Off-Site Video Direction
Another side job I have is as the Technical Director of three campus churches in the West Michigan Area.
One of the best parts of that part time job is I get to work with a great group of voluntees on the tech teams. the downs side is they are volunteers and have lives. Life happens and some times we don’t have people available for all of the positions across the campuses so we need to call some audibles.
I had to be at one of the northern campuses but our video person called in sick. thankfully my mantra of “Always have plan b” came in handy this day. the Mac Studio at the main campus had been set up for remote screen sharing with an app that I have come to like called Jump Desktop. it works on MacOS, iOS and iPadOS. Once the client is installed on your target computer, your a select a virtual audio output that will then transmit audio in as real time as you can with a good internet connection. so the target Mac is pulled up, I route the local audio out to Jump Desktop, and the only change I needed to make in OBS was to turn on the audio output to the “speaker output” on the computer. I know our service order very well and could do it from visual cues as well as check the audio on the stream with a slight delay, but this gave me as close to real-time audio as I could get.
We also have our PTZ cameras controlled on the network, I have the iPad apps for the PTZ Optics cameras on the Mac Studio so I could control any of the presets that I needed that way.
The last trick was to control the video switcher from 15 miles away. Companion is my secret weapon for al things AVL control. They have an awesome Satellite version of the app that will run as a thin instance on your computer and pull the control data from a central instance running on a computer or raspberry pi. Satellite is great when you’re on the same network, in the same building, so it’s then time to tie in another piece of networking technology to connect my laptop to the Mac Studio. Tailscale is amazing at creating a simple VPN (virtual private network) between devices. using their simple app I was able to point the satellite version of Companion at the VPN address of the Mac Studio and connect and control the connected devices like I’m at the main building.
