2020 ECNC Basketball Tournament Championship Striv Stream

I've been the Johnson County Central Striv sponsor since we started it back in 2015. Here is a little behind the scenes of our students' work on Saturday's basketball games. 

For the third straight year, the Johnson County Central Striv student broadcast crew has streamed the girls & boys championship games for the East Central Nebraska Conference Basketball Tournament, live from SCC-Lincoln. This year's student crew was small, but mighty. With only six high school students, the JCC Striv Crew manned three cameras and also included play-by-play commentary and a post-game interview with the winning coach. 

But first, the crew had to get fueled up. Making this a long day, we celebrated our "end of year" for Striv, even though we still have more basketball games ahead of us. 

After getting lunch, we setup in one of the corners of the gym at SCC. You can see our streaming PC & monitor, a second monitor showing the Blackmagic ATEM multi-view of all cameras, one of our three cameras and room for our commentary. 

What isn't pictured are our other two cameras - one at half court and one at the other end of the court in the same corner area. We ran cables to both of those cameras: SDI (for the camera video), two XLR or 1/4 in cables (for headset communication to the camera operator) and a power cable (there was no power at midcourt to power the camera and the HDMI to SDI converter). 

You can see our corner camera and ATEM switcher (both with headsets on to communicate as we switch between camera angles) and the stream producer controlling our on-screen scoreboard bug and Wirecast. The audio board you can see from this angle is for the commentator headset, wireless handheld microphone (for the post-game interviews on the court) and a crowd microphone.

Here is a view from the opposite angle. You can see our streaming PC rig, our secondary audio board for the production crew communication, and our ATEM multi-cam switcher (under the bundle of green SDI cable).

Here is a better view of our main audio board and the monitor showing the ATEM multi-view. You may notice that our cameras are on inputs 3, 5, and 6. Ideally, I would have liked them to be cameras 1, 2, and 3, and I could have switched the label on the multi-view, but I wasn't able to figure out how to change which number the camera switcher operator would have to press to call up that camera. This was the first time we had run three manned cameras with this crew. And it was the first time this student ran the ATEM with three cameras in general. 

It was another packed house at SCC-Lincoln for both the girls and boys games. We gave our commentator a good position to see the full court. We originally planned on having two commentators, but one ended up being sick.

Here is a good overall panorama of our space. It is nice to be a little separated from the crowd, but it is a little difficult getting to and from this spot due to the bleachers being packed.

This shows how awesome it was to have two corner cameras. Neither camera was obstructed, unlike the center camera at midcourt, which we could only get so high. You should be able to see it in this picture during a timeout, but enough people are standing up, you can see the camera is pretty much hidden.

A view of our crew in action: our commentator on the right, camera operator, and the ATEM switcher and Wirecast producer are hidden behind their monitors.

You can see a lot of our wires hidden behind the monitors. And even though the gym was packed with bodies, our internet access is only wireless. While a wired connection would always be better, I'm just glad that SCC's wireless has worked for us so well each time we've visited.

Here you can see our producer marking which commercials we've run so far in the stream. You can also notice our small desktop fan that we carry with us to every game. It wasn't as crucial here, especially since we were running our stream on our desktop PC vs our Mac laptop. The PC tower definitely gets better air flow cooling. 

A packed gym makes for a fun atmosphere. I imagine playing in the game is fun - but being able to live stream the event also gets your blood pumping! Thanks for supporting the JCC Striv Crew as well as the ECNC Basketball Tournament! You can watch the replays below. 
 

2020 ECNC Girls Championship: Weeping Water vs Malcolm (2/8/2020)

2020 ECNC Boys Championship: Yutan vs Auburn (2/8/2020)