 Welcome to some sequential number of reclaimed today. We are actually figured we, we're coming off of a workshop we ran, our first kind of domains 101 slash 201 hybrid online workshop. And I don't know if hybrid online, we'll get into that. But anyway, a kind of virtually delivered workshop that we came together in a physical space to deliver. And we have, we wanted to take the moment to reflect on that process and what it was like. And so we have this cool setup here. We'll talk about that at some length as well. So we wanted to take the opportunity to capture that, how it worked, what worked, what didn't work, et cetera. And just reflect on the time while it's still fresh in our minds and before we'll go our separate ways. Cause it's nice to capture some of that energy and time we have together. Right, Lauren. Definitely. And I think I feel lucky that St. Norbert is allowing us to stay in this space, even past the workshop a bit for us to actually debrief in the same space where we produced the workshop. You know, and as you said, being in person to run a virtual hybrid event is something that we haven't done before. You know, we have run virtual events in the past. Oh, we are by domains conference. And then also we did a virtual domains workshop. I guess that was last summer. Yeah. So yeah, but this is the first time where we have, there has been an in-person element and that's been kind of cool. So yeah, I'm excited to debrief. Yeah. And it's interesting too, because one of the nice pieces with this workshop that's different, obviously is the addition of Taylor and Pilot. And so I'll try and speak into the mic. And so that's been a kind of additional when we did it last year. It was just you and I, Lauren. And now we have a fuller team. And so that has meant us getting up to speed with, you know, two days, more content, more distribution of that content. And so a lot has changed as much as been the same, but like it might be worth talking about the setup. Give someone a kind of a brief overview of what we were doing. Reclaim EdTech's first official event in some way. So that's kind of fun. So maybe we can set the stage a little bit about what we were doing, how we did it, and why. Sure. Yeah. So I don't know how far you want me to go into the details of the tech here, or do we want to talk a little? I would stay away from too many details for the overview. And then we'll go into that later. Yeah, sounds good. Yeah, so we're in this studio room, which is a room that is on St. Albert campus. And we've got several cameras to work with. But basically, we've got this table. We have this audio setup. And cameras switch between. And all of that is piped into StreamYard. It's actually all that's piped into OBS, and then piped into StreamYard, which allows us to do really cool things mixing the capabilities of StreamYard and the in-person stuff. And so it's kind of a cool setup. I spent a little bit of time in the weeks before the workshop coming in a couple times to campus here and testing some things and making sure it worked the way we expected it to. But I think the result has been kind of cool. It's been somewhat flexible, which is nice. We have some cameras that we can move around and stuff like that. And I also, personally, I love good audio for setups like this. I think really polishes the production. I think if you have trouble hearing folks on workshops or podcasts or whatever, it is. You can't focus on the content. It's really hard. Yeah. It's distracting. So I think, personally, I think audio is probably the one of the most core parts of an experience like this. And I actually think in that setup, the audio part of it is probably also the most. I mean, I've been messing around and messing with cameras a lot. But the audio setup is kind of saying, Robert has a setup, but we didn't really. I didn't change anything with it. We're just using it. So that is kind of right on. The audio setup has been a highlight for me. We're hearing each other through in the earphones on my headphones. We're talking into these mics, and they're beautifully balanced. And we know that there is that. And then another element is there's the physical. We have the great microphones and the various camera angles that you're seeing. But we're also bringing in Pilot remotely. And so there is that sense that Pilot then becomes yet another frame that's working with us pretty seamlessly across the workshop. And that's been a really interesting dynamic of having Pilot work with us remotely while we're in a physical space. So Pilot, what has that experience been like for you? And what value might that add to this kind of situation? Because I think it has added a lot. I think it's trying to think through it, because what it means mostly is that my day-to-day routine, aside from the thing that I'm doing all day, being participating in, running this workshop, my day-to-day routine of getting up and going to work has not changed at all, except for the fact that I wake up an hour later because you guys are in central time. But that's really it. But also, I agree that it does feel very seamless and fluid. And it, I think, is in part just because of the way that Taylor has set up the cameras, so that I do feel like another panel in the frame, I guess, which you're getting some fun Ocean's 11 editing sort of. Yeah, exactly, like 70s cut screen, split screen. But it's not like the three of us are sitting on a couch or something, and then you're off in a random window. It's like we are all in our own windows with this sort of layout. So I think it really does, not only does it locate the viewer to say, OK, you can see them sitting around the table, but we've all got our own box in terms of how it's being displayed. And I think that that really helps blend the visual experience. Yeah, we use this camera set up with each side of the table split vertically and then pilot on the left or right side quite a bit, A, because it's kind of the closest angle on all of us. But it was nice to occasionally be able to switch to something like this, which sort of has a establishing shot. We're like, all right, this is the place we're in. You can kind of see what it looks like for what that's worth and have pilot there and be able to switch between that and this if we needed a larger view of pilot. Maybe I was the one talking. It gives a lot of flexibility. And that stuff is really nice because we can do that in stream yard, actually. So I'm switching the camera because a lot of the cameras in the studio are hooked up physically to my computer. But the overall layouts that frame the studio next to pilot are controllable by anyone here, including pilot, because that's all done in stream yard, which is super nice. Yeah, and I think between having the multiple cameras that you can pan between, but then also on-the-fly production features that stream yard allows means that you really can be live and still create a quality recording that's available. And so that cuts down on the overhead and the work involved in putting something like this together where we can say, there's no editing. Whatever we're streaming, that will be automatically recorded and available. And it's going to look pretty great because we're able to switch those angles on-the-fly as folks are sharing their screen or you're highlighting panelists in a larger conversation. And you can have the branding and the overlays and the bumpers. And the editing is happening as you're going. So that's just like a live produced show, and we're doing it on-the-fly. And I think one of the nice things about bringing pilot in this way is when other folks jump in, and Pilate, you said this yesterday, when other folks jump in to stream yard to participate, which we've had happen particularly on day two, it seemed seamless that they were just part of that conversation. Folks were conversing, and it was easy as much as, here's your link, jump in, join the conversation, and then get out when you're done. And that really worked well. I think the one thing we were like, it would be nice to on the setup was mute buttons on the audio, so each of us could mute our own. And then having shared access to changing some of the shots in OBS, both of which we may have solutions for. But literally, you're going to always have some questions, but this setup was so comfortable from day one. And I loved it. And we kind of started to get into a rhythm with it, and now I don't want to go back to anything else. And now it'll be tough to go back to a single space. And I mean, I've got a cool mic on, but this is, I mean, this is next level, you know. Yeah, so we want to unpack the workshop part a little bit in terms of how this affected or how the experience went. Yeah, let's maybe start with talking about what our favorite element was, and then we could go from there into maybe what worked and what didn't work. If I'm going to start with my favorite element, I really enjoyed day two. And I enjoyed a lot of the fact that we almost from the beginning started to get interaction with folks around sharing cool examples, how they had built out their domains instance, and people would jump in like John Stuart or Ed Back or Tom Woodward. And I really enjoyed how fluid it seemed and that the conversation was running in discord. And like we were running a dynamic interactive workshop for sharing ideas both in discord and through video and really powerfully. So that was day two in general was a highlight for me. And that moment when people were coming on and doing the sharing, not just us, was great. Yeah, I would say probably my favorite part of the workshop was getting comfortable in the space and seeing how that kind of changed throughout. So we were in here testing and recording some things on Monday and then Tuesday was the workshop and Wednesday was day two of the workshop. And kind of seeing throughout time as we got more comfortable with that, it's amazing. And then complimented by the fact that day two we had a lot of cool community interaction happening. It was really cool to see all of those lights light up in a way and get, I don't know, this is like really close to I think to the vision we had for this. And I think when we all came in here on Monday and we can kind of see like, all right, this is what it's going to be like and this is going to work. But then it matters so much more when you have the attendees in discord being like, oh, that's really cool. And interacting in the chat and making the virtual space not just a bunch of cameras, but it felt like a community space even though it's kind of weird. Like on the surface of it, it's like, all right, you're producing a virtual workshop and you all, there's three people in a room together and nobody else there is kind of weird. Like if you don't have any other context for that, right? Yeah. And we talked about, well, we want to do this to kind of bring a different energy to the workshop. And I really think that paid off. I agree. Pilot? Yeah. Just, there we go. I was thinking sort of like what Jim was saying of the discussions on day two had a really good energy to them. And I was thinking that my favorite part, I talked about this with you guys a little bit yesterday, I really liked the way that day one was a lot of a sort of technical overview and review of how certain systems work. And that was very good and very important. I think, but day two sort of became more about, it's a bit odd to say it became less about tech and more about topics because that's not completely true. It became about topics around the tech and how to use it best, I suppose. But it meant that there was more room for discussion and for exploration. There wasn't a need to be an authority, I think. And so there was more room for the conversation to evolve in new directions with the guests that we brought in and with people. We invited a couple of people in sort of spontaneously and people in the chat. And I think that was really fun just having that room spread out and explore. Yeah, that's a great answer. I think I'm kind of taking notes here because I don't want to lose my train of thought. But I'd have to echo what you were saying about, particularly the show and tell session was really cool for me. And I like those in general, kind of these free-forming or more like free-form sessions that we can say, OK, here are the concepts that we've talked about today. Here are the things that we've discussed. Let's apply that a little more and see how people have responded to that. That's the one place I feel like where you can really gauge the audience, especially in a virtual environment. And so for me, for us to be able to throw a stream yard link out there and have folks just kind of impromptu jump in and start sharing and just riffing about work happening in the community and sort of a really authentic way that we don't have to plan for is just, it's such a magical moment. And I really mean magic. Like, I think that that's a cool way to explain it. And I liked that session. My second favorite part of the workshop, and this will always be true for me, is Discord. I love that we have built a Discord space that can be useful for events, yes, but then also between and beyond events and seeing that community space grow and seeing conversations from event participants happening in the dedicated event channel, but then also seeing them branch into other channels during the workshop and chat with other members of the community is just exactly what I had hoped for. And so I hope that that will only continue to happen even more. So that was really cool. I agree. I mean, the potential for Discord as a community space where these events offer a reason to go, but not the only reason that they build on each other is super exciting. So if we're talking about the things we liked, awesome. One of the things, and I didn't dislike them, but I will go there, like one of the things that I want to continue to think about is we did a really good job. So if we break down our coming, we came on Monday. That was our prep day, get familiar. The morning, get familiar with the tech. The afternoon, prerecord some sessions. And then Monday, day one, we were going to do live and prerecorded switching. So that's the kind of the setup all of day two was live. And I wonder, was the energy on day two a little bit higher because not only the content, we had to show people like, what is WHM deep dive? What is WHM CS? What is WordPress portal? But we had prerecorded them. So in some ways, we were active on Discord, but it was hard to get other people active maybe because of the content or maybe because it was prerecorded. There's a couple of possibilities. But one of the things that came up that I just want to register here as an idea is, what would it be like to have a new admin join us in a live session to talk about WHM and to overview it and go through it so that the people who maybe are new to it and don't feel comfortable because a lot of people are also expert who are at these workshops, might feel a little bit spoken to and feel free to come in and say, oh, I see that. Or it might relate to them. So that's the one thing I'm still thinking about. Do we rethink it? Or do we reimagine it? Or do we just offload it and let people watch the videos then come with questions? I think you raise a lot of valid points. And I think there's a couple of conversations there. Like you have a conversation around the energies of day one and day two. And I think that can be a lot of things mixed together to have a perfect storm. I think everything from Taylor spilling his coffee 20 seconds before we went live on day one to just simply by the end of day two, we were more comfortable in the space. We had a groove. And yes, it was fast paced. But by the end, we all had our zones. We all had our marching orders. And I was doing banners behind the scenes and picking comments. And our pilot was meeting speakers in the next rooms. And Taylor was on camera. And you were kind of bringing folks in. And we all were wearing hats by the end. And I think in the beginning, that wasn't as defined as maybe it should have been. And so as a result, I think on day one, there was more of just this, OK, there's a lot happening. So I'm going to try and cover all bases. And it makes you kind of feel a bit more frazzled, especially with it being new. And it's also exciting. And there's a lot happening. And then you add in the remote element. And then we're like, OK, we're not doing much, much we need to be doing. So I don't think that there is, I think, still having not remote but recorded sessions. I think there's still certainly a place for those. Because it does balance the very fast paced live portions, which day two was intense. Like it was very intense just with how much we fit in and doing it all live without virtually any breaks. So but I also really love your idea of switching up power talking about the content and bringing in fresh faces with fresh perspectives. Because we have been teaching this stuff for many years now. And when you have a virtual audience, and this is probably the one thing that not what didn't work for me, but is challenging with these sorts of events, is that in Discord, it is very hard to read your audience. Whereas when you are in person and I'm talking about something and I'm pointing to a screen and I look out and I see someone going, you know, you can say, what did it make sense? What should I repeat? And you can help people think through things. But unless you have very vocal participants that are comfortable saying, I don't understand this and are comfortable admitting that, there's a lot of assumptions that you have to make. And that's the challenge of virtual events, I think. Yeah. I think definitely a component with this, too, like with the material that is on day one, which is so foundational. It's the stuff that every admin should at least have some familiarity with, with Domain of One Zone of. These are the three systems. And this is what you can do where and this is how it works. There is a lot to cover in those three systems. So the pace of the presentation is also going to affect how comfortable people are asking questions that goes in person or virtual, right? In fact, you could argue in some ways that the fact that they don't have to be like, could be a benefit. But I'm sure that that still has a impact and it's not like a, it's a subconscious thing, right? Like the pace of someone's presentation is going to signal to other folks when it is, like that's all very complicated to deal with. So I think there's something to do with that. I don't know, I don't know if we could improve that because I wouldn't want to cover less. And I don't know that we should spend more of the day on it either. You know what we could do though. And then I'll stop talking because I know other people have things to say too. But like you really could sort of say, these are the recordings that we're going to make available beforehand to really give you, you know, a solid sense of each session, those three recorded sessions in the beginning, right? On each system and say, this is your homework and please watch them beforehand. And then we're going to do a live session, day one first session after intros of course, doing a system overview, right? And it's going to be half an hour and we're also going to make the stream yard link available or maybe it's an hour, you know, maybe we, this is the dedicated time for this. Like the full one hour training that we usually do. Right, or, you know, hour, hour and a half but this is the time that we are dedicating to a system overview and we're going to start walking through it and we're also going to make that stream yard link available and we want you to come in and interrupt us. We want you to ask questions. This is an open room just like a, we would be doing this in an open classroom in person and we want you to truly interrupt us and say, stop, go back. Otherwise, yes. Otherwise, you know, here's the bullet point of things that we're going to cover. And we'll put that out there beforehand. We're going to talk about mass mailing. We're going to talk about, you know, module commands and, you know, how to change disk quota and these are the things that we're going to cover. And if, you know, you have questions about those or maybe we put out a survey to audience members like, what do you want to cover during this time? Because it's not all of the basic core functionality. It's getting into those systems. It's still talking about them but it's some of the, it's not 201. It's maybe it's domains 102, right? Exactly. But yeah, having that stuff that we know this is going to need to be covered every single time. Yeah, do that ahead of time. And we could even, you know, if we did it correctly had enough time to do it properly. Like I could imagine if we recorded those Monday morning say and then had them available Monday afternoon or earlier, you know, maybe we record them and it's not in the same physical space. We record them from our home offices and stuff. But we release them sort of 24 hours, 48 hours, maybe 72 hours even, like a timed thing. Like, because it still becomes sort of part of the event if that makes sense. Yeah, exactly. So it's not just like, oh, we link to recordings that are always available to you. It's like, no, we made these new but we do want you to watch them early. I think it's kind of a touch down of an idea. Oh, wait, no, not that one. Hold on. This is what happens. Yeah. There we go. It's a touch down of an idea. I feel it over the end zone. Oh my gosh. It took me a couple of tries, but I got that. I like the other ones better though, you know. Oh, you mean? Over to you. We got sound effects on the board here. So all kinds of things we can do. Super fun. Here's the air horn just in case you wanted to hear it again. But coming to the setup though. Oh, wait, no pilot. You speak. Did you have something to say? I don't want to know. No, Jim, Jim just Jim just said back to you pilot or over to you pilot. And I was like, oh, um, OK. OK, you don't have to go over. Well, I did want to see where the air horn button was. So that was good. Yeah, it's in position A. Well, so one of the things I was also going to say to, you know, was just and this is more logistics for next time. I know we mentioned being able to mute our own mics would be cool. But I also think there were times throughout the two days where I felt helpless in terms of just camera angles and things. And I know you can do some of that in StreamYard, obviously. But like, like there were many times, Taylor, where you were presenting and then also multitasking with camera views. And then because of just the amount of things you were covering in your quadrant over there, you know, like Jim would be talking for a long time and the camera would be on me or, you know, or on you. And I again, not a huge deal. But if we're just talking about like sharpening that, we've got such, you know, a lot of people and I would have loved to have been able to help out with those sorts of things. And there was being able to turn off turn off being able to sort of move my camera out of the feed for a little while so that I could like have a drink of water or something whenever I wanted was really nice. Honestly. Yeah. Yeah. So do we want to kind of transition into some of the more technical aspects then because I have a wish list for StreamYard. I like this platform a lot and much of the things I'm going to ask for, I think are just straight up not possible. So I'll just put that out there. But more, I don't really care, right? It's more about like dreaming up a next an aspirational streaming tool that I don't think exists. Maybe it does. But yeah, so that was one of them. Like for an aspect of this, we've got four cameras in the studio here. We have two cameras on the corners of the tables, which is kind of what you're seeing now. We have a pan tilt zoom camera that I can remotely control, which is I could point to it. There it is. And I can remotely control it. And we have a camera on a C stand. And I'm actually going to what I'm going to do is this is not stuff. I'm still getting better at this stuff. But we have a wireless camera that I can move around the room. Right now it's over this part of the table. So I can show some of the gear here a little bit later. But it's on. I kind of love these things, but wrong way. What? Oh, yeah. Pan to the domain header. You have to. Oh, yeah. That's the coolest. So this is the the PTC camera. And sorry to anyone watching this because this thing is not fun. No one's watching. Yeah, this is just for us, to be fair. It's so good. Yeah, this, if we're going back to favorites, favorite. Absolute favorite. Reproduction of the reclaim hosting header in real life. A diorama thanks to Annika. Amazing. Yeah, that was super cool. While we're physically over here with this camera, the this you can see this is the the camera on my wireless camera on a rig. So there's basically, well, it's not really wireless. It's powered via a battery. And then I have a long HDMI cable. But the cool thing is we could reposition that camera. So we at times had it like over by the TV, which was really slick and allowed us to do things. It's kind of nice because we have it. Well, and I should. I don't really have a great way of showing the TV, but there's a TV over there. Look, we're looking at. Yeah. And and I throw a I have a my second monitor is that TV, essentially, so I will throw a stream yard over there. So that way everyone at the table here at any time can go look at the TV and see this is what our audience will see live on the stream. It also is nice because there are because there are times when we want to like where, especially when like pilot is talking. And it's sort of nice to be able to have one place we're all looking at. Even if I'm not making eye contact with the camera, I think this is still kind of nice. But there's definitely things that could be improved with the camera set up here. I'm limited somewhat by like a combination of where the cameras are, where I could put them, and it wouldn't be too much like cables all over the table. There's already plenty of cables on the table, and it could have been a lot worse. I'm just thinking about how for a while, we were planning on having another camera with a green screen behind it. And yeah, technically that that was this wireless camera. The idea was I could roll it over by the green screen and use it. But ultimately we didn't it was never going to be our primary setup anyway. And ultimately what I learned there was like, look, like we had enough to worry about we didn't need an added complexity of like, all right, let's move all our stuff. Exactly. We really didn't need that. So that was good. And that was one thing that I learned kind of when doing the setup. And I also I know this isn't part of the the physical setup, but I really appreciate that StreamYards backstage area because it allowed us to prep like one of the things we were doing in those five minute breaks, you know, we were hopping to the next StreamYard link because every session has to be its own recording, right? Otherwise, we can't have an eight hour stream. You know, you have to have the stream separated. So we were hopping into different meeting rooms for each session. So those five minute breaks, we were hopping to the next room and then prepping our tabs for screen sharing. So by the time that, you know, we had opened the session and we were, you know, jumped around for a little bit and then said, OK, yeah, I'm going to share my screen and walk through this. All of those screens had been prepped beforehand. And each time we had an audience member or a speaker or a panelist join us, they were going into those separate streaming rooms five or 10 minutes before we went live with usually pilot, which was amazing because you were in a separate space and, you know, didn't have to compete with our audio here. So as one was live, the next one was prepping, setting all their screens up and then StreamYard has this brilliant countdown for when you're streaming live to YouTube so you could keep yourself on schedule. So a lot of that, you know, scheduling and down to the seconds, literally kind of planning StreamYard does put at the forefront and makes it really easy to follow. Not to mention the compartmentalization of the banners and the brand and private chat so you could say, hey, five minutes left. Hey, you got to wrap it up, you know, we're two minutes in. Like you were able to really use that as an all-in-one tool. And I forget how great StreamYard is till I have to use it for an event like this. And I'm like, yeah, it's a good tool. Forty nine bucks a month. Thank you, you know, it pays for itself. And we were able to bring in comments from Discord, for instance, as they were rolling in, pull them in as banners and then highlight them in the stream. And so you have this really cool way of, you know, we are collaborating with a virtual space and we're integrating that with our presentation. And again, it's the collaborative aspect. That's amazing, right? A lot of what you're saying, a lot of what we're doing with StreamYard can be done with a tool like OBS and there's others as well. But that all has to live on a computer. The fact that this is like Google Docs version of OBS is like mind blowing and makes us possible because frankly, if you didn't have that, you would have to have a dedicated person who is off camera doing all of this. And you'd have to be communicating with that person what you want, which is not nothing, right? So, yeah. And I think we've talked about, you know, the display site and previous podcasts with how that works with our headless site. You know, we've got all of our sessions laid out. But for each stream that we've got going to YouTube, every stream has a separate ID and those IDs have to be put into a headless site in individual sessions. So it's very detailed and meticulous like behind the scenes to set all of that up so it displays and embeds properly in a chronological way. So you have to say how long is each session going to be? And the site, you know, Michael Branson Smith has done fantastic work to say, you know, okay, based on this timing, play this sort of work. And so that's the one part is there's a lot of prep, but that means that when you're running the event, there's not much overhead. No, it's beautiful in fact. It's like we pre-program all the YouTube IDs and then pretty much if there's an issue, we tell folks at the beginning of each day, just refresh your page or toggle the live button and usually it's just an issue with someone coming on, something already started or not and they just need a quick refresh and that video's running. And there was one, I think one or two sessions at the beginning of day one where we had obviously been testing the space and making sure the streaming worked that Monday before the workshop happened. And I think our YouTube IDs were out of date. And so of course, the only time it didn't work was truly, I mean, it was a human error of just not making sure that those YouTube IDs were correct. But the site itself was really smooth. And I think that's the end goal, right? Is you don't want there to be a technical barrier for the participants. You want them to just go to a URL and be there. And like the Titan embed chat worked if you wanted to just watch the chat and see the video or you could do it from Discord within Discord. And that goes for the participants as well. There was not any idea of how do we get them synced in or it was literally just show up. Everything else has already been taken care of. I do have to say, if there is a win it's we ran a virtual workshop and I did not receive a single help ticket for question. And I'm not saying that they weren't there, you know and we'll have a feedback form rolling out later where I'm sure we'll get those sorts of recommendations for future events. And I'm all ears, believe me. But I do think it was a fairly good sign that like no one asked for help in my email, my Twitter DMs, Discord help, nothing. I think I saw one ticket and it came in and the entire ticket was I don't have the link. I lost it. What's the link? That's right. How do I get there? Yeah, that's fine. And I think one of the things that was interesting and just as a learn, we did this previously last year at Reclaim Roadshow which is a URL. And I think someone assumed because they signed up at Reclaim Roadshow that was where it'd be rather than our new space ReclaimEd.tech. So it's interesting. I think it goes more to the point of us re kind of reframing our links. We have a lot out there that we got to consolidate. We had a lot that we were doing in the last couple of weeks launched a whole new service. There's a lot of things. So I think some of that stuff is definitely still in flux as far as where are those domains, what goes on what domain, where they live, all that kind of stuff. So yeah, so I have some things for StreamYard if you're listening and I know you're not. Oh, right. We were gonna have you talk about that. I have burning things that I need to tell StreamYard. To StreamYard. Love you. Dear StreamYard, love you. For Christmas I would like. Yes, for Christmas. So a couple of things. So we've got four cameras in the studio and one of the things that I kind of wanna show is sort of what we're doing and what if there were features that exist that do this, how it would make our lives easier here if StreamYard or some other thing had the capability to do this. So we've got four cameras. I've already talked about where those are. But we do have a setup that makes it look like we have a lot more than four cameras. We have a setup that, one, two, three, four, five. I have 14 individual mixes of the various cameras we have. So we've got PTZ camera. I have a version of the PTZ camera that's blurred which is nice for intros and outros. Got the wireless camera. I have a version of the wireless camera that's blurred. That doesn't really make a lot of sense for where the camera is positioned right here. But it was cool earlier. But it was cool when you had the camera in different spots. I have a zoomed in version of the wireless camera that I can remotely control with OBS. I've got the stacked shot of the cameras at the tables. A Lauren favorite. Yep. It's a good one. It's very good. And the cool thing is when it gets cropped in because we have other folks in StreamYard, you don't really lose a lot. We kind of mess with it to make that work. Some of us have more room to roam than others I have to say in this. The real estate issue is really my concern. So then we have each individual camera pointing at the corners of the table. So I don't really use this one because it's just Lauren on that side of the table. But the one with Jimmy... Exactly. Thank you. Well, what I meant is there was no reason for me to use that because I have this, right? So there's a punched-in version, right? 10. This is a zoomed-in version of that camera. This is a zoomed-in version of the camera that's on this side of the table pointing at Jim. 11. This is a zoomed-in version of the same camera pointed at me instead. I always have to remind myself where the camera is. And we had some travel issues. So the pilot wasn't able to join us. But this is where a pilot was going to be. Oh! We should have had a pilot like printed out a picture of pilot. Oh, you could have put like a stuffed animal in my chair. It would have been fun. Then finally, we have composites of just where Lauren and Jim are sitting and just where Lauren and I are sitting. So that way I had any combination of the three of us could be all three of us on screen, or two of us on screen, or one of us on screen. That's cool. It's all possible. So that was great. And those are different shots in OBS. Yeah, those are different scenes in OBS. 15 different scenes. I was keeping track. Yeah, 15. And that's how many buttons I have on my stream yard. So that makes sense. So the way that that manifests in the software is, whoops. I need to change my stuff. Oh, my gosh. Show it on there. There we go. So the way that that works in the software. And you're going to have to see the making of here a little bit because I have to move some things around. Sorry. There we go. Just in case. I'm going to go to this one and then take myself out. Yeah. OK, so the way you can kind of see in the corner. And let me do this. Maybe. Anyway, so we've got the audio mixer here. This is a Zoom PodTrack P8. It's kind of like a road procaster. That's a pretty popular alternative to this thing. And so all the microphones work through there. They're all plugged in. There's four of them. They have color coded XLR cables. So they match with the colors on the end. Well, they match with the colors on the ends of our. Yeah, on the opposite end of the cable. So that way I know that. OK, the red mic is Jim and he is muted himself. And Lauren is the yellow mic and I am the orange mic. Testing on two three. Yes. Oh, wait, Lauren's yellow. I have access. Zero hesitation. We did not instruct Jim on how the mixer worked before the. I wish. For good reason, apparently. Well, see, this is me. That's my finger muting, Lauren. Instantaneous. It's OK, Lauren. I can still hear you sort of. The mixer itself is fantastic because not only does it just give us access to the microphones, but if I go in an individual microphone here, you won't really be able to see, but there's actually some effects on here. So if you're an audio nerd, there is a an analog or there's a limiter and a low pass filter. So basically that takes extra boominess out of deeper voices and limiter. Make sure that if you're too loud, it doesn't get all distorted. So that's really cool. I don't have to do any of that in software. That's just happening on this device. It also has some effects, which you've already. Yeah, yeah, we've already done a few. So that and that's all mixable. So like I can adjust the volume of effects with this last slider. You can have a Bluetooth module and get stuff from your phone happening in here. We can have up to five or sorry, six microphones. The sixth one right now is set to use my computer's audio and this is so that we can control how loud we hear pilot coming into our headphones. But I have it configured so that that doesn't send pilots audio back out because pilots already in stream yard. So that would be like we would get the audio twice if it wasn't doing that. That's called a mix minus by the way. So that's really cool. That's also built in. Yeah, then all of the individual volumes for our headphones in the studio are here. They're color coded the same way. So that's really handy. And yeah, I can do a master volume up here as well. I'll never mess with it. And it can do recording right on board, which is really cool. Wow. Then I have my stream deck. I brought this in and this is where I've got all of the different camera angles set up. If I pull my screen back in, it'll be a little easier to see but as I hit buttons, it changes scenes in OBS. And so here is a view of kind of all. They're kind of named nonsense, honestly. They're just good enough for me to remember what they are. So both is both sides of the table. LJ is Lauren and Jim. LT is Lauren and Taylor. PTZ, wireless. And then there's the blur on the wireless. So this required a little bit of like this would have been a little bit hard for me. I originally brought this stream deck here hoping that I could hand this to anyone at the table. And I'm sure all of you could have figured it out. But without knowing the convention I had going on, that would have been extremely difficult and nerve-wracking to deal with. So it was a little bit easier for me to just manage that. But I had to do it that way with the... You just didn't want to let go of your stream deck. Yeah, I had all this power, you know? You really stay away from my ego. I was drunk with so little power, you know, really. Exactly. You were willingly drunk with wine and love. So the way that's working is all of those cameras that are local to the studio here in the room here that's all piped through OBS. And so over here, these are all my scenes in OBS and the stream deck is helping me switch between the scenes so I don't have to have OBS up on my computer all the time. And that is going through OBS as a virtual camera, which is just a feature built into OBS. So as far as StreamYard is concerned, this is one webcam, all of this 15 different camera composites and things that I was showing. So that lets me pipe everything into StreamYard as one webcam, which is super nice. But as we mentioned, there are a lot of limitations to that, right? The main one being, I, Taylor, at this seat, I'm the only one who can control our local cameras. That's just not possible for anyone else to have control over that. There are some things I started explaining just right out of time with their OBS has a thing called WebSockets, which lets like it act as a local web server. And you can, it basically has like an OBS, someone made a plugin that gives OBS like REST API, basically, kind of. So you can basically send commands remotely. I don't know of any way to take that and make it something where you all can change my scenes, though, that's probably out of my expertise, as far as I could tell. So, and it would be nice if I could add all of these cameras, all four cameras in this case, into StreamYard, but StreamYard really only supports two cameras per device. So it lets us, and we're gonna get a little bit of streamception here for a second, so forgive me. But I'm gonna put my screen back in. Oh my God, that's terrible. It's instantaneous. Sorry, everyone. But the StreamYard lets you share your camera, a screen, and like you can play a video file or like upload a slide deck. You can do an extra camera, but it's really only one extra camera. I didn't even know you could do that. I think that's a new feature actually. I'm not sure how long it's existed. That's pretty cool. So two cameras set up? Yeah. But they wanted you to share 15 cameras. No, so that would be my feature request one, and as I said- Why can't I share 15 cameras, StreamYard? Yeah, as I said before, like if I could plug all those cameras into my computer and run them all on StreamYard, then you all would have had access to be able to switch them. So I think an improvement, that would be great if that's possible. I bet they're running into the limits of what you could do on a web browser to be honest with you. That seems like a lot. But we were kind of brainstorming like, what if we took this style of setup on the road, not literally St. Albert's Equipment, but some of the capability, right? And we use that to build our own portable kit. And I'm thinking having a Zoom actually makes a few recorders that are, I have one myself already. It's like this big and it can do eight microphones. What's it called? Zoom H8 is the device. Oh, the old Zoom H8. Yeah, so there's like the H2 is like one of those little, it's like a little handy, it's called the handy recorder and it has little X and Y microphones. You see journalists have them sometimes. What kind of microphones are these? Cause I absolutely love them. I love Zoom handy recorders. Yeah, Zoom handy recorders are great. What are these for? These are sure MV7 microphones. And I bought, when I had St. Albert buy these when I was first putting the studio together, these I specifically liked because A, they look great on camera, I think. I mean, it's kind of a big deal, you know, a little bit. And B, they sound really good and they are not as expensive or difficult to work with as the Shure SM7B, which if you've seen a podcast, like a professionally produced video podcast that with a black microphone from, that looks kind of like this, it's probably a Shure SM7B. Those are legendary microphones. They're used all over, but they're also like $420 a mic. How much is this mic? About $250. So not cheap, but a lot cheaper than this. I like it better than my Elgato Wave. Well, it's a pretty nice mic. So the main thing that's great about these is they have both an XLR out and a USB out. So if you only own one and you just want to plug it in your computer and go, you can use the USB port for that. However, if you want to plug this thing into a mixer so that you can have multiple microphones in the same space, you don't need a new microphone. You can do that. Whereas USB microphones like the Wave are great, but they're really only limited to one per computer. Essentially, that's not 100% true. You can use Loopback to do that, but it gets very complicated and you start running out of USB ports really quickly. So that, the other thing is they are dynamic microphones. So that has to do with the style of how they pick up sound, essentially. The Elgato Wave and most USB microphones, not all, but most are what are called condenser microphones. And basically, they use an additional amount of voltage to be very sensitive and it's great, but it does mean they pick up room sounds a lot. So basically, they're more detailed. Like that's what you would use to record instruments or vocalists in the music studio, but unless your room is sound-treated and if you're using a condenser microphone, it's harder to get that NPR radio sound with one of those without picking up people walking around your house. That's what we have. We have the NPR radio sound going here. Yeah. When I go back, it's gonna be a whole lot of acoustic shooting off my basement stone. And I don't wanna claim to be an audio expert if someone happens to ever watch this podcast, who knows what they're talking about. They'll be like, wow, that guy really doesn't know what he's talking about. But what I'm getting at is these types of mics make that easier. We are in a 130-year-old building in a room with a window air conditioner unit. Like this is not a ideal acoustic environment. So it was really important that the folks at St. Albert had these mics to use in this space. Building is legend, though. I mean, can we just take a moment to say it's a 19 whatever, yeah, thank you. Wait, wait, where's the applause? Nope. No, come on. Yes, this is for the building. I don't know when it was built in the early 1900s. Early 1900s, I think? I don't know. Probably not early 19, probably early 20th century. Yeah. It's a long clap. Thank you. It is. I appreciate it. Thank you, everybody. It's basically a high school. It's a Catholic high school from the turn of the century. Yeah, it was the Ebbett Penning's High School. And it is a high school. From my childhood, I went to high school in the 80s. This could be my life. On the bathroom door, basically carved in with a pen or a quarter or something is Turk 182, for any of you out there who know that movie. It's a movie about a guy who used to write Turk 182 everywhere and he was kind of considered a hero. But that's like 1980s meme stuff. And I'm seeing it on the bathroom door here. I'm like, this place plus the labs and the lockers, it's like breakfast club come to life. I love it. So yeah, it's a cool space. Now back to Taylor. Well, it's a cool space. So the microphone choice, I think was important. I use a dynamic microphone, not this one, but similar at home. And I love it because it makes like things like typing sounds quieter, even though my keyboard is literally inches away from my microphone, I can type at my computer and it's not like really loud. You can, it's not that you can't hear it, but it takes it from extremely distracting to totally reasonable. Totally. So that's what dynamic microphones are great for. However, they need to be right up in your face. They just cannot be far away. If I back this thing up right now, it is about my fist away. But if I back it up to even like two hands away, I'm like now yelling to be heard. And if I talk at the volume before, I'm gonna be pretty quiet. I don't know. And Streamer does do some balancing and stuff. So it may be hard. That might not pick up on the recording as well, but. No, it'll pick up. It'll pick up. What I'm saying is, oh, you heard me get quieter? Yes, it did. Yeah, okay, cool. Then my point, I guess. So that's the disadvantage, but it does mean that they are forgiving to the room you're recording in. So that's another thing. And I don't know of any tools that could really make hybrid producing like this, where we've got folks that are in one room together and people externally that makes it as seamless. Even though I just complained about like, okay, I gotta pipe all this stuff through OBS and then do it in StreamGuard. And only certain things are things you can control. That being said, the fact that we can bring in remote participants at all is amazing. It is. Also, it looks like Meredith is watching our stream and said our mics are really, really good. And it's Streamer's dream. Yeah, Meredith, thank you. Shout out to Meredith. Is it my voice in particular that makes it pushes it into the realm of streamer-dreamer? Streamer-dreamer? Violet, what do you say on that one? Matt, there's a big Matt on that. I think this is pretty good. Violet, you're muted in StreamYard. Are you gonna mute me? No, I'm just saying you're muted in StreamYard. Okay. The last thing that worked out well, but it was a pain to deal with, was the multiple camera situation. So I'm just gonna rotate my camera here a little bit. This dongle mess. Coming too close. Sorry. This dongle mess behind my laptop is how I have four cameras plugged in. So I've got like two USB-C hubs and a bunch to an Elgato Cam Link, a knockoff Elgato Cam Link, an EVJ XR1 Lite, which is just a different type of capture card, and then the PTZ camera, which plugs in directly into my computer on the side, which you can't really see. I am like using absolutely every port on my machine. And that's just what was necessary. And some of that is just the reality of plugging in a bunch of mics. Sorry, I switched, I put pilot back on while you were drinking water. But yeah, it was a lot. So getting that to work is not StreamYard's fault or OBS's fault at all, but it took a lot. Do you have it recording both on OBS somewhere as well as on the stream through StreamYard into YouTube? I don't have it recording in OBS at all, actually. And I'm doing that to save my computer some CPU because it's not, actually my machine's doing fine. I probably could record it, but then during the workshop, it was not uncommon for me to have 15, 20 Firefox tabs open and you just don't want your machine to be slow. So StreamYard does do the recording. And so that's good, especially because if I was recording on OBS, pilot wouldn't be in that recording at all. And any of the remote audio, just our audio and our cameras. So that wouldn't really be that useful after the fact anyway. Gotcha. So yeah, that's the setup. I mean, I'm sorry, I don't mean to push you here, but could you go through your dongle setup again and show me what's what? You went a little fast. And I think me and the viewers at home are like, we want more. I went fast because... Okay, okay. I mean, I went fast because, I mean, who doesn't love USB-C dongles? Let's be real. So I didn't, I don't know. I just didn't think anyone care. But yeah, we can... I think Jim cares. Jim cares. We're making this podcast for one person. They're actually here. If I care, that means at least someone else, one other person out there. If nothing else, you and I, you and I specifically care. That's it. So this dongle is some anchor thing. I'd pick it up, but I'm pretty sure it would disconnect everything I have plugged into it. So I'm not going to. But this has two USB-A ports. This is a cam link from Ogato. This is a thing called USB video capture, video capture device from Amazon. $25. The same thing as in Ogato, but cheaper. It's, it's, and it's worse quality. Like it isn't as nice. I put this camera is actually my wireless camera. And the reason I put it on there is because we're using that camera, the least of all of them. And this camera, is that camera there? Correct. Yep. That camera is that camera there. And then this EVGA, this box, is also a capture card. And that's our side of the table. Got it. They're essentially quality wise, very similar. They're interchangeable. And each of them, the dock here and this is all going into your Mac as a USB-C? Correct. So this, this little hub thing goes into my Mac. And this, this hub is connected to three of the cameras. This secondary hub I have going out here is also an anchor thing. I don't, again, I don't know what it's called, but it's a slightly different one. And this is connected to the audio, the mixer. And what is this? I don't know, something else. Stream deck? Oh, my stream deck, you're right. Yep. Thank you. That's my stream deck. And then this is my iPad, this little cable. And my iPad I'm using as a second monitor, which if I pull in here, you can kind of see. That is my second monitor. This iPad is using Sidecar, which is a built-in feature to iPads and Mac OS. So you can use any iPad as a secondary display now, which is really cool. That's great. You can use it wired or wireless. Anytime you're doing a lot of stuff with production all day, wire in everything you can in my experience. So I've wired it in. So I've wired it in. So it was rock solid reliable all the time. And my iPad wouldn't die battery-wise, right? The iPad second display, I have StreamYard up. And that's, so the TV and the iPad at any given time are the exact same thing. That way I didn't have to fully turn away to be able to see what you all were looking at, which just helps with multitasking. Cause like, like you said, Lauren, there are times where I had to be like demoing something and camera switching. And wasn't real, that was hard, but this helped at least a little bit. What are the inputs on the other side of your computer? You said the PTZ camera and what? Yeah, PTZ camera. And then this is the TV. This is an HDMI, you can't see it. Oh, so that's an HDMI out? This is an HDMI out. And that's going to the TV. And then this is a PTZ camera. So the PTZ has, is just a USB connection. But then I threw a 15 foot USB extension cable on it cause it's pretty far away from us. And then this is just a little USB C to A adapter, five bucks, you know, pretty just generic little thing. So that way it can plug right into my machine. So I'm using, and I found for some reason, this PTZ camera is kind of weird. It require, it would not work with any hub. So I had to plug it directly into my machine, whereas everything else seemed to be somewhat flexible as far as what hub it was plugged into. I, I didn't seem to. In other words, like this is a pretty, pretty kind of mobile setup already. Cause you're running it with a laptop, an iPad, and I mean X amount of cameras and a mixer that can get smaller. But the thing with this that prevents it from being mobile in like the sense of like, I would put this in a bag and go fly with it other than the fact that these mics are on mic arms and the strap to the desk. Like let's, let's not, let's get audio out of it for a second. The thing that would prevent me from doing that is this, as I just mentioned, like I found out that the PTZ camera doesn't like my hubs. And if I was in another city and found out something like that, just kind of be SOL, right? Like there's, cause a lot of this gear, you can't just, you have to order on like Amazon or like B&H photo. You can't just go to Best Buy and some, some stuff they have there. They do have Elgato stuff at Best Buy, but you know, like I can't find a 15 foot long HDMI extension cable at Best Buy, which is one of these, which is this blue cable I have right here because the TV is 10 feet away, right? Yeah. Stuff like that, right? But I think I do have ideas for like, if we were to do a more mobile version of this, I have some ideas like for one, the TV is nice to have, but I think we can get away without it, especially if we all have second monitors. You know, I can use my iPad. Lauren, you have that, that second monitor, that portable monitor. Yeah, it's not up right now, but it was super helpful during the actual workshop because I was able to have discord and screen sharing stuff and one monitor. And then I had StreamYard and private chats and stuff on my computer. Yeah. So if we had Jim set up with either an iPad or something like what you had, I think we probably wouldn't need a TV. It's still nice to have, but I think we'll get away without it essentially. It's a big if if Jim had something. So there's that. The other, sorry, I'll let you finish the tech part. Oh, and then I would probably need some consolidation of cameras. So I think I would probably maybe use like document cameras that are just USB and I don't have to worry about capture cards. And I could just use that or, you know, console, I definitely could consolidate down to three cameras instead of four. So PTZ cameras are extremely weird and we're not going to travel with one of those. And St. Norbert owns this one. So I, but I own one of these cameras and on the corner of the table and one of the ones in the wireless rig. I think if I got one more, like an identical one like this, that's all the cameras we would need. Three is I think more than enough. Especially when I can do things like, you know, composite multiple cameras together in OBS. Yeah, I think if you had three cameras and there were four of us, then you could do the punched in version of, you could have two cameras on each side of the table, punched in versions of any of us to combine however you wanted and one overview shot. Well, and the great thing is these are all 4K cameras, but we're doing a 10 EP screen. So the reason I can punch in and it still looks good is because we're not using all the resolution available to us here. So I can zoom in up to two times basically, you know, still look pretty sharp on the screen. You mean I could have been higher resolution and you chose against it? I did, specifically. Probably for the best. Yeah, I'm gonna have to talk to my agent. We need more than 10 EP, Jim. That's pretty good. Last thing I'll say about setup too and this is not so much the physical camera mic setup, but I think that one of the things that we haven't talked about that we were, was like a lifeline for us during the workshop was the Google Doc. The fact that we had every session written out with direct stream yard links written out, we had time zones and the conversions for when things were starting and stopping and we had outlines for each of the sessions listed there with who was going to be owning kind of the main speaking or facilitating role. And I think one of the things that I would like to clean up for next time because I think that's really helpful, but it was sort of thrown together as we were needing it up until the very end. It got better to like day two, it was better than day one. Yeah, and I think given, this is not the last time that we will be running a virtual event. And in fact, I think they will only become more often and more complex. I think having some sort of template that we can duplicate and reuse and just fill in the blanks, whether we use an Asana project or just if Google Docs work, then we'll use that. But like my goal for next time will be to have a templated version where there will be columns and this is where my organizing brain goes nuts, but there will be columns for main speaker who's responsible for managing camera angles, who's going to be responsible for banners and logo and branding and site changes in stream yard, who's going to be watching comments and bringing those in for questions. All of those roles that by the end, we naturally had delegated, we're going to define those and rotate those session by session. So everyone has a game plan. They have marching orders and that's one last thing we have to think about, you know, during the event. Totally, yeah. Having a spreadsheet for that or something. Yeah, maybe a Asana or something. That would be awesome. And I think, but like we needed to do this. This is hybrid workshop is, I don't know, I think we should be proud. There's not a lot of people who do a workshop like this. No. Period. And we did, we had some, some more organization kind of like this for the OER by domains conference because we were collaborating with another team, you know, and so we really had, you know, before the conference even started, everybody had their roles, right? And when you start bringing in speakers, you have to have someone there helping them get onboarded before the session goes live. So that's an extra role and then the facilitating of course and keeping everyone on time. Those are all different roles. And so we did a pretty good job of organizing that with the all team. And I think, you know, we could take a lot of what was done there and just. Yeah, cause everybody had a role. It was very clear. I was thinking of all what you were saying that like, and I think, you know, it's been a year since we've done something like this too. So like we're kind of like, oh, okay. Back in the groove. And I think the more regularly you do it and the more you kind of get that rhythm and groove, which we started to really feel end of day one, beginning of day two or through, like you get that. And then the more you do it regularly, like we had to retrain ourselves on stream your heart, right? Kind of get back into that groove. Whereas when we are by domains 21 in that conference after I felt like I was a master, right? I was spinning everything doing it. It was great. But not only that, you know, like again, we added, we not only had to retrain and regit into the groove of things, but like there was a whole new layer of also we're in person. We're in person. Exactly. The three of us are in person, right? Which I think was smooth. It was cool. Like it was, it added a lot, but I'm just saying like there was a lot of complexity to that. That's just true, right? Between the technical stuff, figuring that out and running it. And also just little things like, oh, when the hell are we gonna get lunch? Yeah. Because all three of us are at this table and you have a session now and you have a session later and you have a session next. So you got to sneak out and Taylor will make sure not to put you on camera. That definitely happened on day two where I was literally tiptoeing around the room trying to go get lunch during one of the sessions. Soaking wet. And it started pouring rain. And so I came back like out of breath, like dripping rain, you know. Yeah. So Lauren's tiptoeing around and I'm muted her mic being like, it's fine. Don't worry about it. But like it's hard. How do you communicate that? I'm on camera. So I didn't literally go, it's fine. I tried to be somewhat subtle. Not that anyone would have been like offended if we're like, oh, Lauren's back from lunch. But I don't know. I don't wanna break the magic, right? That is one of the illusions for a virtual event that you wanna keep the magic alive. Whereas when you're in person, you can say, all right, let's all break. Let's get up, let's go to lunch together and let's come back and you know. So I had. I was just gonna say, we had that lovely comment that I mentioned earlier, which I went back through and it was from Amanda Schmidt. So shout out to Amanda, which was, this is incredible. It's giving me hope for hybrid events. Oh, see. It's just a lovely thing. We fill the world with hope. I don't know. Do we have to end on that note, huh? Anyway, if you've made it to the end. We fill Amanda Schmidt's world with hope. Yeah, if you've made it to the end of the stream, thank you for watching. Yes, thank you for watching. You should have done something else, but we appreciate it. They can watch it on two times speed on YouTube. I do know that Meredith has been watching. So shout out to Meredith. Meredith. Big fan. Big fan. Big fan. All right. See you next time. See ya.