 You can mute your video and then switch over to presenter view. We're just going to wait for a few more people. We'll wait for a few minutes. Speaker view, sorry. Yeah. Hi, everybody. Welcome. So we're just asking everyone if you can mute your video. And then switch over to the speaker view. I think that will be the best option for the initial part of the meeting. If you have any questions along the way, you can feel free to post them in the chat, but we will have a Q&A section later on. And we'll happily take questions. All right, Maddie, are we still waiting on more people to come in? I think we could get started if we want to, and I can just keep letting people in as they join the waiting room. Okay. Sounds good. So again, we're just asking everyone if you can, if you can mute your video. If you could go ahead and mute your video and then switch over to the speaker view mode. That would be great. You can mute the video down at the bottom of the zoom interface. You can just turn off your webcam there. Great. Okay. So hi everybody. My name is Billy Clark. I'm the artistic director of culture hub. I'm here with other members, members from culture hub, including. Maddie and Deandra and sangmin. Basically what I'm going to do is give just a, an overview of what live lab is and why we created live lab, just a little bit of a history behind that. And then I'm going to explain a little bit about what live lab does and what it's good for. And what it doesn't do. And then I'm going to pass the mic over to Deandra, who's going to give more technical overview of the live lab interface. We have Jean here as well from the culture of team. And then, and we'll show a workflow that uses live lab. To do multi-locational live streaming. So I'll start with a little bit of just a background on, on live lab and how it came about. And what it does. So about, when culture was founded by La Mama and the solace to the arts about 10 years ago, just over 10 years ago, we started exploring the internet as a mechanism for creating multi-locational events, both in the performing arts and education. But in over the course of our 10 years, we've worked extensively using a variety of different technologies to basically connect venues in different locations for the purpose of creating sort of telematic exchanges. And so live lab came about out of sort of frustrations with existing tools that were available in the marketplace. We were working a lot with hardware video conferencing systems. And these had a lot of limitations. The first problem that we had with them is they were extremely costly. They cost sometimes upwards of $30,000. And while they were good at transmitting low latency and high resolution video and audio streams, they were extremely challenging to implement and to, to use and to maintain. And one of the biggest challenges that we faced was, you know, obviously the lack of access based on cost and also based on just a technical know-how and infrastructure that you would need to implement these tools, but also in the way that they were designed not for the creative industries. And so the user interfaces and the way that they routed media didn't really work always in the way that creative artists wanted to use these tools. And so we began imagining that perhaps there was a way to develop our own tool that would work better to help facilitate the types of creative exchanges that we were seeing that artists wanted to produce. So we got a small NISCA technical assistance grant and we were introduced through our network to Olivia Jack, who's a creative coder that's been working on with us on LiveLab for the past five years. And we developed a prototype and, and we did a feasibility study and we found that what we thought we could potentially produce might be feasible. And so we embarked over the, you know, last five years to kind of make several iterations of, of LiveLab. And about a year ago we transitioned from using hardware, the hardware video conferencing systems to using LiveLab exclusively for our classes and our productions. Then in March, the pandemic hit the U.S. and we felt a need to work towards bringing this, this tool to the public, which was something that we had always intended to do. But I think that the pandemic certainly put a fire underneath us to, to, to move that forward more rapidly. So we've launched a collaborative program with LaMama called Downtown Variety, a weekly variety show that was produced using LiveLab and streamed online for audiences to watch. And along that process of producing this weekly show, we were also testing and working with creative coders. I think Tong is in the house as well, who was another contributor to the LiveLab project. And basically ultimately over the course of about a two month period, we were able to polish and restructure the code of LiveLab in order to create a public release. So now LiveLab is publicly available in beta form at LiveLab.app. And we are trying to build a community around it. And also explore, yeah, how people want to use it and what new features we should be thinking about, including tracking down bugs, et cetera, et cetera. So this is the first of what we hope will become a monthly meetup. And while we will maybe take kind of a lead, the culture of team will take a lead, sort of providing instruction and information about LiveLab in the initial few sessions of this meetup. Our end goal is that it will be something that will be run more in a communal and decentralized fashion. And that it will be an opportunity for people to share how they're using LiveLab and also to share different workflows, different methodologies for using the tool. And so, yeah, I think that's a pretty good overview of why what LiveLab, the background on LiveLab and why we're here today. So I'll just tell a little bit about what LiveLab is and then I'll pass it over to Deandra. So our original intention for LiveLab was, as I mentioned, was to replace video conferencing systems. So as we were developing LiveLab, we always imagined that it would basically be a router for audio, video, and data. And that the tool would be really used to link physical locations in space. So you could take your video feeds and you could spatialize them around your venue for whatever type of exchange that you were doing with remote locations. But again, because of the pandemic, we started realizing that there was another potential, which is that we could also use it to produce these multi-locational live streaming events as well. And so I think that what we're going to focus on today is really on that workflow and how we use LiveLab, what LiveLab does and then how you use other pieces of software to then route the video conferencing feeds that are within LiveLab out to a live stream. And without further ado, I'm going to pass the mic over to Deandra. Hey, everyone. I'm Deandra. Yeah. Nice to meet you all virtually. So before we jump into LiveLab, I know we're going to have a lot of questions and we're going to get to kind of a Q&A section toward the end. So as your questions kind of come to you, you can just write them in the chat. And once we get to the end, we'll fill through some of those. Any issues you may be having, again, you can write the end chat to Maddie and Maddie probably will feed that to us. If we have to stop at any point, just let us know. And if you have a question and you don't want to forget it, you can put it in the chat or you can use the raise hand function. I think we have that. And when we get to the Q&A portion, then I'll just ask people to unmute and start your video if you'd like in order to ask those questions once for at that point. Yeah. Yeah. So I think we can jump into LiveLab. So before we actually jump into LiveLab one, I'm sharing a screen. So you guys should be able to see a screen right now that has an incognito window. I don't know if it's in presenter mode. It might have to be in presenter mode. But you should see a share screen that should have a Chrome window open. You might see application called back. Okay. Yeah. I see a thumbs up, which means you guys see it. Cool. Cool. So let's get started. So before anybody joins in with LiveLab, the two things that you should know is that one LiveLab currently doesn't work on iOS devices or doesn't support iOS devices that being iPhones and iPads. It does support Android devices. But right now it does not support iPads or iPhones or any iOS devices. The second thing is that LiveLab works in Chrome. Right. So we don't want to be using Safari. Don't want to be using Firefox. You want to be using Chrome for LiveLab to use it in its full capacity. Okay. So there's two important things to note before you jump or delve into LiveLab. Right. So now you guys see my window. And I'm going to go to Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. Live. adlivelab.app as a website that you get permission to use your camera and your microphone, okay? So once I do that, I see that now next to this camera and this audio, now I have a source, right? So I have camtwist, which is a virtual camera application as my video source, and then I have an audio source, right? So I'm going to leave camtwist for now as my video source, and I'm going to leave this microphone as my audio source. Now you do have the option to join into livelab with no video and no audio. That might be helpful for maybe a technician who wants to kind of be a fly on the wall, make sure everything's going well in livelab, but necessarily doesn't want to take up space in the room, right? You have the option to join livelab with no video and no audio. You will still be able to chat, you just wouldn't be able to talk or nobody would see your video, right? And if I click on that drop down, you'll see that you have those options. You have the no video option and for the mic, you have the no audio option. So now under that, I'm going to write my name where it says name. I'm going to put it Deandra, so everybody knows who I am. And then I'm going to head over to this settings button. So if I click on the settings button, it takes me into a window that's just some advanced settings. So you have the option to change your video resolution. So under width and height, you can change your video resolution to whatever you need it to be, right? And the way to verify that is if you go up here a little bit, you see where it says video preview, next to video preview right now, it says 640 by 360. So that's the resolution I would be going into livelab at. So this verifies, next to video preview where it says that resolution, that verifies the resolution you're going into livelab with, okay? You also have the same options. You have the video input, so you can select your video source from here. You can select your audio source from here. And then if you scroll down, you have some audio processing options. So if you're doing something that's more audio based, you can play with having echo cancellation, audio gain, and noise suppression unchecked, right? So this window is just some advanced settings that you can play with before going into livelab. So for now I'm going to save and I have everything set up. So I have my audio source, I have my video source, I have my name, all that stuff. So I'm going to press start and I'm going to join. So now I'm in livelab, but I want other people to join into my livelab room. So how do I do that? So what I'm going to do is I'm going to copy that URL, I'm going to go to my email and I'm going to email that to some people so that they can join. Don't be trying to steal my password now, people. So I've emailed that to Billy and Maddie and that link lives on. So if by chance that you're creating a link that will later exist, so you might not need it, currently you might need it later on, that link will still exist, right? Because you just sent this to somebody. So if you need to get back to that link, you can just click on that link you sent, and it'll take you back to that room, right? So I sent them that link, all they have to do is click on the link, it'll take them to the landing page of livelab, they'll put all their information in and they'll join. Bam. Maddie is here. So now if I hover over my cam twist feed, right, at the bottom of my cam twist feed it says my name, it says D'Andra. The next to my name, it has a little camera function. So if I click on that function, what it does is it mutes my video, right? And we also hover over those icons, it will tell you what they do as well. So that mutes my video. Now next to that, there's a little microphone, I click on that, that mutes my audio, right? So I have something, I can mute my video, I can mute my audio. Now to the right of that, you have a little box with an arrow that comes out of it. I click on that, it popped me up into another window. But what that does is it creates, let me bring it out. Sit again. So I pop out that window. And what it does is it creates, excuse me, it creates an output window that I can use for example for if I have an external monitor and I want to take somebody's feed and I want to connect it to that external monitor, I can drag that feed into the external monitor. If I have a projector and I want to have a feed in that projector, I can take that feed and put it into a projector, right? And you can do that for the feeds, all the feeds in the room. So I can do that for Billy's feed. I hover over Billy's feed, let me just take the window up a little bit. If I hover over Billy's feed, I have the option to pop out his window as well, right? And I can move him around wherever I want to move him. And I also have that same option for Maddie. If I pop her out, I can move her wherever I want to. Right? So now if I pivot to the right, I see that next to Maddie's feed, there's a bunch of icons on the right hand side. Let me see if I can make this a little bigger so you can see here. So we're going to go from top to bottom. So the first icon is that same function as the video, the camera one that we did over my cam to a speed. So if I do that, mute the video. Same audio. If I click on that, then use my audio. Under that, in that little monitor with the plus sign in it, that allows me to share my screen. So I can share my entire screen. I can share a specific application window. So if I have iTunes open, if I have OBS open, I can share that specific window, and then I have a Chrome tab option. So if I have a specific Chrome tab I want to share, I can do that. Now, under that, I have a little round circle with the plus in it. Because on that, what that allows me to do is add another media stream. And the way that that works is or the way it can be useful is, for example, I can say I have two camera feeds. So I have my FaceTime camera, but I want another view. So I want a view from a webcam, for example. I can add another video input source. So in this dropdown, I can select another video input source or audio if using audio. And then I'll be able to add that into this room. So I have my source that I joined their room with initially, and then I can add another video or audio source. Right? Now, under that, I have the hang-up, which I'm not going to press on now because take me out of the room. If you go further down in this little settings button, I'm going to click on that and that's going to pop out a window. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to uncheck the stretch to fit. And now you see that I actually can see the actual resolutions of Maddie. I see that Maddie's coming in, not a 16 by 9, but you can see that my cam twist is. So now I can see their actual resolution. I can see the room that they have in their video. Now, under that, I have column layout. If I click on column layout, what that does is it's going to push my feeds to the sides and create a column where everything will line up. So now you see a better idea. So now you see that these columns are no longer or these pop-out windows are no longer covering Maddie's feed. They pushed our feeds to the side and they created a column that then all the little icons I click on, it will pop them to that column. Now, in that settings button, we also have a number of output switches function, and we'll come back to that. Let me just finish all the icons and then we'll come back to the number of output switches because that will allow us to go into window capture and streaming. I'm on the X side of that settings. And one thing to note is that any changes you make, so for example, if I click on that stretch to fit or uncheck that stretch to fit, that's all on the end user side. So that only affects what I see on my side. That's not going to affect what everybody sees in their layout. If Billy wants to see the same layout as that, he's going to have to uncheck it on his side. So any changes I make on my side of Live Lab does not affect the whole room. It only affects what I personally de-androcy. That's an important note to keep in mind. So I'm going to X out of that for now. Under that settings button, I also have an audio mixer. So what that allows me to do is it allows me to control the volume of Maddie and Billy as well as the overall output sound. So for example, if Maddie's talking and I'm like, I'm really tired of hearing Maddie, I can lower her volume. Same goes for Billy. If at some point he's talking, I'm just like, I'm tired of this. I can lower his volume. We came in with no audio though. So you don't see it currently. And then also you can obviously take down the overall output volume. So you can take down the volume of the whole room. Then under that, you have the chat function. So if I want to talk to Maddie or Billy, I can write hey. Again, if you end up joining in Live Lab for some reason with no video, no audio, for example, they've joined in with no audio. So maybe we need to communicate. I can chat with them. I can write hey. And we can chat in that chat function. And that chat function goes to everybody. So if you send a chat, be mindful that everybody can see it. I'm just sending a chat to Maddie. I'm sending a chat to the whole room. Then under that chat function, I have three little miniature people. And if I click on that, that shows me the participants in the room. So right now, I can see everybody in the room. I see myself, Deandra. I see Maddie. And I see Billy. I also see the resolution that they're coming in at. So I see that Maddie is coming in at a 640 by 480. And I'm coming in at a 640 by 360. And that's why our videos look differently. Also the same for Billy. He's coming in at a 640 by 480 at 30 frames per second. So that's a good thing to know also when maybe you have somebody that's in the room with no video, no audio. You can probably see them participants, but you just won't physically see them in the space. So let me add that. Now I'm going to go back to that settings button. I'm going to click on that settings button. And I'm going to go to number of output switches. Don't live lab. The cool thing is that we have video switches built in. So what I can do is I can create an output window and I can switch between feeds in live lab with, for example, if I just want one output window, I can switch between Maddie, my own feed and Billy, right? So let me show you an example of that. So I'm going to create one switcher for now. And what's going to happen is above that settings button, there's going to be a little monitor with an A that pops up, right? So I'm going to click on that. And now I see that I have a pop out window that says switcher A, right? Now if I come over to, let's use Maddie's feed, I see now that next to that little pop out with an arrow, it says Maddie has a camera, this little box with an arrow. Now there's an A that wasn't there before. So if I click on that A, what that does is it sends Maddie's feed to switcher A. I also know that because they have a huge A on top of her face, right? So Maddie's feed is going to switcher A and there's a huge A on top of her feed. So that allows you to know where what feed is going into, right? So I have that one switcher. Now if I go back to where it says switcher A, on the right-hand side of Maddie's feed, I have a little, it looks like a scrolling knob. Now what that allows you to do is that allows you to fade. We don't really use it much, but it is there. So that allows you to fade to black. Currently we do not have a crossfade, but that's something we're hoping to have eventually in the future. But right now you can sort of fade to black, right? What I can also do is next to switcher A, there's a little box with a pop, the arrow out of it, which is the same little icon that we had when we popped up those individual feeds. So if I click on that, what that does is it pops out Maddie's, my switcher A window, right? And it clearly says live lab switcher A. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually X out of that for a second. And I'm going to also go to Billy's feed. And I see that on Billy's feed, he also has that A. So if I want to switch, I can switch to Billy's feed. If I want to switch to this cam to his feed, I can switch to that cam feed, that cam to his feed. And that big A is going to follow each feed that I click on. So I know that that specific feed is going to that specific switcher, that switcher A switcher. So I'm going to create another switcher. Now you see that that little monitor with the B on it popped out. Now, if I have over Maddie's, I also have a B there. So I'm going to send Maddie to B. And then I'm going to send Billy to A, right? So now I have two switchers, and I have Billy in one, Maddie in one. And if I want, I can switch between, I can have them go to whichever switcher I want them to go to. And I'm going to pop out each switcher. So I'm going to pop out switcher A, which has Billy. And I'm going to move him a little lower here. And I'm going to pop out Maddie. So as for LiveLab, that's kind of the functionalities of LiveLab, right? Now I want to take the feeds that I have in LiveLab, and I want to get them into a stream. So I popped out Maddie's, that switcher A and that switcher B. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to just make LiveLab a little bit smaller. And now I see that I have Maddie and Billy's, that LiveLab switcher A and switcher B here. One thing to note also is that right now, well, LiveLab has a max of four switchers. I don't imagine you, anybody would need more than that. But if they do, at that point, then you would have to pop out those individual feeds, right? But right now I have two switches, I have switcher A switcher B. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to focus on audio for a quick second, because now I need to get, I have their video feeds, now I have to get their audio feeds. So for Mac, we use an application called Loopback. The equivalent of that for Windows would be VoiceMeter. And what it allows me to do is it allows me to capture my Chrome audio, and then my streaming encoder, my junior application, will be able to grab Loopback as the audio input. But I'll show you obviously how to do that. So right now I have Loopback open. And what I'm going to do is at the bottom left-hand side, I'm going to create a new virtual device. I'm going to change it to input for now. So I know which one switch, press enter. I'm going to select under sources, I'm going to select this pass through. And then at the bottom, there's a little trash with the, with the delete. I'm going to click on that to delete that pass too, because we don't need that. Now next to sources, there's a little plus with an arrow. I'm going to click on that drop down. And as you can see, I have an abundance of applications I can use. So I can be catching the audio from OBS. I can be catching the audio from Zoom. If I have something like iTunes open, I can catch the audio from there, or Spotify. So you can catch audio from multiple applications. But for right now, I need it from LiveLabs. So I'm going to go to, I'm going to select Google Chrome. Right. And now I have, now basically I've set up a virtual input device. So if I go back to my Chrome, and let me go to YouTube really quickly. Let's play something. I play something I see that I'm getting feedback. So Lubeck is recognizing my Chrome audio. Right. So I'm going to exit up that. You go back to Lubeck. So Lubeck, I created a virtual input device. But now I need to hear that sound. Right. So what I'm going to do is I'm going at the bottom left hand side where it says new virtual device. Again, I'm going to click on that. And I'm going to create a monitoring, sorry, monitoring setup. I'm going to type in monitoring. I'm going to do the same thing I did before. I'm going to select on that pass through. I'm going to delete it. I'm going to add Google Chrome. Now if I, next to sources, it says output channels and next to output channels, it says monitor. What I'm going to do is I'm going to add my internal speakers as my monitoring system. And now I have both an input device that I can take into Streamlabs. And I also have a monitoring system that I'll be able to hear what's going on and monitor the sound. Right. Now again, for Windows, this would be equivalent, the equivalent would be voice meter. Voice meter is free. Loopback is not. After 20 minutes, Loopback creates static sound. And it is $100, I believe. I think it's just one flat rate of $100. That's one thing to keep in mind when looking into it. So make that smaller. And now I'm going to go to Streamlabs OBS. Streamlabs OBS is going to be my streaming encoder. And Streamlabs OBS is under the OBS world. So it is similar to OBS. I think it just depends on what you need it for and what your preferences are. We like it for window capture. So we use Streamlabs OBS versus regular OBS. But again, it's all in your preference. But it is very, very similar in that you can lay it out the same. You add your sources the same, stream the same. So if you know OBS, you will know pretty much Streamlabs OBS. So now I have Streamlabs OBS open. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to select this little four box at the left-hand side. What that allows me to do is that allows me to customize my layout. So I'm going to customize it similar to how I have OBS. So I have a scene selector. I have a source selector. I have an audio mixer. And at the top, I'll be able to see what I'm doing. The next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go to my settings. So at the bottom left-hand side, I'm going to go to Belize Outputs. Video. I'm going to go to Video. And where it says Base Canvas Resolution, I want to make sure that my canvas is the size of what I'm streaming to. So my resolution for streaming, I'm going to make 720. So I want to make sure that my base canvas is 1280 by 720. Again, that's going to change depending on what you're streaming with and what you're doing. But for us, it's 1280 by 720. Then I'm going to select Done. And I'm also going to select Save Changes for the custom layouts that I've created. So under scene, I'm going to create a, well, I have a scene already there. So if I just double click on that scene, what I'm going to do is I'm going to create two scenes. I'm going to create a host scene and then I'm going to create a performer scene. So I have my artist and I have my host. I'm going to rename this scene that's already there and done. Now, if I go next to the scenes, I see that I have a source. So here, this is where I'm going to be selecting my switcher. So I'm going to select that little plus button. I'm going to select Window Capture, Add Source. Then I'm going to rename it Host and Add Source. Then I'm in this little dropdown. I'm going to select what I want it to be. So I know that Maddie's going to switcher B. So I'm going to select switcher B and Maddie's going to be my host in this scenario, in most scenarios, because she hosts downtime variety too. So I'm going to select switcher B and I'm going to select Done. So now Maddie is my host and I see that I have Maddie's feed in here. Now, right now it's in Studio Mode, but we're going to work with it. So now I'm going to right click on Maddie's feed, which is also the canvas. I'm going to right click on that. I'm going to drop down to Transform and I'm going to select Fit to Screen. Then I'm going to right click again on Maddie's feed and that canvas, Transform, Edit, Transform. And in Maddie's feed, you can see at the top it says Blank and I have all that information that I really don't want. So I'm going to crop the top out. I'm going to Guest Mate at like a 54. I'm going to press Done. Again, I'm going to right click on Maddie's feed, Transform, Fit to Screen. And now I have Maddie's feed in Streamlabs, right? So I have Maddie's feed, but I don't have her audio. So now in that same plus button, I'm going to select that plus button. I'm going to select Audio Input Capture. Oh, but I don't have my audio coming in, should I? Oh, that's fine. We saw that we got some feedback when I played that YouTube video. So we know that in Chrome, we're getting audio. There you go. Add Source. I'm going to name it. I always name it Loopback because it's coming from Loopback. But I can also name it Maddie's. Or just Chrome. I'll name it Loopback. Same thing. And I drop down. I'm going to select Input, which is what I named my Loopback Audio Input. And then Done. So now I have Maddie's feed and Maddie's audio. So I have the whole speed and the whole audio. Now I want to create something for my artist, which is Billy. He's the talent. I'm going to rename that to Artist. Done. I created a new scene. Again, going to go to Source. Click that plus button next to Source. Select Window Capture. Add Source. I'm going to uncheck this. And I'm going to do Add New Source instead. I'm going to name this Artist. Add Source. Again, in that drop down. Now I'm going to select Switcher A. Press Done. And now I have Billy's feed. I'm going to transform his stuff. I'm going to right-click. Transform. Fit to Screen. Again, right-click. Transform. Edit, transform. I'm going to crop the top of that information that I don't need. Again, yes, I made about 54. Done. And then right-click again. Transform. Fit to Screen. So now I have Billy's feed. Again, I need Billy's audio. So I need the Chrome audio, the Loopback audio. So I'm going to add another source. I'm going to add Input Capture, Audio Input Capture. Add Source. And I don't need to add a new source because it's all that same Loopback feed, all that same Loopback input. So instead of doing Add New Source instead, I'm just going to select my Loopback and I'm going to add that same source. So now I have Billy's feed and his audio. And now I can switch between Hosts and Artists. What I also can do is if I go back to Live Lab and I want to make Maddie go to switcher A, I can click A and Maddie will switch to switcher A. Right? Now, in Streamlabs, you also can do PIP. So you can have two people next to each other and talking to each other. You can do pretty basic, basic, basic video processing. Like you can do a little bit of composite, maybe take some saturation out. That's super basic. If you want to delve deeper into maybe effects, you would need another application. For example, the one we use being VDMX. But yeah, that's Streamlabs. So you created a host and you created an artist. Now I want to stream. Right? So if I go down here to my Settings and I click on Stream, here, I don't want to mess up our actual stream. So maybe let me just see YouTube. I'll just show you guys how it looks. So here I want to stream to YouTube, for example. I'll assign it to my YouTube. I'll go to here where it says that little camera with the plus inside creates. Then I'll say go live from there. I'll put in my stream information. So I'll put my name. It's unlisted because this is a test. No, not made for kids. Create. And then in that YouTube stream, what it's going to do is it's going to give me a stream key and it's going to give me a stream URL that will copy to my OBS settings. So under URL, I'll copy that stream URL and paste it into there. And next to stream key, I will copy that stream key and paste it into there. Then done. So basically I filled all that information in. So once I was ready to go live, I would just press go live at the bottom of Streamlabs. And then I also would go live here in YouTube and then I'll be live to YouTube. So that's the basic workflow of getting feeds from LiveLab into Streamlabs. You create output windows or output switchers. You make sure you capture your audio from Chrome in application. We use Loopback. You can use something like Blackhole or Soundflower. I know I don't think they create Soundflower or it doesn't work as much anymore. Then from there in your streaming encoder, which could be OBS or regular OBS, from there you create your scenes, capture your sources, and then stream to the World Wide Web. And that's my spiel on things. I think now we can get into... Wow, thanks, Deandra. That's awesome. So I think now we're ready to take questions. We've been answering a lot of them in the chat. So obviously feel free to check out the chat if you haven't been. But if you want to raise your hands, we could actually bring you into the stream here. If you want to ask your questions, just keep in mind that we are live streaming. So please make sure that you feel comfortable with that. And Maddie will... I'm going to ask Justin to unmute. Quick question. Have you been using any other streaming services for audio and do you notice any difference in quality, for example, Source Connect or Clean Feed for the purpose of bringing like live musicians into a feed with audio only? I don't think that we have done that, have experienced doing that. Specifically those we have used in a couple of our productions. Let me see if Mike can get past my mental block. Sangmin, are you there? What is it called? The multi-channel audio routing? Sangmin, what's the... Jacktrip. Got it. We've used Jacktrip in the past for multi-channel audio. We actually did a concert in the winter between just yesterday and Seoul where we had musicians playing live. And we used Live Lab for the video source and we used Jacktrip for the audio routing. It's much more complicated and requires a much more difficult audio setup. We did do some side by side testing of the audio latency and we found that Live Lab is pretty close. Jacktrip beats it by a little bit. And there are some interesting workarounds if you want to explore multi-channel audio. I think that's still very much an emergent area of the web and we hope that eventually Live Lab will be a multi-channel audio router as well. Right now it's not truly... I mean you can mix your stereo output but you can do things like add multiple tabs so you can join from one computer using another tab and you can sort of route based on the tabs because there's different softwares that can grab based on the tab. So there are some kind of funky things that you can do currently using Live Lab to route multi-channel audio. We've also used audio hijack which is another tool made by Rogue Amoeba that makes loopback to sort of grab different things and route them and patch them in interesting ways. But yeah it's still emerging Live Lab as an audio tool. Although if you do have plug-in your audio interface it'll read that and that significantly improves audio quality obviously. The same goes for video if you have a proper ingest device and you have the proper tools you can also have a camera come into Live Lab and use that as your video source. So yeah you can do that for both audio and video to improve those. Yeah and you can add also in the add media function which I think Deandra showed you can you can add additional audio sources to the call right. So you could have say your built-in microphone and then also add a new audio from the same computer and from the same device you could bring in another source you know that you're piping in using you know a black hole or loopback or or some kind of virtualization software. Thank you. I'm asking Tyree to unmute. Cool. I'm very warm enough you can see me. Yeah we can see you. Yeah okay perfect. Hi Billy how are you if I'm away? Good how are you? Doing good. So I've used Stream Lab OBS of course for some of our shows and I think Maddie probably just answered my question down in the chat. Since it's only six to eight participants is there at some point the idea to expand this because right now of course we use for our two shows that we've done here in the spring we use of course Zoom but of course you know we don't know what's going to happen at Zoom of course we can't always rely on it as well. Yeah if you're away to expand the participants that can vote. So yes a couple of strategies so currently what we've been doing you know because we're often doing shows that have more than you know even in downtown variety we'll have you know sometimes seven you know including the technicians right that are involved which are also all distributed you know like maybe we have like 12 or 15 people that are participating in that show and one of the ways that we've done is we've designed a backstage room right and we have a technician in that room and then that technician is in we use a sort of comms system like we'll use we've been using FaceTime sort of what we've settled upon and we are what you know all in communication across the multiple locations and then we're routing people into the stage area as needed now obviously that's not solved every single scenario if you're doing the play and there's supposed to be eight people on stage you know so forth and so on basically there's no limit to how many people can be within a peer-to-peer connection in LiveLab there's nothing that's stopping you from adding more except for limitations of bandwidth cpu and basically hardware and that those are real limitations and we sort of feel that you know around six to eight is about where it kind of maxes out cpu starts to to really um buffer now in terms of future possibilities for expansion so one of the advantages to WebRTC is that it is peer-to-peer so it's a disadvantage and an advantage so it makes it less latent because you're not going through a server so and and that also makes it I think more you know underground in a way in the sense that you're also not going through some sort of corporation server they're not extracting data WebRTC is inherently encrypted um and you're you're really the server all the server is doing is is making the initial handshake and going yes these people want to talk to each other and then it gets out of the way and then your computers are connecting to each other through the internet without a server that being said that there are some new open source protocols for servers which are designed to expand the capacity of WebRTC and we are collaborating on another project that has already implemented that a server infrastructure which allows the scalability to increase to around 30 or 40 using that server and and the performance is really quite good we didn't see any noticeable visible difference in latency so we are investigating that whether that can also be there could be a version of LiveLab which would remain like this for people that are really need very low latency high resolution production and then also a version that would be scalable using a server infrastructure so hopefully something that is not too far in the future hopefully within this year thank you um does anybody else have questions that they want to uh ask with everybody else if not i think that we will um stop live streaming now and just take like another five to ten minutes we won't go too far past three um but just to have a little bit more informal hearing from people like what they are interested in using LiveLab for and maybe if they're interested in seeing different features added just have a little bit of a more informal conversation um and yeah i mean in in general for for folks i we're still live right um um you can visit culture hub dot org slash live lab and um you can also email live lab at culture hub dot org um with any questions or um