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Conducting an Adobe Connect Webinar

image by sridgway

The October FLN f2f meet up was held in Kurri Kurri on October 31st.  Throughout the day a number of sessions were conducted in Adobe Connect as weninars. Tony Loriman from Hunter Institute has asked me to provide an overview of the set-up I used to broadcast the audio and video so I thought I would do my response as a blog post.

Over the past couple of years I have experimented with a range of methods to conduct webinars, sessions where there is a combination f2f and online audience. This scenario poses a number of challenges.

• How do the online attendees hear the f2f speakers with good audio quality
• How do the f2f audience hear the online attendees when they are not wearing any headsets
• How do you get better video quality than a webcam into AC
• How do you make simultaneous audio recording for podcasting

Most people use Adobe Connect with a USB/Analogue headset, however there is no technical limitation to audio sources coming from range of inputs all mixed together into one feed and then fed into adobe connect.

Below is the set-up I have settled on and used successfully on many occasions.

Wireless Microphones

For large webinars a wireless lapel mic and a roving hand microphone for audience questions etc. is an effective and flexible solution to capturing good quality audio from all the f2f audience.

There are lots of commercially available wireless microphone systems available, so long as the gear you choose is a quality unit it does not matter which one you use.

I have opted for a Shure PG1288/PG185 Vocal/Lavalier Combo Wireless System. This has a wireless lapel mic and a hand held roving mic paired to a receiver unit. They sell for around $1000

Mixer

This your standard mixing deck into which the wireless receiver is fed, along with any other additional microphones you may wish to include into the mix.  I will sometimes add a standard wired lapel mic for me so that I can talk to the online audience for audio testing or facilitation. Here I use a Sony ECM44B lapel.

The mixer allows significant control over the level of each microphone input and the mixed down final output, it is also easy to mute a mic if it is introducing noise etc.

We use a Behringer XENYX 1204 which retail for around $300 but any good quality mid range mixer would be fine.

M-Audio Mobile Pre-USB

It is possible to feed the output of the mixer directly into the Line-in of the computers sound card however there is one more component I add to improve quality and versatility to the set-up by adding a M-Audio mobile pre USB mixer to the final stage. This USB based sound encoder essentially replaces your computer sound card and does all the sampling in high quality 48 Khz. This bypasses any poor quality you might have in a laptop soundcard. The output of the mixer is fed into the line-in on the rear of the unit and it is chosen as the microphone by windows and Adobe Connect. This way all the wireless/wired mics connected to the mixer are fed into the computer. The nice thing about the unit is that it also provides a mixed output of the audio input and the computer audio output, perfect for a simultaneous podcast of the online and f2f participant audio. They sell for about $300.

Podcast Audio Recorder

I like to make a high quality audio of the adobe connect session for a separate podcast. I do this using a Maranz PMD661 solid state audio recorder plugged into the mixed down output of the mobile Pre USB. I love this unit however they are expensive @ around $1500. You can alternatively use any recording device including an ipod/Belkin combo or an Iriver etc.

Video Camera Input

As most of you would know Adobe Connect will only accept usb based webcams as input to the camera pod, so how do get a standard video camera to operate as the video source? Well through some experimentation I have found that cheap usb DVR video converters work a treat with a windows based computers essentially treating them as a webcam. These are typically utilised to digitise a composite video/audio source from a camcorder into a computer for conversion to DVD. You simply plug the video in one end and the usb connector on the other end into the computer and it’s treated as a webcam.  This would also be an ideal way to have a POV camera feed into Connect. Ours is a Belkin DVR purchased from Dick Smith Electronics for around $129. I only had to install the software to set the input to PAL as it came set by default as NTSC, other than that it is treated as a standard USB camera by connect and other applications such as Adobe Prem Elements.

Examples

image by sridgway

Well that about it, it’s not for everyone and as you can see from the images in my flickr stream you do need top be a tad techie to set it up and troubleshoot any glitches but once you have the hang of it it’s not too complicated. It’s really the only way to ensure quality audio and video for a large online webinar, I have been to one to many sessions where they have used a head set mic held to the speakers mouth and the questions from the audience are inaudible to the online participants.

Here is a recording done recently using this set-up

Adobe Connect recording

Podcast

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