Live Production Best Practices

Live production is not filmmaking done faster. It is a different discipline, and its central fact is that there is no second take. Everything below follows from that.

Before the day

Do the site recce. Not a phone call — stand in the room. Where is the power? Where does the cable run? Where will the control table go, and will catering want that space? What is the actual internet, and what is it shared with?

Every live disaster we have seen was visible on a site visit that did not happen.

Get the run of show in writing, and get the version from the day before, because it will have changed.

Agree the frame rate. 25 or 50 for India. Set every camera and every box to it.

Ask who else is taking a feed. The venue's screens, the sponsor's stream, the recording someone promised head office. Find this out early, not when someone asks for an output you do not have.

Redundancy, in priority order

You cannot make everything redundant. Make these things redundant, in this order:

1. The recording. If the stream fails and you have the file, you have a bad day. If both fail, you have no job. Record locally, and record in more than one place.
2. Audio. An independent backup track, always, separate from the house feed.
3. The uplink. Two connections on two different carriers.
4. Power. A UPS on the switcher and the encoder — the devices that must not reboot.
5. The programme path. A cabled fallback for anything wireless.

Notice that cameras are not on this list. A dead camera means you cut to another angle. It is survivable in a way that losing the recording is not.

On the day

Arrive earlier than feels necessary. The setup always takes longer, and the time you lose is always at the start.

Test the whole chain end to end before doors, including actually streaming to the destination. A test to a private stream key proves the entire path; a green light on the encoder proves nothing.

Label everything. Cables at both ends, inputs at the switcher, cards for each camera.

Tape down anything anyone can trip over. This is a safety obligation before it is a technical one — and check whether the venue allows floor tape at all.

Brief the camera operators on the run of show, not just their framing. An operator who knows what happens next gets the shot.

Agree who is allowed to talk to the client during the show. One person. Everyone else stays on the job.

During

Watch the programme output, not the cameras. What goes out is the only thing that exists.

Keep a safe wide available at all times. When anything goes wrong, cut to the wide while you fix it. A wide shot of a stage is never wrong; a frozen close-up always is.

Do not cut on the beat of your own boredom. Live cutting is slower than it feels. Hold shots longer than instinct suggests.

Monitor audio on headphones continuously. Meters do not tell you about hum, crackle or a radio mic dropping out.

Note the timecode when something goes wrong. Ten seconds of writing saves an hour of scrubbing in the edit.

After

Do not strike anything until the files are copied and verified. Not "the copy finished" — verified, opened, played.

Two copies before you leave the venue, on separate physical devices.

Write the post-mortem while it is fresh. What went wrong, what nearly went wrong, what you will bring next time. This is the document that makes the next job better, and it is the one everybody skips.

The India footnote

• Power is the recurring theme. Dirty supply, generator changeover, and phases shared with lighting. UPS on the critical path, and ask about generator switchover during the recce.
• Venue internet is shared with delegates, whatever the AV brief says. Assume this and plan bonding.
• Venue AV teams are often subcontracted, and the person who answers your email is not the person on the desk on the day. Meet the person who will actually be there.
• Heat. Cameras shut down, adhesive fails, crews tire. Build it into the plan.

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Gloworks is a video production and live streaming studio in Bengaluru.