洛杉矶时装周迎来流媒体视频改头换面

洛杉矶时装周 streams its runway shows online, but there’s plenty of room for improvement. Luckily, 流媒体 这是流媒体视频改造吗.

A little background: Los Angeles Fashion Week occurs twice per year, 三月和十月, 它的创立是为了提高洛杉矶时尚界的知名度. One of the groups that organizes Fashion Week events is 洛杉矶时装周 (FWLA), 是什么组织了时装秀. FWLA被制作公司UCA Media Group收购, which streams 3 days of runway shows online for each Fashion Week, 在这段时间里，大约有150名设计师展示了他们的作品. M. Gio Ferrigno (right), UCA的管理合伙人, reached out to 流媒体 for a little advice on how to stream better. We were happy to put him in touch with an expert, but more on that later.

费里诺是一位经验丰富的商业和电影制片人. He has a staff of about 20 people at UCA who work on the FWLA streams. 在我们把他和流媒体专业人士联系起来之前, we spoke to him about what UCA does and what it wants to do better.

在这次采访之前, UCA已经直播了8个flla赛季, 每一个都是一个具有挑战性和昂贵的项目, Ferrigno says. 一个持续的挑战是获得足够的带宽. 在每个地点, Ferrigno需要6Mbps的上传连接, 那些根本无法以合理的价格买到的东西. 6Mbps的物理线路是UCA最大的FWLA开销, 其次是设备租赁和购置费用.

费里尼奥在选择视频直播平台时也遇到了麻烦. UCA has looked at Livestream and Ustream and was one of the first companies to use YouTube’s live streaming. While Ferrigno likes YouTube, its Content ID system creates problems for him. 因为设计师在他们的演出中使用了受版权保护的音乐, UCA’s FWLA streams have been automatically discontinued more than once. 为了解决这个问题, Ferrigno’s team substitutes an audio track of music specially created by its music coordinator.

Once UCA has streamed a three-day event, the next problem is what to do with all that HD video. Even when UCA could only stream in 720p, it captured content at 1080p. More recently, it’s been capturing 4K ProRes 4444 video to assure a wide color gamut, 然后是1080p流媒体. It moved from a NewTek TriCaster to a Blackmagic ATEM 2 M/E 12GSDIcapable production switcher. Content is stored on a storage area network (SAN) within the UCA offices using Toshiba hard drives. Last season’s shows resulted in 92TB of footage recorded from eight stationary broadcast cameras and two additional roaming cameras. 除了归档所有内容的负担, UCA has problems tagging and organizing it so that it can find footage at a later time.

UCA makes some money from its FWLA coverage—such as licensing video to appear as demo content on Microsoft Windows 10 laptops for sale in electronics stores—but would like to do a better job monetizing its work. Each show has a $65,000 budget, which UCA doesn’t come close to recouping.

“我们并没有从中赚钱. 这已经是连续八季的损失了，”费里尼奥说.

时尚的洛杉矶时装周直播

To help Ferrigno conquer his many video streaming difficulties, we connected him with Rob Roskin (右)，高级绩效顾问三级通讯 and formerly a senior manager for video operations and emerging technologies at MTV Networks. As many who have attended 流媒体 East or West conferences know, 罗斯金是直播视频方面的专家，也是一位出色的演讲者. He was the ideal person to help UCA move past its live video pain points.

The first issue Roskin needed to tackle was the problem Ferrigno didn’t even know he had: getting away from using YouTube as the sole distribution method and starting with an online video platform (OVP).

“There are companies that are designed just to help this specifically,” Roskin says. “我有很多自己创造的内容. 我既制作直播内容，也制作点播内容. 我需要一种方法对这些文件进行分类, 这样我就能弄清楚我在哪里有什么，而且我从来不会弄丢东西, and then I am going to need somebody to give me a way to play back all of these files.’”他提到了站台, Ooayla, 和Brightcove, 尽管他强调他并没有特别支持任何一个人. “What these guys do is basically take you from ‘I have everything on YouTube [to] now I really want to do it myself and I want to run my own ads, and really own my own content and have a good sense of what I have, 把所有东西放在一个地方.’”

使用OVP运行编码, distribution, and storage, Ferrigno’s team would be free to focus on other matters: getting the best cameras, 排镜头, 组织赞助. It would also put the team’s workflow in the cloud, where it belongs.

“That would be an inevitable part of moving to an online video platform. My assumption is that they would help you store those videos so that in the worst case there is at least multiple copies. If a hard drive were to die, you don’t lose any data,” Roskin says. And don’t worry about cloud storage costs: “Storage only goes in one direction. 存储这些文件的价格只会越来越低. 随着格式变大, it’s going to seem like so little to store something from say, 八年前. It’s probably going to be a fraction of the file size that you have now.”