Building a Multi-Cam Broadcasting Studio On The Cheap

Hey,

Remember me? It’s been a while, huh? Life has made it difficult to find the time and motivation to write. I started a new job. Had my second son. Both are awesome. Honestly, Covid made it hard to innovate and try new things in the classroom, so I didn’t have much to write about. I’ve been in survival mode until recently. But, mostly, Garden State Esports (GSE) has consumed my free time.

During Covid, I started a scholastic esports league so my students would have a way to stay connected and socialize. What started out as inviting teacher-friends who had video game clubs to play against other schools in Rocket League has turned into one of the nation’s biggest scholastic esports leagues. As of this morning,  I have 170 school districts in my league, which is almost a third of the districts in NJ. It has been an amazing ride starting the league, turning it into a nonprofit, and recruting other passionate educators from around the state to help out, all in the name of helping kids grow socially, emotionally, and academically through esports.

Here’s the thing about scholastic esports, though, and maybe why my league is doing so well: it’s not about competitive gaming. Gaming is just a way to teach kids what we want them to know using something that they love.

One of the best parts about bringing an esports team to your school are all the Career and Technical Education (CTE) benefits that go along with it! GSE encourages schools to create the “team behind the team.” This suppor team fill all the important roles and do the neccessary jobs to make our esports team function. For example, I have a team journalist, statistician, IT experts, project managers, business developers, and more. These students’ on ‘the team behind the team’ are getting hands-on experiences with in-demand, mostly stem-based, jobs in one of the fastest growing industry in the world.

One of the ‘and more’ positions on my team is the shoutcasting team. A shoutcaster is the broadcaster of the esports world. Shoutcasters call the action, provide color commentary, and otherwise engage the audience during an esports competition just like a broadcaster does during a traditional sports broadcast during in-person and live streamed events.

Behind the scenes, a team of kids support the shoutcaster. They use software to add overlays, graphics, videos, and other assets live to the stream to improve the overall viewing experience. They also transition between scenes and make sure the broadcast looks and sounds good. Members of the team monitor the chat, answering questions and making sure everyone is being respectful. The team statitician is also turns numbers into meaningful factoids for the shoutcasters to deliver. If something goes wrong, it’s all hands on deck until it’s solved.

Now, I’m very lucky. My district believes in what I’m doing. They have made an investment in STEM (which is an investment in esports) and have gone all out to empower me to have the best STEM program possible. I know that not everyone is a lucky as I am. And if you’re familiar with blog, you know I’m always thinking about ways to recreate meaningful education systems for as close to free as possible. I think I’ve done that for teacher’s interested in bringing a multi-cam, relatively sophisticated, broadcasting program.

You will need:

• A moderatley powerful windows-based computer
• Chromebooks, phones, iPads, webcam, or other devices that have both a camera and can connect to the internet.
• OBS – Free and open source software for video recording and live streaming
• VDO.Ninja – free, browser-based software that turns any device with a camera and internet connection into a live cam or screen share that can be sent to OBS.
• Canva (with free educator account)
• A place to broadcast to (Twitch, Youtube, etc.)

The basic workflow is this:

Install OBS on a moderatley powerful PC with a dedicated graphics card. OBS is your virtual broadcasting studio. Once you have OBS installed and setup (there are a ton of guides out there to get you up and running quickly and easily) you can use Vdo.ninja to turn anything with a camera and internet into a live cam.

Using the ‘add your camera to OBS feature on Vdo.ninja’, you can create a link that will send whatever you are recording with the camera to OBS which can then be shown live on your stream. Protip: ask parents and other members of your community to donate their generation-old phones. Phones without a carrier can still be connected to wifi and work great on a little tri-pod to create an on-the-go live cam for your studio. Since the whole system is wireless, you can either move the camera anywhere and/or you can use as many cameras with vdo.ninja as you want, we often ‘throw it’ to shoutcasters who are at our game-analysis desk, doing sideline interviews, or getting crowd-reaction shots. You can even plug a mic or lavaleer into the Chromeboo, phone, or ipad if you have one, but I’ve found the onboard mic is usally good enough for what we’re doing.

If you need to, you can also use vdo.ninja’s ‘remote screen share’ to screenshare gameplay into OBS as well. From there, the shoutcasters can call the action based on what they see shared with them.

You can even make things look professional! Canva, if you didn’t know, is a wonderful graphic design program that is free to use for educators. A little known fact is that Canva has been adding a ton of great features that make it perfect for creating amazing looking stingers, logos, scene transitions, overlays, and on screen graphics perfect for broadcasting. Not only do my kids and I use this in our esports program, but Garden State Esports is basically powered by Canva. If you do a search for Twitch templates or esports templates in Canva you will get all kinds of pre-made graphics and videos that can be easily editied and exported into OBS that help take your broadcast to the next level.

Finally, using industry concepts like this run-of-show spreadsheet I created so I didn’t have to buy expensive software, you can have kids pace-out and plan the broadcast. Market and invite the community to watch your event live or online via Twitch and you’re ready to go live!

This guide is super short and simple because I could spend all day walking you through different tweaks, plug-ins, etc. but there is so much to learn and so many good tutorials and resources out there, I’d be wasting your time. I am also still learning the best way to run something like this in a school setting, so if you have any thoughts or tips, please share them.

Finally, some schools might not even have access to a computer with a dedicated graphics card, so do know there are other options like Stream Yard that make it even easier to get started, though I would argue learning software like OBS is part of the education value.

The broadcasting system I’ve described here would work for something like a student-news program or classroom “show” as well which is always a fun way to have students show what they’ve learned. Don’t forget, with OBS you don’t have to go live. You produce an entire show while it saves it to your hardrive that you can later edit and push to YouTube.

Give it a try! I didn’t even get into the social-emotional benefits, connections to literacy, math, and other subjects, as well as all the digital citizenship you can teach through broadcasting, but you’ll see that for yourself if you give it a try!

I can’t promise I’ll be posting reguarly, but I do promise not to let a year go by before my next post. If this or anything I’ve written has been helpful, please consider following Garden State Esports. Leveraging the size of our audience to get donations will help me keep GSE free for everyone!

Until then,

GLHF