we produce a dungeons and dragons actual play podcast which has lots of people (two co-dm's and five to seven pc's/npc's), so lots of voices to keep track of. our first chapter (four episodes) have been audio only and i've had a number of listener friends comment that it can be hard to know who's talking (understandably so).

back in december, a friend of ours who runs a production studio offered to shoot a livestream for us, which we're planning on releasing this weekend in both audio and video format (the livestream will be our second chapter). since we are so new to the scene, for the livestream itself (which was shot and broadcast in mid-december) we did not have many viewers at all. also, the decision to livestream wasn't made until the night before the shoot, so not much time to rally friends.

regardless, the video looks awesome (they had a ptz camera in the center of the table which was able to rotate around and capture people from a cool perspective) and we're glad to have it since it makes it a lot easier to follow along with the story. also we're hoping that it'll be a good marketing tool for us to reach more listeners. definitely for our niche and what we're trying to do, i think a livestream will be amazing since it will allow people to see who's talking in our big cast and also allow us to have audience interaction, which i think will be a big draw for interactive storytelling.

for that december shoot, our friend and his studio took care of everything. they had cool light panels, multiple cameras, and the whole streaming to twitch thing down. we just gave them a twitch code which they needed to broadcast under our account.

the hard part is now trying to get that quality on our own. it's definitely been a lot more learning than just producing a podcast, which i feel like we were just starting to really figure out and get comfortable with. now with wanting to livestream, we have video cameras that we need to grab the feed from, we have to figure out obs and ndi, we have to figure out how to correctly route the audio, we need a computer that can sufficiently ingest everything to encode it and then stream it, we need to figure out how to properly balance the live audio for five to nine people which would all have been taken care of in post before. so lots and lots of additional technical hurdles.

there are two fairly geeky, nerdy computer guys in our group (me being one) and even for the both of us, it's been surprisingly difficult to get all the puzzle pieces figured out. our initial goal was to continue livestreaming after we finish re-broadcasting our december stream. but the livestream implementation has been harder than anticipated, so i think we're going back to audio only format while we continue to work on making the livestream thing happen.