The first theatrical production of the semester experienced some technical difficulties with streaming.
“Woe is Me,” directed by Hal Kohlman and Lance Marsh, streamed through Stretch, a streaming service the university has used for years for various performances.
Jacob Henry, adjunct professor of sound design, was the sound designer on “Woe is Me.” He said the streaming service, Stretch, was brought in by the School of Music toward the end of the production process.
Henry said he tested his stream through a YouTube link during most of the rehearsals. He said both the YouTube test stream and the Stretch stream resulted in some delays, but Stretch needed to be refreshed more often for some users.
Henry said he also found issues with audio and video falling out of sync on the Stretch stream.
“I would step out into the lobby and watch Stretch on my phone. What I noticed is there was the video would sometimes freeze but the audio would not. Then, eventually the video would snap back to where it was,” Henry said.
Jackson West, acting junior, said he watched the performance from his dorm room with difficulty. He said he wished Stretch was easier to navigate and froze less frequently.
“I had to sit next to my computer on the floor while it was attached to my TV and hit pause-play to get it to continue going on,” West said.
West said he struggled with Wi-Fi in his Cokesbury Court Apartment, but when he bought an ethernet cord to connect directly into the wall, his streaming experience improved.
“It was kind of stinky because live theater doesn’t have any pause-play issues usually, but I understand that this is something that just comes with it,” West said.
Dr. Keith Hendricks, technology coordinator for the Wanda L. Bass School of Music, said Stretch is a system already implemented in the School of Music which was expanded for plays, musicals and operas operating differently due to COVID-19 regulations.
Hendricks said the “Woe is Me” streaming issue had a retrospectively simple solution that took a few days of troubleshooting to solve.
“The issue is we have cameras shooting at 30 frames per second. We had our streaming software at 60 frames per second. Those two things battling each other either caused a backlog of information that just caused it to constantly freeze or caused one of the components to not talk nice to the next one,” Hendricks said.
He said resolving the frame rate issue fixed many of the buffering problems on various devices. Hendricks said the stream could have been even less reliable if not for the support of campus tech.
“Honestly, campus tech had helped a lot, getting us hardwired into those spaces and making sure that we were not depending on just the Wi-Fi,” Hendricks said.
Hendricks said future projects include further collaboration with directors to make as many creative camera choices as possible within the limitations.
“We’re letting the directors come up with a dream wish list of what could happen and what they’d like to see happen, and then we have a sit down of what our capabilities are and what could work,” Hendricks said.
He said one of the main challenges now is finding the personnel to operate the equipment during a show week.
“If you add one camera, that means another person has to be there for all the dress rehearsals and all the shows. In the opera, since you need subtitles on the screen, that’s an entire other person we need in that process,” Hendricks said.
Hendricks said he hope students have a good experience with all streamed productions going forward. He said Stretch is the main system now for all on-campus streaming, but two additional services, BookTix and ShowTix4U, are also being used for ticketed productions.
“This is how we’re getting all this hard work and contact out to family, friends, patrons and loved ones. We want that to be a good experience and easy experience for all of them,” Hendricks said.
Hal Kohlman, adjunct theatre professor, said he heard from many people who could not get through the show without pausing and playing consistently, as well as at least one professor who did not have any problems at all. He said he told Hendricks about many of the streaming issues he heard about from faculty and students after the show.
He said Hendricks was given the responsibility of moving the entire performance season online with very little time. Kohlman said Hendricks put a system together which far exceeded his expectations.
“We had two cameras; we had titles that were brought in. You know, they ran the sort of commercials for the different departments in the School of Theatre. They did a lot of stuff,” Kohlman said.
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