Executive Producer Suzanne Blais has lived and worked in Bellingham, Washington for 22 years, the last 17 as the owner/Executive Producer at Black Dog Productions. During that time she has worked to create a unique mix of entertainment and education for a wide variety of commercial businesses, municipalities and not-for-profit organizations, helping to personalize and update their messaging and media content for TV, cable and web.

Black Dog production recently had the opportunity to use the Roland VR-5 to produce and web stream a special speaking engagement from the Governor of the State of Washington Christine Gregoire at the Bellingham City Club, a local service organization.

The System
To produce this event Black Dog Productions used three matching JVC GY-DV500 SD cameras, a small analog mixing board from the hotel ballroom, then mixed the audio from the room and sent a broadcast mix to the VR-5. In addition to the audio feed from the board they placed shotgun mics near the Governor and setup up two room mics to pickup ambient audio and audience questions. USTREAM was the streaming service for this live web broadcast and Blais setup a dedicate Internet line at the hotel to ensure reliability. Blais also mentioned that she is very particular about her live productions and always put back-up systems in place in case there are technical issues.  The live production was recorded to the VR-5’s built-in SD recorder as well as DV tapes in each one of the cameras.

Fortunately these backup systems were in place because there was a low master volume output setting in USTREAM that caused no audio to be heard during the first 5 minutes of the production. This was discovered early on and was quickly resolved for the duration of the hour-long broadcast. Because this production was recorded to the VR-5’s built-in recorder the full production with the correct audio levels were posted to the USTREAM channel post event allowing customers watching it on demand to hear the audio levels correctly.

Application
“We knew going in that it was going to be a packed house because all of the tickets were sold and they didn’t have seats for all of the people who wanted to attend”, commented Blais.  Bellingham City Club the event sponsor stopped promoting it because they didn’t want to turn people away at the door.  They wanted to provide a way for City Club Members to experience the event knowing that there were not enough seats to accommodate all, so the live web stream was setup and produced through Black Dog Productions.

Blais knew that the VR-5 was the perfect solution for this type of event.  Blais explains, “ We have been trying to do more live to Internet production. In the past live to Internet production has been a circus because of all of the gear that you have to travel with, and all of the time it takes to setup.” Black Dog Productions knows from experience that you are only as strong as your weakest technical link and at any one time any of those pieces of equipment could fail. “You can’t pause the event to go and fix or find the problem,” says Blais. “The idea of replacing a whole table of equipment with one elegant little unit (VR-5) is really attractive.”

Blais loves this new piece of equipment and comments, “The VR-5 is very intuitive. On this production I was working with seven student interns and it was very easy for them to pick-up and learn.  You can tell that the VR-5 was designed to be easy-to-use.”  “The keying functions were very nice as well.”  Blais highly recommends the VR-5 and states, “For people and organizations interested in doing live to Internet productions, the VR-5 is the most elegant solution that I have come across.”

System Integration