Ways to Live Stream Your Wedding Ceremony From Easy To Professional.

With the current restrictions being 30 guests many couples are finding the answer to extra guests is by live-streaming their wedding to the internet via a platform such as YouTube or Facebook. I want to give you a broad overview of ways that you can stream your ceremony from the simple to the more complex professional broadcast quality solutions.

1. Simple - The quickest and easiest solution as you probably guessed is by using your phone to record and stream to Facebook or YouTube. A couple of tips if this is the option you’re going choose, is to use a tripod with mount and to position it at the front near the wedding couple so that you get a clearer sound. As long as you have a fast enough connection via 4g or WiFi your good to go. There are a few cons with this set up the first being Audio. you really are at the mercy of the quality of your phone's microphone, yes there are solutions to plug a microphone into your phone however this just adds to the complexity of the setup. The second con is the ability to monitor and control the stream. Whilst recording you really don’t have much control over what the camera and audio decide to do.

2. The second solution is to use the camera with built-in live streaming capabilities this way you’ll be able to use a smartphone to monitor and control the stream. It also gives you the ability to plug-in professional microphone for cleaner Audio. This option is often used by wedding videographers who add streaming as an option. Some affordable and practical Livestream ready cameras to consider are the Go Pro from the hero 7 onwards, the Zoom Q2 and the MeVo. A couple of quick tips is the plugin an external battery pack into the camera to make sure it lasts
throughout the ceremony and to have a quick look for the best settings of your camera if you’ve never used it before ( you will want to turn off any fisheye, stabilisation ).

3. The third and much more complex way to stream your wedding also delivers the very best quality. For this option, you will need a DSLR or mirrorless camera capable of sending a full HD 1080 HDMI signal, an HDMI cable, a laptop and capture card(such as camlink). You will also want to connect your laptop to either your phones Internet connection or a dedicated 4G dongle you could connect your laptop to the church, hotel or venues Wi-Fi if this is quick enough and you ask your guests to not connect at the same time. Lastly, you will need some software to make it all work there is free software such as OBS studio which lets you set your live stream up to any way you would want it to go. You can then plug professional audio directly into your camera and this will be carried through to your live stream through the HDMI cable and capture card.

4. Okay so now we will talk about our own multiple cameras live stream set up and with operated cameras and multiple microphones, this is the truly professional way to put your wedding out on the Internet for your other guests to see. It enables you to have professional audio, well frame shots and even the option of starting or ending your live stream with a custom video message or a photo slideshow  to give it a better experience for your online guests. In many ways it is a similar set up to option three however you will need to use a vision/ audio mixer and multiple cameras. The mixer will enable you to change camera angles set up the audio and to include external elements such as the slideshow or a video message. The professional solution also uses channel bonding when connecting to the Internet this is when two or more Internet signals are used together to create a more reliable connection because if one of the signals stops then the other signal can pick up the slack. We often connect to the Internet by the venues definite or Wi-Fi and also bond in a 4G or multiple 4G connections from different network providers. The best way for us to provide this streaming service for you is to have one person operating and filming the wedding ceremony as normal and another staff member in charge of setting up and monitoring the live stream. It is impossible for one operator to film and to monitor the live stream simultaneously., so to multicamera with one operator you would need to have static cameras.