or: It’s complicated until you make it simple
We’re smart people – we’ve been making collaboration software for the better part of a decade now. We live to connect people & information, no matter where in the world they are.
We’ve been having a problem that’s got us all scratching our heads. We want to have a (gasp) meeting, to present some ideas that we’ve all been working on. We’ll need to screen share, and talk to each other, and listen. All in real time. We’re scattered from Vancouver to Thailand.
We can’t figure it out. It’s the audio part that has us beat. And by ‘us’ I mean the people in the Chicago office. We can screen share, and one person can talk. But we have this great theater, full of people who can’t keep their mouths shut.
Our A/V Club reports our audio set up won’t support aggregate input devices, meaning another microphone. Our non-Chicago folks can hear the speaker, but not the audience comments. The result is pathos & fury, heads hung in failure, the stench and shame of defeat.
Here’s what we’ve tried:
- Campfire conference calls. They’re great if all you want to do is talk, which often we do. But if we need to screen share, we need something else.
- Speaker phone & screenshare via IM. Works great if there’s only one remote person. We need more people involved.
- Google Hangouts. Yup, we investigated it. Great service, but it’s limited to 10 people, unless you want a public hangout, which we don’t. (Sorry, it’s not personal)
- GoToMeeting & WebX & Join.me. GoToMeeting works great for our Basecamp classes. They’re all great if we have one speaker.
- AdobeConnect. We need an “Enterprise Specialist” to help us connect. What does that even mean?
- Meet-ups. A few times a year, everyone hitches up their wagons & moseys to Chicago to interact in person. Having everyone in one room works flawlessly, but it’s not always practical.
SvN readers, we want to pick your juicy brains. How do you do this? We’re certain this is a solved problem. We’re appealing to your benevolence & mercy.
Let’s hear it.
Gil Lopez
on 10 Jul 12Telepresence from CISCO.
Matthew Riley MacPherson (tofumatt)
on 10 Jul 12At Mozilla we use Vidyo conferencing, but I have no idea what kind of weird licenses/setup/etc. is needed to get it going. It seems like a very BS enterprise-y solution, but at the end of the day works pretty damn well for us for our voice/video/screen-sharing needs. I used it while I was in Bangkok to connect with people from San Francisco to Chicago to London.
Nathan
on 10 Jul 12BlueJeans Network.
Thijs van der Vossen
on 10 Jul 12Maybe I don’t understand the problem correctly but if you want to need audio only with lots of participants you want to use what the gamers use: http://mumble.sourceforge.net/
Donald Wheeler
on 10 Jul 12A company for which I used to work produced software that should do this – try Blackboard. It’s made for classrooms but should fulfill your requirements if not in a totally sexy fashion. You’ll probably want the Blackboard Collaborate software/service
Mykel
on 10 Jul 12We use Yuuguu for doing webinars. One speaker, unlimited attendees. They even provide a conference line with international call-in numbers for everyone.
We’ve been using them for 3 years now without issue.
Stephen
on 10 Jul 12Kludge the room full of people by using microphones that go to a speaker that is next to the actual conferenced phone’s receiver.
Sri
on 10 Jul 12We faced all your problems and recently switched to meetingburner which tends to quite well for screensharing where you can flip the presenter around… We use skype or a dial-in (provided by meetingburner or freeconferencecallhd) for audio.
seth godin
on 10 Jul 12The hack I like is to realize that all participants own a cell phone.
So use the computers for what they’re good at, and have everyone who wants to talk use their phone, with any conf. call service you like.
Thijs van der Vossen
on 10 Jul 12And if you want to capture audience comments you should go talk to people who do audio for churches and large evangelical gathering with a lot of participation from the congregation.
Ryan
on 10 Jul 12To clarify … we can video conference fine in small rooms. The problem is doing it in a theater.
We can’t figure out how to include remote folks when we have group discussions in our theater at the office.
It would be awesome to hear if anybody has solved this problem.
Peter
on 10 Jul 12take a look at vidyo.
From the meeting room control you can easily mute/unmute participants (if this was the issue).
It can do Screen Sharing and it has clients for PC, Mac, iOS.
I used their VidyoRoom100s in a 3 inputs + guests setup. The experience was quite enjoyable.
We used a “trial” portal and thus we bypassed the infrastructure costs (which were quite high from what I remember).
Brian Dear
on 10 Jul 12Scratch your own damned itch and build a solution. I’m sure yours will be great and I’d pay to use it.
justin b.
on 10 Jul 12just feed the various microphones (speaker, audience, etc.) into a mixer (the physical analog kind), adjust the levels, and then feed the mixer into your computer audio input.
am i missing something?
Josh K
on 10 Jul 12I’m slightly confused by the statement of the problem…but it sounds like what you’re wanting is a speaker microphone and an audience microphone being send at the same time, but for whatever reasons are having issues with that. I would run both the speaker/presenter mic and the audience mic into a small mixer, and then the output of the mixer into the computer.
Michael
on 10 Jul 12Javascript Screen share + audio capture (optionally synced with conference call) built into campfire chatroom. New premium feature.
Michael
on 10 Jul 12The large corp I work for uses AT&T Connect. We are spread among many locations in a 4-state (US) footprint; I do not know how well it would work for int’l, and it may be bundled with some of the other multi-million-$$$ telecom services we utilize from AT&T. We use it as a screen-share + conference bridge with Polycom speakerphones in meeting rooms and individuals on whatever phone they use; I don’t know if it supports VoIP or not, it isn’t a feature I use. Yes, the site is very corporate-y and you may need an “Enterprise Specialist” for this service also. $.02
http://www.business.att.com/enterprise/Family/unified-communications/business-collaboration-services/
Brent
on 10 Jul 12Use more than one thing. Mumble/Ventrilo for the audio (imo, easy to set up and adjust for differing audio input levels) and screensharing through iChat. There’s probably a little fiddling to do to make sure the iChat audio doesn’t ruin the Mumble audio, but that’s the fun part. :-)
Point being, there may not be a single solution that knocks it out of the park. But using two things that do their tricks well might work well.
Swami Atma
on 10 Jul 12From the beginning of this article I had the feeling it was a way to introduce a new service. I might have been wrong.
Tyler
on 10 Jul 12you need a proper conference room speakerphone system with echo-cancelization and beam forming, like this: http://www.lifesize.com/Products/Audio/LifeSize_Phone_2ndGen.aspx
Peter
on 10 Jul 12The theater issue is solved by having the source computer plugged into the room mixer.
It is a very sensitive issue due to echoing, especially that nasty delayed echoing that is very hard to solve.
In past events, the sound technician helped by selectively reducing the level of either the output or the input. This was done live.
Dusty
on 10 Jul 12A graduate program that I finished recently offered the option of attending the program remotely. About 1/3 of the 40 participants would join each week remotely from their homes or offices. The courses took place in a large teaching theater setup, which is similar to the theater you describe. There were two projectors, one was attached to the presenter’s laptop, the other showed the online participants “Brady Bunch” style. Each participant, online or in person, could speak at anytime. Each remote participant could see what was being presented, or the participants in the room. The room had ceiling mics and 3 pan-tilt cameras in the corners. The software was manufactured by Cisco and was called Movi, it looks like it has been renamed to Cisco Jabber Video for TelePresence
krusty
on 10 Jul 12We use mikogo for screen and skype for voice, if you want multiple audio voices in one place, you need some kind of audio mixer, no way around that.
Daniel
on 10 Jul 12Sorry that I’m not adding to the discussion, but please don’t forget to post whatever solution you come up with!
Shane
on 10 Jul 12For the infrequent meetings you have, I would suggest plane tickets, maybe even Business Class! It would probably be cheaper than an Enterprisey teleconference solution.
ChrisArchitect
on 10 Jul 12On a tip from a Mozillian a long time ago, Big Blue Button impressed me for scalability and all the screensharing/presentation features.
http://www.bigbluebutton.org/ WebFWD participant etc too
Not totally clear how the multiple audio /overlap thing would pan out tho, but there is individual muting etc
Ann
on 10 Jul 12Don’t worry Daniel, we’ll be happy to share! I actually want to live-tweet the discussions we’re having.
Tin cans & string, index cards & Sharpies.
13 new microphones set up in the theater.
Boom mics & green screens
We’re prepared to engineer the shit out of this.
Karl
on 10 Jul 12We handle this with normal conference software (e.g. WebEx, GoToMeeting) on two large screens in front of the room and omni-directional microphones/speakers scattered through the theater/conference room. One screen handles the screen sharing, the other the video feeds of the remote users. Audio works fine, though we often have to remind people to mute themselves when not speaking (too much background noise).
gary
on 10 Jul 12Polycom? Big companies do this all the time….it’s interesting that you’re so perplexed on this one…
audiohead
on 10 Jul 12quick win here: audio conference only, if it’s a meeting no need to be bidirectional. I’ve used presentta.com and it worked nice having a chat for questions and a voice channel – simple setup – to communicate. there are people using freeswitch and mp3.js/aac.js to enable browser audio decoding too.
Marc Grabanski
on 10 Jul 12We’ve been using https://join.me/ for the screen sharing portion (one person shares to the rest) and then we just use a group audio / chat on Skype. That setup has been working great for us.
Adam Sentz
on 10 Jul 12I’d use a bunch of Mac Minis running Skype for the remotes – the outputs of which would feed into your main board along with your mics there in the main room (podium, lavs, a few wireless handhelds to place around the room that people can pass around, etc.).
You’ll want a board (or boards) that can handle a main mix for the room, and a second mix to send to each of the Minis for your remotes. Video routing would be a good idea as well so you can put your remotes up on your screens as desired.
This is roughly how a podcasting network like 5by5 or TWiT handles this sort of thing, and it should be no big deal
Adam Sentz
on 10 Jul 12...for any decent a/v engineer.
Fred Dixon
on 10 Jul 12Want an open source solution?
I’m one of the developers of BigBlueButton, an open source web conferencing system for distance education.
It does real-time sharing of webcams, desktops, slides, chat, and audio. We use FreeSWITCH for voice conferencing, so you can have dial-in numbers through the public service telephone network.
We use BigBlueButton itself within our project to coordinate development within our community. You can download and setup your own server from this link: http://bigbluebutton.org/.
You’ll have your own server running in < 30 minutes.
To handle it in the theater, you would have the audio piped over the speakers. Remote users can mute/unmute themselves. In the theater, if you have a person who is acting as proxy for relaying the questions, that would simplify the scenario.
Regards,... Fred
Kyle G
on 10 Jul 12I had this exact problem when I helped organized conferences a few years ago. We used GoToWebinar. The video was no problem, it was the audio that gave us trouble. For that you should try a splitter like this. Plug the male end into your computer audio input. Take your two mics and plug them into the female ends of the splitter. You may need some kind of converter to turn the 1/4” mic jacks into 1/8” jacks that will fit into the splitter. Your mileage may vary, but this worked for me.
EH
on 10 Jul 12I’m anxious to see if the crappy company (who shall remain nameless) I worked with a year ago pops up in this thread. That said, doesn’t Justin.tv have a multi-video service?
Anthony P
on 10 Jul 12I found this new startup and I love the free version. It sounds like their pay version may have something you need: http://vsee.com/
AdamA
on 10 Jul 12Outfit your rooms with BSS hardware. The acoustic echo cancellation is what you need. Then run it through any of the providers mentioned above. http://www.bssaudio.com/conferencing.php
Mad Hemingway
on 10 Jul 12Simple solution.
It’s called a bottle of Guinness Draught. Found at something call a “bar”. Drank at something called a “table” across from “people”.
Works pretty well, better as time and beers go on.
Josh K
on 10 Jul 12Kyle- You’d want to be careful with combining two microphones with a splitter as microphones really aren’t made to work that way, and the purpose of a splitter is to split out audio to different inputs as opposed to combining two different audio sources. While it can work in some situations…it’s not the best possible solution.
Woodbine
on 10 Jul 12Depending on how much you want to engineer the solution, you can set up the theatre with a full conferencing solution that gives every seat a microphone. This saves the two mics problem where everyone has to wait whilst the microphone is carried to the person who wants to speak. These systems can be set up to allow multiple speakers at once or to allow just one speaker at a time. You can even have a central command desk that overrides microphones and turn them on and off.
All the sound from the theatre can be patched into a vidyo or webex conference as a single caller. You’ll need some good moderation and the remote attendees might like to see a video feed of the theatre, but it seems to me that the issue is gathering (and moderating) a good audio experience in the theatre, the rest can be done with basic video conferencing software.
Here’s a good supplier http://north-america.beyerdynamic.com/shop/ct/conference-technology/product-line.html
Steve S
on 10 Jul 12We had a similar problem at my company. We are an audio and video conferencing provider so we don’t use the minutes included with our subscription. Instead, using the APIs available for our service we created a plugin for our hubot (http://hubot.github.com/) to start a conference and give everyone a join link for screen sharing.
If we need to start a meeting the person who wants to be leading says “hubot create meeting” and everyone who wants wants to join the meeting says “hubot join me”. Assuming they have said “hubot remember me cell 312-867-5309” it will dial them automatically and give them a link to join the meeting. When everyone is done “hubot close meeting” and its all wrapped up. We have been discussing plans to make the workflow smoother. In our conferencing rooms we have a conferencing phone with multiple mics around the table so everyone can in the room can be heard and can hear otherwise we all get dialed on our own phone.
Matt B
on 10 Jul 12I think justin b has the correct solution above. The problem doesn’t seem to be the software used, but rather the unique audio setup you desire – mic’ing both the speaker at the podium and the audience sitting in the theatre seats.
Mark Gibson
on 10 Jul 12Hi Guys, I do this for a living and I can tell you, unfortunately you’ve hit the limit of the technology. The University I work for has multiple remote Campuses that we V/C to every day. It all works fine, including large theatre’s of people, but only while there is a single person presenting and everyone else is listening. The minute you try to involve that large theatre full of people, it all falls down for the reasons you’ve discovered. As some of the folks above have pointed out there are various echo cancelling units available but to work they rely on very controlled environments. I wish I had an answer for you as it’s a facility we need too but… unfortunately physics kicks in at some point!
Jason Watts
on 10 Jul 12What Justin B said. Your A/V club should have thought of that by now
Ted Pearlman
on 10 Jul 12Hi Ann and Ryan,
The key to solving this problem is talking to someone who truly knows this domain up and down (not to disparage the generous suggestions of the audience here assembled). Give me a ping at 303-325-2607 so I can drill down a bit further and I’ll find you the person you need to talk to – gratis. Once you see my site (http://whodknow.com), you’ll get it. :)
Cheers.
Mike Groble
on 10 Jul 12We’ve got microphones distributed on the ceilings. Like Justin B says, you should be able to figure out how to make multiple mics work. The problem, like in any large conference rooms with multiple satellite mics, is that people talk on top of each other or have multiple conversations going at once. Live control of the mix might help (as well as discipline from the theatre participants).
Wilson Bilkovich
on 10 Jul 12Anthony already mentioned it, but VSee is pretty damn decent: http://vsee.com/
Joe Dev
on 10 Jul 12You need a microphone placed at each seat. Each mike connected to the room’s sound system. Remote participants also feed into the room’s sound system in such a way that the sound system treats remote input just like a mike in the room. While not an easy task, making multiple mikes work is not a novel problem for sound engineers.
Wilson Bilkovich
on 10 Jul 12Proper mic installation is the fix though, yeah. Having an audio engineer come check out your facility is a good first step, and there’s a lot to be learned from ‘distance learning’ installations that you find at various colleges. They’ve been solving similar problems for years.
ChristianL
on 10 Jul 12We have teams in LA, Stockholm and Romania and are using Skype as only communication software. It works great. Someone needs to have their paid account to be able to screen share or send video when we are in group chat. It also works good from mobile which is great when trying to squeeze the meetings on he global timezone schedule..
Christopher
on 10 Jul 12I believe we have accomplished in our office what you are looking for. We are about to do an upgrade (we have been using the current system for over 4 years) so I just happen to know the setup we have now and what we are moving to. Great timing for your post.
We can currently share a screen to internal monitors and external participants. We have in room audio (mics and speakers) that allow for in-room amplification and audio to and from external participants that can be over the phone or skype. I would be happy to show what we use and discuss how it may work in your setting.
BTW, this is purely educational, I do not sell or implement these systems outside of the office I work for.
Please contact me at the email given if you would like to arrange something.
bob
on 11 Jul 12is the issue simply you don’t have a two way microphone in the conference room? A single path microphone will cut audio to the speakers if the local microphone is picking up audio. A two way microphone will filter this for you.
Jake Wegner
on 11 Jul 12I concur with the “add more room mics, echo canceling and small mixer” camp. I worked for a company that paid for a professional consult/installation, and it made a big difference for the meetings they held in their 250 person auditorium.
Expect to spend several thousand dollars, but when you’re done, you’ve got a system that is not locked into a software platform.
Faisal
on 11 Jul 12We gave up on screen sharing. For voice we use Rondee, which exports an iCal feed and basically just works. Costs normal phone rates (to San Diego, IIRC) for the person dialing in, but that’s what expense reports are for.
Tom Allen
on 11 Jul 12How much is a solution worth to you? At a first pass guess, a ceiling mounted microphone array to localise a sound source (the person speaking) then a rotatable turret with a highly directional microphone (to get high quality audio of the speaker) could be engineered for a few thousand dollars of parts and a few man-months of time. That said, there may well be a far cheaper and hackier solution that hasn’t occurred to me.
Travis
on 11 Jul 12If everyone has a smartphone, you could have each person in the theater join with with the mobile client app. The GoToMeeting iOS app is okay, for example, and I think the webex one is as well. They may be able to set their phone down and talk like it was a speaker phone, or dangle an earbud w/inline mic out of one ear to isolate background noise and prevent a cascading echo. That also allows a moderator to mute individuals who chew loudly or snore, depending, while allowing full participation.
For that matter, each person could just dial in on their phone individually and use the inline mic sort of as a clip-on stage mic.
Phil
on 11 Jul 12Ryan. “We can’t figure out how to include remote folks when we have group discussions in our theater at the office.”
From a video production aspect, that is difficult. You actually might need a sound operator – a guy with a shotgun mic on a boompole to follow the talkers. Or depending on the size of your theatre, setup multiple omnidirectional mics that will sufficiently cover the area (kind of like mic’ing up a drumkit), plug them all into a mixing unit and feed that one channel into your conference call. You might get feedback issues but you need to talk to a soundie.
EricTimmer
on 11 Jul 12I think a “Mix minus” setup on the mixer will take care of the audio issue. Most podcasters use this to deal with remote hosts.
Alex Nucci
on 11 Jul 12I would recommend UberConference for audio. They don’t do video, at least not yet. The guys won Techcrunch Disrupt.
http://www.uberconference.com/
Anonymous Coward
on 11 Jul 12Use Polycom speaker phone for the theater.
Steve Roy
on 11 Jul 12Blackboard Collaborate is an app that I had a hand in developing. Like you, our team is spread out across many time zones and we use the app daily to conduct meetings and collaborations. Works swell for a few people or even hundreds.
Regarding the audio, the hard part is your theater and the problem is not the software but the hardware.
You need a conferencing audio system that is able to pick up the voice from the people sitting in the theater. That might mean microphones dispersed throughout and all connected to an audio conferencing pod that is itself connected to the web conferencing app.
Bill Kirst
on 11 Jul 12IBM’s Social Business SmartCloud Meetings Solutions. It just works!
Thomas
on 11 Jul 12We do internal video-conferencing for our firm using Sony gear. For the audio we use wireless microphones from RevoLabs. They have built-in echo cancellation so you don’t get massive feedback. We have a unit with 8 mic that we put around a boardroom table, but you could also scatter them around.
Not sure how they would work with a web-conferencing solution, but they work well for our purposes.
Alexis
on 11 Jul 12SmartCloud Meeting with confcall
Paul Thrasher
on 11 Jul 12http://meetings.io/ does all of the sharing parts. Video, audio, chat, file share, phone bridge, screen share, notes, all over flash in the browser with no client to download. And it’s free. And it doesn’t drop out all the time like Skype.
I don’t work for them, I just love the service.
Martin Westin
on 11 Jul 12You need hardware… Lots of it. For the audio you should get as many microphones you want and a suitably sized audio mixer. The resulting audio signal will be the single audio input to whichever communication system you use (Skype to Polycom).
We had this Kind of setup running n a 120 seat theater over a decade ago with both video and audio.
I highly suggest researching how Dan Benjamin does things at 5by5. His mixing problem was one step worse and for quality reasons requires individual Skype calls to each participant and separate audio mixes to each. I am simplifying here. Go read and listen to what he has shared about his setup. It sounds like a direction you may want to go. Not an exact clone but for some inspiration.
Stijn Mathysen
on 11 Jul 12Hi there,
we had the same problem with one of our customers. They wanted a video conference solution in which they were able to video-chat with schools, making sure that the children wouldn’t mess up the chat.
So we implemented TokBox in a custom web-app (that does some project management as well) http://www.tokbox.com/.
You can implement “push-to-talk” and other kind of features. It also has a gem to implement it into a rails app (that I maintain); https://rubygems.org/gems/opentok
Hope this helps!
Stijn
Nic
on 11 Jul 12Yes, the problem has been solved before, but you need to speak to the people who have solved it!
You need to mic up the theatre properly before you are going to get anywhere. There are two options: (1) the team sits around a boardroom desk with a single omnidirectional mic, or (2) you sit theatre style and use specialised conference equipment.
Does everyone in the theatre share video/screen, or is there just one video feed from the whole theatre? Assuming just a single feed for the theatre, you could feed the Skype/whatever VC feed into the conference system.
Here are some ideas:
Shure SCM810 8-channel automatic mic mixer.
Shure DFR22 Digital feed back reducer (if you intend amplifying voice in the theatre)
Enough boundary mics like this or this.
You also get complete all-in-one digital signal processing units, e.g. a Biamp Audia programmable DSP, or their dedicated Voip DSP (but that may need a matching unit on the other side which is no good.)
As has been said throughout this thread, you need find a local professional A/V company and ask them to help. Find someone that does churches, schools, government conference facilities (think UN, city council, parliamentary rooms, etc), and so on. You can’t solve every problem with software. You can’t solve every problem for free.
Sen
on 11 Jul 12I don’t remember the name of the provider anymore but this company that I used to work at, we had daily morning meetings with our representatives spread out across Japan.
The solution was more human than technical. We already had a simple v/c solution available but the mic wasn’t really suitable for more than 5 folks sitting round a small table. So what we did was split people up into groups of 5 each at one station.
I believe I may have read something similar in the Getting Real boko? If you don’t have a direct solution, look for something that splits the problem into smaller ones.
Javier
on 11 Jul 12Allan, please find a solution for this.
Joe
on 11 Jul 12WebEx all the way… get the version that calls you back. Remote participants can get in via iPhone and iPad. Video works great.
Sam Parsons
on 11 Jul 12Here’s a possible solution. Use WebEx / GoToMeeting (or any other similar product). We’ll assume the problem you want to solve is audio, not video. Setup:
Everyone around the room and around the world is individually logged into GoToMeeting and can see the screen share and is using their computer to call in. Turn down the speakers at each individual laptop in the theatre to reduce feedback, but leave the microphone’s on. Use the output audio from the hosts machine to power the sound system in the theatre.
This way, everyone in the theatre and abroad is individually mic’d.
Screensharing could still be based around with GoToMeeting.
I also liked the suggestion of using the open source stuff that gamers are using to all talk simultaneously. By mic’ing everyone individually, even in a room with the audio being amplified through the sound system, you should be able to avoid feedback. And you can always introduce a feedback eliminator product in your sound system to remove that in the room.
Gene Smith
on 11 Jul 12We tried most of those solutions and ended up just using Lync for our audio/vid conferencing solution. In our conference rooms, we use the ClearOne Chat 170 microphone/speakers. Works great.
GregT
on 11 Jul 12There’s actually hardly any people between Vancouver and Thailand. Unless you have a bunch in the Philippines, a couple of cell phones would probably do the trick.
carlivar
on 11 Jul 12I will second BigBlueButton. Out of the box it’s a bit education-focused, but reading the API, I’m quite tempted to build a Rails wrapper for it. I think there’s already a ruby gem API client.
Seriously, check it out. If 37signals members were to contribute to the project, all the better.
Adam
on 11 Jul 12Might not 100% solve the issue but is pretty simple to implement. The Cisco 7937G can take 2 microphone extension kits that (according to Cisco?!) will cover an area of 30 by 40 feet. Also you can then connect a wireless lapel mic via the 3/32” input, although cisco don’t sell one – apparently the polycom wireless lapel mic will work. That should cover the speaker and then pick up any of the audience members as well. Not too sure if you could mute the wired mics separately from the lapel though.
Am sure polycom will sell an equivalent model that can do the same, but my employer is a Cisco shop so know that kit better.
Scott
on 11 Jul 12How about something like www.shindig.com
Adam
on 11 Jul 12Should have also mentioned that you can then use this to dial into any conference/screen sharing service you like and the remote parties do the same. We use MS Livemeeting at work but it sucks hard, but there are huge numbers of options as the other commenters have highlighted. You cold always roll your own conference service using something like Twilio.
Hossen
on 11 Jul 12We use vlc through streaming feature. You can stream files, webcam, audio, screen … Distadvantage is you nedd a public ip or vpn and a little handy configuration.
Rahul
on 11 Jul 12Sounds like a great project for someone to build a solution for during the month they have to do whatever they want. Wait a second… ;-)
GeeIWonder
on 11 Jul 12You have a guitar player in your midst. I’ve seen his stool. Get a 4-track (USB if you prefer) and be done with it.
Michael
on 11 Jul 12You’ve seen his stool, eh.
Geoff
on 12 Jul 12Everyone talking at the same time doesn’t work in AV conferencing any more than it does in large group face-to-face meetings. A moderator in the large group location is very helpful to direct traffic. The suggestions above on good mic setups for the theatre and a decent mixer (Mackie, Allen & Heath, et al) is key to group the audio streams into a simple stereo mix. Highly recommend some realtime audio processing like a noise gate to reduce paper shuffling (some can be setup frequency specific if there’s an annoying sound/buzz within a given range), some audio compression to reduce the loud peaks and raise up the quieter people – evens out the sound levels, perhaps a bit of EQ to tune the room sound a bit. Makes a massive difference, but won’t change people stepping on top of each other… good luck!
steve
on 12 Jul 12Keep it simple. Agree with Seth
Marius
on 12 Jul 12http://www.meetings.io, previously mentioned here, is the example of simplicity and effectiveness. I dropped Skype for my team meetings and have been using meetings.io for the past months. Nothing to complain about!
Jonas Byström
on 12 Jul 12Actually, to my surprise, Micosoft’s Live Meeting does a really good job at this. It’s definitely worth considering, and now they even have “Microsoft Lync for Mac”, which I suspect only requires a Live Meeting server to function.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office_Live_Meeting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Lync http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/olmcjm/thread/77743d49-f57d-478f-965a-28b2260c50cd/
Danny
on 12 Jul 12You’ll want some ceiling mics linked to a mixer that pushes one audio stream to the other participants.
You’ll also want to use a lot of sound absorbing foam/decorations to reduce echo. From the 2010 37signals office video that theater looked quite exposed.
As for our small team’s meeting we use a local installation of http://avconference.net with a media server from Adobe.
David Anderson
on 12 Jul 12Yamaha makes a line of microphone arrays that I’ve seen work surprisingly well in large conference rooms with ~20 people. I’m not sure these products would scale to your theater, but they might. These products are quite versatile—most have USB interfaces and can be used with your choice of software.
Anonymous Coward
on 12 Jul 12-1’
Dave B
on 12 Jul 12Add boundary microphones into the ceiling or throughout the room. Spend some money and run each into a gate/compressor and then aggregate the feds + other AV sources into a mixer and finally into the computer for transmittal.
But… Delay/Acoustic Echo, etc… make this a losing battle for the theatre folks. Save yourself the headache, get the people in the theatre headphones to hear the other end + a tiny feed of the room audio – and call it good. Bands use similar IEM and done right… it sounds natural.
Eric Thompson
on 12 Jul 12Eric from Adobe here; I noticed the comment about Adobe Connect, and thought you may want to know there’s both a free trial and an online purchase option. (And yes, there’s a way to talk to a human being / enterprise specialist as well :)
Here’s the direct link to trial/purchase online: https://service.acrobat.com/cfusion/bots/purchase/index.cfm
For your stated use case—real time screen sharing, VoIP and/or telephone, all integrated into one client, Adobe Connect is great for that (we use it for basically every meeting, all day long, for those reasons). You may also find a use for webcam sharing, note pods, whiteboards, chat, moderated Q&A, polling, file sharing, etc., all included as well.
If you have questions or need more details, ping me @EricT.
Derek
on 12 Jul 12Mic each seat and have a speaker that broadcasts directly into the single phone (or pc) you’re using for the call. Fairly low tech/simple to implement.
Brianna
on 13 Jul 12FuzeBox. Check out one of the several mentions we received today: http://dthin.gs/LiBGUY. Email me, I would love to give you a demonstration of our software. [email protected]
Steve Floyd
on 13 Jul 12Collaborative video conferencing with more than 15 people and the ability to screen share a selected user, or even screen share between two users at the same time with good audio would own. There isn’t anything that works really well now, at least that I have come across. You listed most of the better options available. They all come up a little short.
p249434876
on 13 Jul 12Mic each seat and have a speaker that broadcasts directly into the single phone (or pc) you’re using for the call. Fairly low tech/simple to implement.www.diesel-generatorset.com
Wes
on 13 Jul 12It sounds like the core of the problem is actually getting good audio from the room. Since sound is actually compression and rarefactions of air, the problem can’t simply be solved by adding more microphones to the room. Multiple microphones capturing the same sounds from different positions and even slightly delayed can cause phase cancellation. You’re effectively neutralizing the sound wave to some extent and therefore reducing the power or amplitude. I would pay more attention to the polar patterns and placement of the mics being used.
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Daniel
on 13 Jul 12I guess TreinaTOM would be helpfull.. TreinaTOM is a Brazilian FLEX+Rails E-learning App, but I think it will fit your needs…
www.treinatom.com.br
Cheers
H Rivers
on 13 Jul 12I’d suggest a look at Uberconference. They do audio conferencing only and are definitely looking to disrupt that very overlooked business:
http://www.uberconference.com/
I’ve used it for a few conferences and while it still has rough edges, it beats the pants off the competition. Some examples of their thinking: you can see who is presently speaking; they let anyone easily mute people; and also “put on earmuffs” so that they can’t hear part of a discussion.
What I really want to do is to have each person dialed in from a conference room wearing a headset so that I can hear them properly. It’s really the microphone in conference rooms that’s the problem. But that solution needs software support to really work. In the meantime, I would definitely try Uberconference.
Thorsten Claus
on 14 Jul 12I am an investor in http://www.bluejeans.net so I might be biased—but we are using it from tons of different mobile devices, with anything from Skype, Google talk, LifeSize, to a 250k Cisco Telepresence. Screen sharing works from Skype, LifeSize, Cisco etc natively, not sure about Google talk
Christian Huund
on 14 Jul 12Uberconference sounds interesting. Does it support screen sharing? Their video doesn’t suggest it does.
JC
on 15 Jul 12I don’t know why online meetings always seem to be such a pain in the backside to get up and running, but there you have it.
Pepe
on 15 Jul 12If I understand correctly, your problem is this:
This is common problem in AV conferencing and I’ve never seen a solution which uses only one microphone. I have always used dedicated microphone for speaker and additional mikes for audience. Depending on the size and shape of your “great theater” you can get by with omnidirectional desk mike, or you will need to use multiple ones to cover every person or group in the audince. I had good experience with Polycom and their “starfish” mikes as they do really good job with echo cancelation.
Since you are only doing this couple of times a year, maybe you could rent a professional conferencing system – there are some very nice wireless setups which you can just bring in, power on and start using (I had great experience with Bosch DCN Wireless).
Since I like talking about this stuff, here are some details how this is done for really high end meetings: You would be using some conferencing system (like Bosch or Braehler) at HQ location where every delegate will have its own microphone and headphone set. Headphones are important as they remove need for echo cancelation, and echo cancelation is never perfect. That system will be the source of “floor” audio and it will have input for remote parties. Remote and floor should not be the same signal since you will need to adjust compression and levels separately ann you don’t want remote it to be fed back to remote parties (this is called mix minus).
Hope I helped.
David Harris
on 16 Jul 12Get an external audio mixer board, get the appropriate microphones you need (wireless lavalier for presenters, wireless hand-held mics for the audience, or wired mics on mic stands), and have someone with experience handle the mixing for you… then feed the mix into the single audio input of your conference solution. You could have a professional audio firm provide this service and equipment.
You’ll probably can’t mic the entire audience in the theater with a few omnidirectional mics (although you could try). For feedback and echo cancellation, you’ll want to limit the number of open mics in your theater.
But if you have several floating hand-held mics, the audio mixer can un-mute only the mic being used, and someone that wants to speak can get the mic quickly if you have enough of them.
Marta Janis
on 16 Jul 12A single Crown or Radio Shack PZM microphone will hear everything in the room with one input device.
This discussion is closed.