Causeway u3a (Northern Ireland)
Causeway u3a
Pioneered by me, Brendan Mullan, Causeway u3a held their first face-to-face monthly meeting since the start of lockdown. It wasn't a full hybrid meeting, but I took the opportunity to test how it would work as a hybrid meeting, connecting cameras, audio etc. and recording the result via Zoom to assess later.
First the audio side. One of our members is very experienced with audio equipment and had previously (pre-covid) organized the purchase and configuration of a wireless speaker system for our monthly meetings. It uses an Alto Stealth Wireless system to connect to active speakers. Wireless mics connect to an amp which in turn is connected to a Stealth transmitter. This transmitter broadcasts wirelessly to the receivers attached to each speaker – no trailing cables over which members might trip. He advised that I buy an Alto Stealth expansion kit (£170) composed of 2 additional receivers one of which I should use to capture the audio signal. I did a bit of online research to find how I should connect this to my computer and determined that a USB Audio interface (£40) can take XLR input from the Stealth and output on a USB connection.
In Fig 1 you can see the Alto Stealth receiver, at top, connected to an M-Audio USB interface via an XLR cable. The M-Audio is in turn outputting audio to my laptop via a USB cable, here connected to a 4 port USB hub. A pair of earphones allow me to monitor the audio coming from the Alto through the USB interface.
For video I used 2 cameras for this meeting. I own a Panasonic FZ1000 bridge camera which has a high-quality lens. It outputs via HDMI. I had previously purchased a USB video capture dongle from eBay costing £20. It accepts HDMI input and outputs through its USB connection. It then appears as a USB device in Zoom’s list of cameras. This camera allows me to zoom in on the speaker. In Fig 2 is a photo of that setup – the chairs placed are to prevent people tripping over the HDMI cable connecting the camera to my laptop.
The second camera was a Samsung Galaxy S9, my brother’s discarded phone with a cracked screen but the camera works fine. I mounted it on a tripod placed at the side of the stage focused on the audience. To avoid feedback I disabled the phone’s microphone and speaker. Then connected, on it, as a Zoom participant to the Zoom session I was running on my laptop. I used the venue’s free WiFi which performed faultlessly throughout the meeting but I was prepared to use my phone’s WiFi hotspot if necessary
I had planned to have another spare Galaxy phone on a tripod pointed at the screen on which our speaker had his PowerPoint presentation. However, because I had a copy of his presentation on my laptop, I ran it there as a Screen Share in Zoom and moved slides manually in synch with him.
I had not advertised the Zoom meeting to our members as I couldn’t be confident that it would work as planned. I recorded the meeting using Zoom’s record feature and I was pleased enough with the result that I published it, with the speaker’s permission, on our YouTube channel: Causeway u3a meeting AshesToGold
For our meeting next month I plan to advertise the Zoom meeting link to our members. I do not intend to input Zoom audio to the meeting audio system so if Zoom participants want to communicate, say in a Q&A, I’ll ask them to use Zoom Chat and I’ll relay their questions.
Mistakes.
The Galaxy S9 phone camera was in 4:3 mode rather than 16:9 so I missed some of the audience.
When I setup my Panasonic camera in advance of the meeting I had temporarily set focus on the projector screen behind the lectern, but I forgot to go back to this, so the speaker is slightly out of focus.
Also, if I’d focused on someone standing at the lectern, I would have had better exposure of the speaker’s face – it’s a bit dark in my recording.
When setting up I discovered that the USB cable connecting my camera to my laptop was way too short – luckily, we have a Currys nearby where I was able to buy a 5-metre, quality HDMI cable.
Fig 3 shows most of the setup: