Tips for streaming Zoom / Facebook?

Community DIY Corner
1

I’m looking for feedback and ideas from other enterprise admins who have dealt with taking a big corporate machine that’s done things one-way, in person for decades and decades, and is now diving head first into doing things online.

The public organization I support is diving head first into streaming meetings, and interacting with the public virtually rather than in person. US federal and state Open Meetings Act applies to our meetings, so that makes things a bit more interesting.

We’re signing up with ZOOM.us, and also have created a Facebook community page.

My plan is to ask those wanting to make public comment to connect to the Zoom meeting before it starts and using the “waiting room” feature of Zoom. When the public comment time slot comes up, I can move each participant waiting one at a time into the main meeting for them to speak their peace, and then disconnect them when they’re done.

The Facebook live stream is going to be view only, with comments disabled.

For equipment I have a HP mini with 16gb, i7-9700, a 1080p camcorder, a Zoom microphone, an Elgato HD60 capture card and a StreamDeck Mini. This will likely be setup in a meeting room for the Chairman and clerk to use, with everyone else being remote.

2

Why not just use a Webcam?

Like, a c922 would be waaay more affordable.

But yeah, this whole solution seems solid to me, if you’re getting under 20 people who want to join…

Otherwise, you might want to contact zoom support about their options.

3

The webcams I played with all seemed to have a limited focal length. For our first meeting, I used a Microsoft Studio Pro webcam (it has actual optical auto focus), and it worked but wasn’t ideal.

I’m not so concerned about the technical aspects of the video capture. More unknown is the streaming side of things, the cat-wrangling of the online experience, using Zoom itself, etc.

4

Ah, okay. I guess if you have specific needs, a full-fledged camera isn’t a bad solution.

Yeah, so to my knowledge, you have a few options.

You can use two meetings; one for the private part, one for the public part.

You can use one meeting and use the waiting-room feature and drag people in manually.

You can expose the password publicly at the right time.

Again, if I were you, I’d contact Zoom support and they can probably give the best insight.