A summer in Silicon Valley presented a studio build challenge which transformed the way I think about portability, quality, and more broadly, the future of remote contribution. Since 2020, I’ve regularly contributed as a panelist to a volunteer group of AV & tech professionals who answer questions together from all over the world.
The panelist’s feeds are remotely switched by a fully remote crew and the finished show streams live via YouTube as Office Hours Global (OHG). While my trip began to take shape, so too did the challenges I’d have to overcome if I wanted to broadcast throughout the summer.
Founder of Nerds Ltd and regular panelist on Office Hours Global.
Over the years, I have built many remote broadcast studios, but none with such an elaborate cocktail of prerequisites, portability hurdles, and output quality standards. I narrowed everything down to three constraints.
First, to travel as checked airline luggage, everything must fit in two Pelican Air 1615 cases, each under 50 lbs. Second, the sound & video must be as good as my permanent studio or this project would be over before it had begun. Third, my MacBook Pro couldn’t be a part of the build. I was in Silicon Valley to take meetings, attend conferences, and generally do things which required it to be uncoupled from the studio.
Equipment
Any claim about production has to be backed by the equipment that made it.
Video: Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K Pro with a Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II, routed through an ATEM Mini Extreme ISO.
Audio: Heil PR 40 into a Sound Devices MixPre-6 II, with NoiseAssist handling room noise in real time.
Monitoring: Shure PSM 300.
Lighting: Dual GVM LED panels.
IO: OWC Thunderbolt Go Dock. Uplink: long Ethernet run.
Platform: a paid Zoom account with the enhanced media add-on.
Control & Automation Triggers: Elgato Stream Deck.
For the fans of the nitty gritty, this is the full wiring diagram.
You’ll notice there are no displays on this list. They are one of the more fragile components a packed studio could include, and cheaper to buy than to fly. I’d planned to pick up a couple when I landed, but never needed to. The places I rented had more than I could ever use. The rig, as designed, ran with a single display. I lucked out and used three.
Travel setup
I expected to spend three months tolerating a travel setup. Instead, I forgot I wasn’t at home. Not only did the rig surpass my expectations, it did so by eliminating the countless little quick-fix gadgets that I’d spent years buying for the main studio. No single niche gadget contributed more than a whisper to the complexity of the studio.
Over the years, they’ve converged into an outright shout. The components, having performed perfectly all summer, now sit packed in its original pair of cases at Stanford awaiting our return flight.
Compared to my usual rig, the only tell that I was somewhere else was the blank white wall behind me. It’s true that a permanent studio has other, non-technical benefits. An in-frame space which can silently express your career, interests or achievements can’t fit in two Pelican cases. At home, my backdrop is full of old lenses colorfully lit and beautifully in bokeh: a proper wall of depreciation!
I used to believe a remote rig earned its portability by cutting corners. Nothing could be further from the truth. Optimization is how we improve with practice. The trick is noticing when an optimization has outlived the situation that produced it.
Once you can see a better way and leave things as they are, you’ve taken on technical debt. At best, this technical debt costs a project its elegance, at worst it stacks up enough complexity to push an ambitious project past feasible.
Workflows
There’s a line from The Dark Knight I can’t get out of my head: “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” That happens to workflows!
Every one of them started as somebody’s clever answer to a real problem: remote access into a workstation because a Mac mini couldn’t run the job or approval loops built for the era before anyone could see the same frame at the same time. Those were heroes of their day. Some still can be. The rest remained long after the problem went away.
The primary assumption I had to overcome this summer was that remote, by its very nature, is lesser than professional. The workflows we built around it are a cast still protecting a limb that isn’t there.
A broadcast is just someone trying to reach other people who aren’t in the same room. By that definition, every video call can have the same clarity and authority as a broadcast. This lesson applies to everyone. Let’s test my theory.
A background blur that can’t decide when hair is foreground between one frame and the next is a small thing. The cognitive load it imposes might not rise to the level of conscious awareness when it occurs. Yet, your recognition of it, be it on your last call or your next, is proof that it has occurred to you before.
See that as an opportunity to raise the standards and the friction becomes an opportunity to prepare. Such preparation for a call is like dressing up for a formal meeting. It automatically says that the occasion was worth looking and sounding your best
Walt Disney once asked his Imagineers why the animatronic birds in the Enchanted Tiki Room didn’t breathe. The mechanism was tedious, they explained, and nobody in the audience would ever notice. He said, "People can feel perfection."
Nobody needs to name what was wrong with a virtual meeting to know they’d rather not sit through another one which felt virtual.
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