Zoom v Teams - live talkbacks

Jay Ashworth

Jay Ashworth

Well-Known Member
We're doing (our third) Chorus department talkback, where the chorus sings, and an outside expert watches and listens and then comments on how things are going, in my college mainstage theatre this month.

In the interim since the last one, our college Zoom account was allowed to lapse, and it's being discussed to do this with Teams instead.

The rig, last time, was:

VIDEO: Canon XA10 camera -> HDMI-SDI Converter (this is a prebuilt camera rig) -> SDI-HDMI converter -> HDMI Balun -> Building Cat 5 -> ATEM Mini Pro ISO -> USB to Mac Mini as a webcam
.
.
AUDIO: Building audio (wireless and wired mics to LS9/32) -> Presonus firewire interface -> MacMini and the opposite, back to our mains and front-fills; levels controlled by hand to avoid feedback, though Zoom's "Pro Audio" switch helped a lot.

I have an intuituion that Zoom will make this much easier to manage (since I can't be there, having another conflicting musical-run booking) than Teams will, especially since Teams/Mac is almost certainly a redheaded stepchild, knowing Microsoft.

Does anyone have any *recent* experience trying to use Teams in this sort of environment, though? The teacher in question suggests "it's gotten lots of upgrades" recently...
 
We were doing live demos with two cameras and and external microphone. We would always use Zoom and never ran into major issues once it was set up the first time.
I had a customer request a demo through Teams and was not able to get the same set up working before the demo. This was about 13 months ago so I am unsure of what changes have happened since then but in my experience I had a much better time with getting Zoom to function in a non-traditional set up.
 
Teams sucks. Period, end of story.

Pay for Zoom for a month and call it good.
 
Calc said:
I'll usually feed the board audio into the camera to keep everything time-aligned. One less thing to go wrong.
Click to expand...
Yes, I do the same. Of course, if the camera doesn't have an XLR, line level input, that opens another can of worms.

I have used Zoom a lot, and found that it to be technically very flexible, works well, and generally looks and sounds good. I have limited experience with Teams, but it seems poor in comparison.
 
I tend to think of Zoom as the 2nd worst tool for this sort of thing.... and every other conferencing platform available is tied for first place.

To be fair, though, most of the frustrating things Zoom does are there because they play to the least common denominator of making even the crappiest of connections & equipment at least somewhat usable. At the same time they do offer more flexibility than others in turning off some of that automatic stuff and allowing for more advanced uses. Given the choice, I would much rather use Zoom than Teams.

If nothing else, just the fact that you have a working system with Zoom is a good reason to stick with it. Unless there's time in the schedule for you to mock up and troubleshoot a realistic test with Teams, then trying it for the first time on an event you can't be present for just seems silly.
 
TimMc said:
Teams sucks. Period, end of story.

Pay for Zoom for a month and call it good.
Click to expand...
One of our adjuncts reminded me that though the pricing page *defaults* to annual for business accounts, you *can* in fact subscribe for a month, which I'd forgotten; yeah, that'll be what we do.

Thanks.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

StradivariusBone
ATEM Mini Audio?
2 3
Replies
42
Views
62K
macsound
macsound
carsonld
Setting up the CC TV in a theatre
Replies
8
Views
4K
carsonld
carsonld
D
New to live streaming video production
Replies
0
Views
974
Dane
D
dewknight
New equipment upgrade questions
Replies
2
Views
1K
museav
museav

Users who are viewing this thread

Total: 1 (members: 0, guests: 1)
Back