Conceptual Signal Flow Drawing for Mutek Nexus 2020
Mutek is an internationally renowned electronic music and digital arts organization that hosts annual festivals in cities globally. The relatively new Mutek San Francisco chapter was faced with a challenge for their 3rd annual festival in May 2020: In the face of Covid-19 should they cancel, or find a way to translate an engaging, creative community festival to a virtual event?
Mutek San Francisco hosted Nexus, their 2020 online music festival, using a bespoke virtual community event platform custom built by Currents.fm for the event. Nexus combined live video streams, video-on-demand, a gallery of online Open GL artwork, live workshops on a variety of creative topics, and community-submitted art, music, and live video streams from the SF Bay Area and all over the world.
Making the event community-focused and highlighting community contributions was key to the experience. In addition to the curated musical performances, live DJ sets, and film screenings, the festival highlighted live trainings and performances from both Bay-Area and global artists, as well as links to other concurrent festivals. The live audience interacted with each other and the artists via text and video chat built into the interface alongside the artwork and performances.
The Currents.FM Live Event Interface
In addition to the task of building a custom audience-facing platform, this event posed multiple content-delivery challenges. With multiple live “rooms” running simultaneously with a mix of live and pre-recorded content from many different locations, there were many sources of content going to several different destinations. There were questions of streaming infrastructure, of video endpoints at both the artist (contributor) and audience delivery endpoints of the signal flow, as well as questions of routing in between. This project required both technology solutions and the team to develop and implement them.
Mutek SF Technical Director John Mitchell brought in streaming engineers Drew Patterson of Fresh AV and myself, Tim Kerbavaz of Talon AV to provide live streaming and virtual event management expertise. Drew provided early-process technical management, and Jessie McDaniel, also of Fresh AV, provided show-day artist and stage management, coordinating live remote performances and asset collection.
As a team, we implemented a mix of technologies to make 4 concurrent live rooms possible. Two of the rooms were a mix of live content from artists’ homes and playout of pre recorded performances submitted in advance. Another room was a film screening room playing a timed schedule of films, and the fourth was a workshop room with live presentations by contributing artists.
Leveraging our live event and online video expertise, Drew and I spun up playback systems in redundant locations, with playback locations in both Texas and California, as well as cloud-based playback and routing.
We used LTN Live Video Cloud, which is a cloud-based video routing system to manage, route, and record live contributions. For timed playback of pre-recorded content, we used LTN/Make.TV Playout, a cloud-based broadcast playout application, and Figure53 QLab, a desktop cue-based playback system for Mac OS. Endpoint destination streams went to Vimeo Live, Twitch, Facebook, and Youtube.
Author Tim Kerbavaz in the Sacramento Control Room for the Mutek Nexus Festival
These infrastructure choices proved to be essential to the success of the event. QLab’s Wall-Clock triggers and time-based loop cues in LTN Playout made scheduling playback based on time of day an easy feat, and the cloud routing and playback solutions from LTN enabled remote performers from all over the world to each have their own RTMP or WebRTC ingest credentials and for a team of technicians and production staff spread across two states and 3 metro areas to collaboratively manage the same production.
This was a great opportunity to try some new tools and be a part of a one-of-a-kind live music experience. The event pushed the envelope of online events, creating a new model of what a virtual event can look like and letting us stretch to the cutting edge of both video streaming and event platform technology. I look forward to applying these skills and technologies to future projects.
Tim Kerbavaz is the Technical Director of Talon Entertainment Audio Visual.
Talon Entertainment Audio Visual provides event AV production services for private, corporate, and community events across the United States. Serving a wide range of events, from political round-tables, to Silicon Valley Tech Company Conferences, to community festivals, to automotive-industry board meetings, Talon AV provides expertise and an exemplary attendee experience.