u/theOUTCOME3

Hello everyone, I’m a new ref in Europe. Just started couple of months ago, although I’ve had reffed 12 years ago for a brief period. Currently 29 y.o. and absolutely loving it so far with the confidence I lacked back then.

I specifically asked the assignor for many games to get me going. However I’m starting to regret this a bit. After almost every weekend I suffer from hips and knees pain that takes a few days to go away which hinders my training schedule between matches. Looking at RefSix, I might be doing 15-20km over the weekend during games.

I’ve been into sports my whole life, with the exception of the last few years. Refereeing is my comeback to regular sports apart from gym. I’m fairly big guy, 190cm and currently at 103kg which means I’m overweight but I’ve got a wide frame and while few kilos need still to go (I actually lost around 10kg in preparation for the season and still going down) I was around that weight for most of my adult life. In this time I’ve trained combat sports, I’ve been running and have never ever experienced issues like that.
I’ve bought high quality running shoes, I focus a lot on leg strength workouts and it still happens. I’ve started to question my running form but can’t really focus on that much during games.

Have anyone gone through this before? I don’t know if there is some injury I’m not aware of causing this, is it a skill issue or simply I’m still too big to put that much work without the effects overworking the joints.

Hi everyone,

We are a small live entertainment group. We've got somewhat extensive experience with video recording of our shows, we even curently deliver ready product to local TV station. However, we never went live with it.
On the video production end we've got one main guy and me personally - I'm trying to handle our transition to live production. We're both absolutely self-taught amateurs and figuring things out on the fly. Maybe someone here has got experience with similar set up and would be willing to help. This would mean the world to us.

We’ve been test streaming for close to a year to test the setup, though our shows happen once in 2-3 months so there weren't that many attempts. Out of 5 of these, we had maybe 2 that were somewhat successfull.

I'll give you a quick rundown of our setup, though we're set on this end - the issue is when it comes to moving our broadcast live.

• Switcher: ATEM Mini Extreme ISO
• Video: 1080p50 with 6 cameras handled by ATEM
• Platform: YouTube (RTMP stream)
• Workstation: PC (Ryzen-based, NVIDIA GPU for NVENC)
• Software: OBS (preferably)
• Network: Here shit hits the fan, extremely unreliable 5G connection with about 10Mbps upload in best case scenario as our main source

1. The first attempt was streaming through ATEM and we got lucky with the network then. It was rather smooth but it lacked overlays and graphics that we felt the need to include.
2. Then came the OBS into the mix, but video/audio quality through USB was not that good on top of the network issues.
3. Foolishly we went with CamLink 4K not fully understanding the tech and while better, it was still off. Then we had some major network issues as the bandwidth was not stable and it resulted in poor performance over duration of the broadcast but I believe dynamic bitrate saved us to some extent.
4. Most recently, we reverted to streaming through ATEM but when network got bad, ATEM completely choked due to lack of dynamic bitrate and the stream dropped several times

Network is obviously our biggest bottleneck so first I want to handle this and then entertain an idea of sending signal from ATEM to OBS better than before. I tried to do my research and came up with this setup:

1. The Signal Path (Internal): Instead of using the ATEM as a USB Webcam, we want to utilize the internal H.264 hardware encoder of the ATEM Extreme.

• Plan: ATEM (SRT Caller) -> Local Gigabit Switch -> PC (OBS Media Source / SRT Listener).
• Logic: We're looking at a 12-15 Mbps SRT stream over local LAN for high-fidelity ingest into OBS.

2. Connectivity & Redundancy: We are looking into Speedify for channel bonding to combine three disparate sources:

• Source A: Venue ISP (Ethernet Cable) - very slow, but probably more stable
• Source B: 5G Cellular (Currently router was indoor which most definitely messed up the signal, now we plan to place it outdoor and run Ethernet to the workstation -> Gigabit Ethernet adapter).
• Source C: Starlink (this is not set in stone, it's not ours and we're not sure if we'll be able to use it)
• Hardware: We are adding multiple USB 3.0 to Gigabit Ethernet adapters to the PC to keep everything on "hard" wires.
• Connection: A will go to Ethernet switcher that will handle PC and ATEM. B will go to external network adapter and C either the same or over WiFi.

3. OBS Production: OBS will handle the "final polish":

• Overlays, stinger transitions, and dynamic graphics.
• Encoding: NVENC (CBR) at 8-10 Mbps to YouTube.

Questions for the Experts:

1. SRT vs. USB: For a local ingest (1.5 meters from ATEM to PC), is SRT over LAN a significantly more stable solution than the standard USB-C Webcam output for a high-motion 50fps feed? Should we be looking towards other solutions?
2. Network Bonding: Does anyone have experience with Speedify in a broadcast environment combining 5G and Starlink? Are there any hidden pitfalls regarding MTU or packet reordering that might affect a persistent RTMP stream to YouTube? As I said, we're rather amateurs and the whole ATEM setup was expensive for us. I don't think that we can afford hardware solutions for this at this moment.

It was difficult for me to convey all the info without this being unberably long post. If I missed any crucial info I'm happy to answer questions if anyone is willing to help.

Hi everyone,

We are a small live entertainment group. We've got somewhat extensive experience with video recording of our shows, we even curently deliver ready product to local TV station. However, we never went live with it.
On the video production end we've got one main guy and me personally - I'm trying to handle our transition to live production. We're both absolutely self-taught amateurs and figuring things out on the fly. I've seen that this sub is full of professionals though, so hopefuly somebody will pity us after reading this and share some of their knowledge :)

We’ve been test streaming for close to a year to test the setup, though our shows happen once in 2-3 months so there weren't that many attempts. Out of 5 of these, we had maybe 2 that were somewhat successfull.

I'll give you a quick rundown of our setup, though we're set on this end - the issue is when it comes to moving our broadcast live.

• Switcher: ATEM Mini Extreme ISO
• Video: 1080p50 with 6 cameras handled by ATEM
• Platform: YouTube (RTMP stream)
• Workstation: PC (Ryzen-based, NVIDIA GPU for NVENC)
• Software: OBS (preferably)
• Network: Here shit hits the fan, extremely unreliable 5G connection with about 10Mbps upload in best case scenario as our main source

1. The first attempt was streaming through ATEM and we got lucky with the network then. It was rather smooth but it lacked overlays and graphics that we felt the need to include.
2. Then came the OBS into the mix, but video/audio quality through USB was not that good on top of the network issues.
3. Foolishly we went with CamLink 4K not fully understanding the tech and while better, it was still off. Then we had some major network issues as the bandwidth was not stable and it resulted in poor performance over duration of the broadcast but I believe dynamic bitrate saved us to some extent.
4. Most recently, we reverted to streaming through ATEM but when network got bad, ATEM completely choked due to lack of dynamic bitrate and the stream dropped several times

Network is obviously our biggest bottleneck so first I want to handle this and then entertain an idea of sending signal from ATEM to OBS better than before. I tried to do my research and came up with this setup:

1. The Signal Path (Internal): Instead of using the ATEM as a USB Webcam, we want to utilize the internal H.264 hardware encoder of the ATEM Extreme.

• Plan: ATEM (SRT Caller) -> Local Gigabit Switch -> PC (OBS Media Source / SRT Listener).
• Logic: We're looking at a 12-15 Mbps SRT stream over local LAN for high-fidelity ingest into OBS.

2. Connectivity & Redundancy: We are looking into Speedify for channel bonding to combine three disparate sources:

• Source A: Venue ISP (Ethernet Cable) - very slow, but probably more stable
• Source B: 5G Cellular (Currently router was indoor which most definitely messed up the signal, now we plan to place it outdoor and run Ethernet to the workstation -> Gigabit Ethernet adapter).
• Source C: Starlink (this is not set in stone, it's not ours and we're not sure if we'll be able to use it)
• Hardware: We are adding multiple USB 3.0 to Gigabit Ethernet adapters to the PC to keep everything on "hard" wires.
• Connection: A will go to Ethernet switcher that will handle PC and ATEM. B will go to external network adapter and C either the same or over WiFi.

3. OBS Production: OBS will handle the "final polish":

• Overlays, stinger transitions, and dynamic graphics.
• Encoding: NVENC (CBR) at 8-10 Mbps to YouTube.

Questions for the Experts:

1. SRT vs. USB: For a local ingest (1.5 meters from ATEM to PC), is SRT over LAN a significantly more stable solution than the standard USB-C Webcam output for a high-motion 50fps feed? Should we be looking towards other solutions?
2. Network Bonding: Does anyone have experience with Speedify in a broadcast environment combining 5G and Starlink? Are there any hidden pitfalls regarding MTU or packet reordering that might affect a persistent RTMP stream to YouTube? As I said, we're rather amateurs and the whole ATEM setup was expensive for us. I don't think that we can afford hardware solutions for this at this moment.

It was difficult for me to convey all the info without this being unberably long post. If I missed any crucial info I'm happy to answer questions if anyone is willing to help.