I’ve been quite busy over the past few weeks wran­gling all the tech­ni­cal aspects of TEDx­Man­i­toba 2012, which took place this past Feb­ru­ary 9^th. Being a part of the steer­ing com­mit­tee for the event was an incred­i­ble expe­ri­ence, as was work­ing with my crew in my posi­tion as tech­ni­cal lead. I was also for­tu­nate to make a num­ber of new con­nec­tions and friends through the expe­ri­ence — as well as, of course, hear­ing some fan­tas­tic ideas worth spread­ing. After the event went so well, I wanted to write up a quick overview of how we pulled off the day’s tech­ni­cal aspects so I could give credit where credit is due. (Lost? Read up on TEDx Events.)

First off, a note about how I got to be the tech­ni­cal lead for this year’s event. I was orig­i­nally signed on to work with the highly tal­ented Nicole Jensen on the venue com­mit­tee. I had met Nicole at TEDx­Man­i­toba 2011 and enjoyed start­ing to work on the venue aspects with her team as we sorted out where to host our event this year. Some time last fall, the tech­ni­cal lead warned he would have to step down from that posi­tion due to other com­mit­ments. He had a con­ver­sa­tion with Lisa M^acKen­zie. My name was dropped, fur­ther con­ver­sa­tions ensued, and I was sud­denly doing double-duty.

In a fash­ion, it made sense for me to pro­vide con­ti­nu­ity between the venue and tech­ni­cal com­mit­tees — they had been run as a sin­gle com­mit­tee for 2011, and had to work very closely together. Nicole put for­ward a stage design con­cept over lunch one day, and I think it came together fan­tas­ti­cally. Upon see­ing it, some­one remarked that it looked very “TED”, which I think was a good compliment.

How did we do it?

We really wanted to take the tech­ni­cal pro­duc­tion of TEDx­Man­i­toba up a few notches this year. When we made our selec­tion of MTC Ware­house The­atre as the venue for this year’s event, it hap­pened to come with a few accou­trements, which included an impres­sive sound sys­tem and pro­fes­sional the­atri­cal light­ing – obvi­ously! It also came with the ser­vices of Randy (light­ing) and Greg (sound) who did a fan­tas­tic job get­ting us all set up and run­ning pretty flaw­lessly. Big props to those guys.

The next thing we did was to select some­one who could cap­ture and stream the type of video pro­duc­tion we wanted to show, which meant we needed a multi-camera shot with a direc­tor call­ing live shots to the cam­era oper­a­tors and select­ing the image to dis­play to the live view. Besides the cam­era views, we also wanted to feed the video pro­ducer an addi­tional source — a direct video copy of the pre­sen­ta­tion slides and videos so he wouldn’t have to rely on a cam­era image of the screen. In addi­tion to all that, every­thing had to be recorded so we’d have a com­plete record of all that we did onstage. For this job, we issued an RFP and after meet­ing with Craig John­son (@arcimagemedia) from ArcIm­age Media, we awarded him the task. ArcIm­age also became a spon­sor and were offi­cially with us for the ride — we added Jeremy Williamson to his team and we were good to go. Now that the event is done, Craig and his crew still have the task of edit­ing each speaker’s video into its final form so it can be uploaded for online view­ing at any time… and the goal is to have that done in just three weeks. (If you know much about video edit­ing, you’ll know that’s a lot of work in a short amount of time.) For a lot of the peo­ple who bring it together, the work goes on for a while even after we lock the venue doors at the end of the event. Feed­back for the livestream was noth­ing but pos­i­tive, includ­ing from last year’s emcee, Kevin Hnatiuk of New Media Man­i­toba.

Now that we were assured a top-notch image would go up to the livestream, we had to make sure we had an Inter­net con­nec­tion that would han­dle the nec­es­sary capac­ity with­out bog­ging down or drop­ping out or oth­er­wise implod­ing. While we were at it, it seemed rea­son­able that we should make sure we had lots of avail­able band­width and capac­ity for wifi ser­vice to any guest who wanted to live-tweet or live-blog the event, and your typ­i­cal box-store wifi unit wouldn’t cut the mus­tard for this task. For this require­ment, we turned to Rainy Day Inter­net and Net­Set Com­mu­ni­ca­tions, who both quickly became TEDx spon­sors. These com­pa­nies worked together to pro­vide a high-capacity Inter­net con­nec­tion between the MTC Ware­house and the Inter­net as well as a cou­ple of high-capacity wifi access points. Appar­ently we were a very “wired” crowd — at points dur­ing the day we had more than 100 devices reg­is­tered on the wifi net­work and were hit­ting 8Mbps on our Inter­net con­nec­tion. (Don’t worry, it’s a geeky statistic.)

Really, How Big Was It?

Our online audi­ence was much harder to mea­sure. We had almost 300 con­cur­rent con­nec­tions on the livestream, but this doesn’t account for the fact that some peo­ple were only able to watch for a part of the day. The livestream actu­ally saw well over 800 unique con­nec­tions through­out the day. Since a num­ber of those were group view­ings, the total num­ber of peo­ple who were able to engage with the day’s pro­gram online and in per­son will be some­where upwards of 1,000 peo­ple. Some com­pa­nies and orga­ni­za­tions hosted view­ing par­ties for staff, which helped us gain decent-sized view­ing audi­ences even out­side the province.

Next, we wanted to make sure the pre­sen­ta­tions went as smoothly as pos­si­ble. This meant set­ting our­selves up with sev­eral lap­tops in both PC and Mac flavours so we could dis­play both Pow­er­Point and Keynote pre­sen­ta­tions, as well as play back the video clips we needed. This meant we needed a video switcher that would switch between the dif­fer­ent video sources to send to the pro­jec­tor behind the 9′x12′ screen we had on stage as well as to the video record­ing desk and the “con­fi­dence mon­i­tor”, which is an extra mon­i­tor at the front of the stage to give the speaker the con­fi­dence that the cor­rect slide is being dis­played with­out hav­ing to turn around and look behind them.

We matched the con­fi­dence mon­i­tor with a sec­ond one to show a count­down timer so the speak­ers would all know where they were in their times­lot so they could be cer­tain they were at the right point in their pre­sen­ta­tion. The big count­down num­bers became a bit of the run­ning gag with the emcees, but they know the ben­e­fit that it was to every­one in help­ing to keep every­thing run­ning on time. Greg Mack­ling and Chuck LaFleche did an expert job at fill­ing a vari­able amount of time as they made their intro­duc­tions — we made a very con­scious effort to start each talk at the time we sched­uled it so that peo­ple tun­ing in online for a spe­cific talk would be able to do so with­out miss­ing the begin­ning of it.

Some of the addi­tional equip­ment for the event came from the Fron­tier School Divi­sion and some came from Stage Light Man­i­toba and River City AV, each of whom — when they heard about our event — promptly offered gen­er­ous dis­counts on the rental fees as a way of help­ing to spon­sor us even with­out for­mal recog­ni­tion. (In fact, the num­ber of peo­ple and com­pa­nies who threw in what they could with no expec­ta­tion of pro­mo­tional space was a fan­tas­tic boost to us in bring­ing the event together.) To run the whole setup, we recruited Dave Straker and Andrew Monti, who got every­thing set up and kept it run­ning smoothly through the rehearsal and event days with an extra hand from Michael Ander­son.

The last piece of the tech­ni­cal puz­zle was filled by recruit­ing Bram Ryan to make sure each speaker was wired up with the cor­rect micro­phone, keep the tech team in touch with what was going on back­stage, and make sure that all the nec­es­sary props appeared and dis­ap­peared at the right moment and in the right place. It’s very easy to list all that in a sin­gle sen­tence, but pulling it all off flaw­lessly for the full day was a tall order that Bram seemed to pull off with nary a hic­cup or fraz­zled nerve.

The pho­tos in this post were all snapped by Richard Ray, who we recruited as our offi­cial event pho­tog­ra­pher. He’s uploaded an early batch of TEDx­Man­i­toba pho­tos, with more to follow.

As the lead for the tech­ni­cal com­mit­tee for the lat­ter half of the year lead­ing up to the event after I was sec­onded from the venue com­mit­tee, I lost track of how many times over the setup, rehearsal, and event days that I said how much I loved work­ing with good peo­ple. By the time the speak­ers were tak­ing the stage, I was able to sit back and trust each mem­ber of the team to con­tribute their part. That left my only task as being the one appointed to worry about what was going to go wrong and jump up to fix what­ever peo­ple needed help to resolve. And I’m proud of the team to be able to say I had almost noth­ing to do all day.

Greg, Randy, Craig & crew, Jeremy, Dave, Andrew, and Bram — thanks for mak­ing us all look so good, and thanks for mak­ing it pos­si­ble to show some really great ideas worth spreading.