Creative Technology Asia: a Virtual Fireside Chat with Video Transport

Creative Technology (CT) is part of the NEP Group, the world’s premier provider of technology and production services to event organisers and content creators operating 29 offices in 17 countries. The company’s customers are usually from the corporate sector – such as banking or insurance organizations willing to produce a product launch, an annual financial report, or an internal speech from the CEO.

As for many other live event companies, focusing on virtual events was a natural response to the challenges of the COVID era. But not many have been as creative. Today, we are speaking with Karc Chan in Hong Kong about how Video Transport is being used for a product called Virtual Fireside Chat.

VT is a really good transportation product for this scenario, because we are looking for very high quality and very low latency.

The Virtual Fireside Chat involves using a green screen in both locations, delivering these video feeds to the media servers and using a chroma key engine to key in the right background. The result is, it looks to the audience as if the two people are in one location, while in reality they can be in different parts of the world – simply sharing one virtual environment.

In a recent production, the communication was between Hong Kong and Singapore. Two feeds were delivered from each location via Video Transport: a wide shot and a close-up – both on a green screen. The close-up feeds were displayed on monitors right in front of the speakers to make sure they could see each other and have a more engaged conversation.

I think VT is very easy-to-use, very easy to set up, has a short learning curve, and it is stable. For example, at one point we tested it between Shanghai and Hong Kong – it was stable for 48 hours. It's really good.

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