uA Supporting Beyond Blue 2019 – A Post-Mortem

I had been planning this event for months. Streamer recruitment, game choice, travel plans, hardware checklists, software setup, sponsor/partner recruitment – this was going to be the most ambitious event we had hosted to date. In this article I’ll be outlining our challenges, diving into our available statistics and suggesting what we could do better – a post-mortem on our Beyond Blue 2019 event.

In 2018 we hosted our third charity event. We managed to raise $5,320.69 for Beyond Blue through Just Giving – 234% more than our previous attempt in 2016 and 106% of our $5,000 AUD campaign goal. This can largely be attributed to being our very first event having streamers on-location and interacting with each other in person as well as the fact that we’d discovered more tools to expand our horizons in terms of streaming options. We had also partnered directly with Just Giving for the event and had their assistance. The stream was done entirely with free tools (more on this later) and hardware borrowed from people involved with the stream – we only spent $400 on necessary cables and equipment.

This year we managed to raise a whopping $8,010.14 for the cause – 50.6% more than last year and 80.1% of our $10,000 AUD campaign goal. We’d upgraded from my house to a real venue – Checkpoint Esports Arcade & Bar in Surfers Paradise. Checkpoint provided almost all the hardware in terms of PCs, headsets, keyboards and mice and most of these were exactly the same. This provided a reliable test bed for how each PC would react on stream.

Streaming Setup

Checkpoint allowed us full access to their VIP room for the day which we had filled with 8 PCs. 6 of the PCs were used for the streamers to jump onto, 3 on each side of a green screen wall separating the 2 sides. You may even see people from the other side popping through on the VOD. 1 PC was setup as a observer view for Overwatch and the last one was the streaming PC itself. We also had a PC upstairs to run the cameras for Dungeons & Dragons. We also had various cameras setup throughout Checkpoint for the hosts and Cosplay Corner segments.

Each PC was sending an RTMP stream to the streaming PC at 1080p 30FPS, 32,000 bitrate on NVENC. The streaming PC then had all these streams available to switch to at any time and each scene was selected via OBS multiview. Names could be changed on each PC’s stream via a preset button on an Elgato Streamdeck. All voice audio was captured on the streaming PC through Discord so there was no vocal echo when switching scenes.

Due to the sheer amount of data coming through the streaming PC, we decided to stream at 1080p 30FPS at 4000 bitrate using the NVENC (New) encoder in OBS. Even then, the PC was sitting at 60% CPU usage and spiked up even further when Skype NDI cameras were added in for both the mobile camera at the start of the stream and the caster cams for the Overwatch segment.