Going to be spending several upcoming posts on the subject of live-streaming. Specifically focused on my lessons learned and efforts around live streaming our RPG sessions, but honestly it can be applied to a great many different options. I am by no means an expert, but thru trial and error and many YouTube videos, I have adapted my process into what I believe to be a fairly solution solution.
Since your particular situation no doubt is different, take my suggestions and claims as such – only a starting point. Hopefully much of my process will apply, but some you will no doubt have to ignore or alter to fit your situation.
The biggest challenge of course is to set your expectations. In my case, set them low. If you aim to high, frustration will set in, and the effort will be wasted. For our group, these lessons have been over the last several years, I continue to adjust and modify, and in truth have found practically no audience. But for me, the journey is more interesting that the destination – I find it a challenge to optimize the process, rather than expecting instant success.
For a basic description, my group streams our live gaming sessions every week on Sunday. Current timing is a pair of bi-weekly campaigns, alternating each week. One group has 10 players, then other has 7 (2 of which are remote). We utilize FoundryVTT for a digital board, Discord for remote voice, and OBS for the streaming. Content is streamed live to Twitch, then trimming down and published to YouTube for long term archiving. Productions levels I am happy with, even if the actual quality is not up to professional standards.
If your group is (likely) smaller, or entirely remote, much of what we use will be different, but the same lessons apply. I will post equipment and some other inspirational or reference videos as we progress.
As appropriate, I will revisit this topic on occasion, to update based on the evolution of our channel.
