Nathan Rae Productions uses some simple principles to inform our methods. They also shape the way we work with clients, each other within the company, and with the people who we are filming.
Openness
While we never disclose client information, Nathan Rae Productions has an open and honest approach when it comes to costing projects, wages, and hiring subcontractors.
We publish all our standard prices online. Being open with all stakeholders helps everyone relax, get creative, find new solutions to problems, and ultimately make the product better.
We are also open about how we run our live streams, train staff and contractors, organise equipment, and how we build out new equipment. Four or five other video producers have now built their own “TV Studio in a Pedal Case” for their ATEM Mini based on Nathan’s build video.
Lightweight Is Usually Better
We aim to travel light (though not too light, see below) as this gives us a huge amount of flexibility. We can set up quickly in venues between shows or meetings, can change camera positions as needed, be flexible with the location of the control desk, etc.
Everything we need for our 3 Camera, 3 Crew live stream package is ready to go within an hour and is suitable for most events and venues though we do also hire specialist equipment as needed.
For almost all smaller events using full broadcast equipment is overkill. The video quality from our professional Panasonic cameras more than good enough, especially as the raw HDMI video feeds are massively compressed before streaming. Having good quality sound and optimised compression and streaming settings are just as important.
Equipment Redundancy
We aim to always have redundancy in all our equipment. We have back up cameras, back up streaming laptops, audio equipment, etc. If one item is damaged, breaks, stolen or lost we have another item ready.
More importantly, the back up equipment is not transported with the primary items. This means that if any of our large flight cases, tool boxes, or bags are lost or stolen in transit the live stream will still go ahead.
Data Redundancy
We aim to have double or triple redundancy for all live streaming events.
We record to the SD cards on each camera, save a high quality version of the final feed on the streaming PC, the video is archived online with the streaming platform, and if we are using our TV studio equipment for a multi camera shoot we may save it there too.
Camera SD cards are transported separately from the streaming PC, they are backed up to hard drive the same day, then stored separately until the job is signed off by the client.