Managing Remote Conference Presenters with Zoom

Managing Remote Conference Presenters with Zoom

Bringing remote presenters into a face-to-face conference is challenging and fraught with peril.
In this post, I describe a scheme using
Zoom
that had in-person attendees forgetting that the presenter was remote!
The
Code4Lib conference
was this week, and with the
COVID-19 pandemic
breaking through many individuals and institutions made decisions to not travel to Pittsburgh for the meeting.
We had an unprecedented nine presentations that were brought into the conference via Zoom.
I was chairing the livestream committee for the conference (as I have done for several years—skipping last year), so it made the most sense for me to arrange a scheme for remote presenters.
With the help of the on-site A/V contractor, we were able to pull this off with minimal requirements for the remote presenter.
List of Requirements
2
Zoom Pro
accounts
1 PC/Mac with video output, as if you were connecting an external monitor (the «Receiving Zoom» computer)
1 PC/Mac (the «Coordinator Zoom» computer)
1 USB audio interface
Hardwired network connection for the Receiving Zoom computer (recommended)
The
Pro
-level Zoom accounts were required because we needed to run a group call for longer than 40 minutes (to include setup time).
And two were needed: one for the Coordinator Zoom machine and one for the dedicated Receiving Zoom machine.
It would have been possible to consolidate the two Zoom Pro accounts and the two PC/Mac machines into one, but we had back-to-back presenters at Code4Lib, and I wanted to be able to help one remote presenter get ready while another was presenting.
In addition to this equipment, the A/V contractor was indispensable in making the connection work.
We fed the remote presenter’s video and audio from the Receiving Zoom computer to the contractor’s A/V switch through HDMI, and the contractor put the video on the ballroom projectors and audio through the ballroom speakers.
The contractor gave us a selective audio feed of the program audio minus the remote presenter’s audio (so they wouldn’t hear themselves come back through the Zoom meeting).
This becomes a little clearer in the diagram below.
Physical Connections and Setup
This diagram shows the physical connections between machines.
The
Audio Mixer
and
Video Switch
were provided and run by the A/V contractor.
The
Receiving Zoom
machine was the one that is connected to the A/V contractor’s Video Switch via an HDMI cable coming off the computer’s external monitor connection.
In the Receiving Zoom computer’s control panel, we set the external monitor to mirror what was on the main monitor.
The audio and video from the computer (i.e., the Zoom call) went out the HDMI cable to the A/V contractor’s Video Switch.
The A/V contractor took the audio from the Receiving Zoom computer through the Video Switch and added it to the Audio Mixer as an input channel.
From there, the audio was sent out to the ballroom speakers the same way audio from the pod…