A moving truck, 6 iPhone cameras, editing direction placed on a subwoofer box, 250 thousand people and 7 hours of partying – that shortly describes our extraordinary live stream from the “Back Market Truck”, during the “Rave The Planet” event in Berlin.
Paying homage to the Love Parade of the 90s, the crowd was drawn by nearly 20 event trucks that offered booming bass and rhythm, as well as socio-political messages – and a quarter of a million people came to be part of it all.
A technical endurance test
In the middle of it all, we were on one of the trucks, streaming from the top deck: equipped with 6 iPhone cameras, all with magic-arms and clamps set up on the railing of the truck, around the DJ and the dancing guests.
The challenge here was to find good perspectives and also to stop the vibration created by the music in the camera image. Thanks to a mode in the iPhones, this succeeded flawlessly and created a clear view of what was happening on the truck and around it.
Also not nothing was the unpredictable factor of the weather, which punished us for a while with heavy rain. Nevertheless, our technique survived it very well.
The third acid test of this event was the distribution of the live-streaming.
Not only was there a montage from 4 cameras that we connected from the picture control room in the lower deck of the truck to other staff in our office, from where it was then broadcast live to multiple destinations. In addition, there were two iPhones on the truck, which transmitted live directly to the customers’ Instagram channels.
The teaching of the LTE
In the end, our previous assumption that an LTE connection would not be stable enough for such an event was clarified, despite the elevated location on the upper deck of the truck and the Internet bonding router. The number of people around the truck – each equipped with their own cell phone – caused us to experience some LTE outages.
The lesson: next year our Internet will come via satellite connection.
