The Power of Live Switching for Video Production
April 22, 2025
Live switching technology transforms video production efficiency, allowing real-time editing during filming that saves countless hours in post-production while maintaining professional quality. We explore how this approach revolutionized a recent project where we captured 80+ educational videos in just five days.
• Live switching records final edited output during filming, eliminating extensive post-production for multi-camera setups
• Green screen keying can be monitored live to ensure proper lighting and camera angles before leaving the set
• Complex setups may require multiple switching boards for different functions (main switching, picture-in-picture, keying)
• Virtual conferences benefit greatly from live switching, allowing remote participants to interact while maintaining broadcast quality
• Software solutions like OBS can provide similar functionality for smaller setups without expensive hardware
• Recording individual camera feeds as backups (ISO recording) provides editing flexibility while still saving time
• The approach particularly shines for long-form content and projects requiring numerous deliverables
Reach out if you need help with consistent, story-driven video marketing for your brand, agency, business, association, or nonprofit.
For more information on live video production, visit https://letsbackflip.com/services/live-video-production/
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Topics in This Episode
- (0:00) Introducing Live Editing Efficiency
- (3:10) Green Screen and Live Keying
- (8:37) Multiple Switching Boards Setup
- (10:40) Virtual Conference Solutions
- (17:56) Benefits of Live Switching
- (19:15) Closing Thoughts and Experience Value
Transcript
Ryan Freng:
Welcome to the Backflip Effect, the podcast that proves there’s a method to the marketing madness, specifically, a method that involves clever video strategy and a dash of creative mischief. Now, don’t be fooled by bland ideas or big budget fluff. Instead, we tackle real client questions and share how we’ve transformed businesses with strategies that actually work. Grab your headphones and join us as we explore the nitty-gritty of turning everyday marketing woes into story-driven success. Let’s get started. Today we’re going to be talking about efficiency in production with live editing, switching technology, and I’m super fired up about this topic. It’s probably pretty lame to people who are not in video or care about this stuff, but I’m fired up because of the technology and because of the maybe the budget savings and the efficiency that can be gained for a client yeah when doing specifically a studio production, but with live editing or switching technology.
John Shoemaker:
So I’m all fired up yeah, so the particular example, the recent shoot was, you know, filming with the client. That had a lot of educational videos, a lot to teach.
Ryan Freng:
I think there was like 60, but I feel like there was like 80 that we did by the end of the week.
John Shoemaker:
Yeah, I don’t know how many modules and how many videos made up each module or whatever, or whatever. But basically, yeah, just for the context, for the listener, for the viewer, they were going to have a ton of these videos, a ton of content, and didn’t want to have to go back and re-edit everything after the fact. So what’s one way to solve that is, you know, this wasn’t totally multi-cam, it was multiple, multiple views. So that might be a little confusing to explain, but they had a full, wide person, they had the screen that the person was showing or teaching off of the PowerPoint, and then they had a picture and picture, you know, person in the corner and then the screen behind them. But they didn’t want to go back and edit that later and go back through the hours.
Ryan Freng:
That’d be insane to edit 80 videos and hours and hours of footage. I mean five days filming.
John Shoemaker:
You know at least half those days were filming, you know yeah, and so live switching um, people are probably somewhat aware of it from like concerts and things like that multi-cam shoots um, you’re live switching. People are probably somewhat aware of it from like concerts and things like that multi-cam shoots, your live switching. But you can also just record that output and that’s probably. The difference here was like it wasn’t all about the fact that it was being streamed live or something it was. We were recording the output and then giving them the final video file that already has all those edits there. So especially, it’s especially useful for long form content and when you have tons and tons of deliverables, many videos coming out, you know, after the fact. So that was kind of a cool one. We incorporated green screen, we incorporated keying for the background that they wanted.
John Shoemaker:
Another cool one where we weren’t live switching in the studio but we were live keying was when we did the work for Madison College and we had those kind of crazy everything everywhere all at once, vfx things to pull off. So we had a student and they’re in a setting, they’re in their living room, they’re at in their kitchen and then crazy VFX and they end up at the college in a location, and so that one we had shot all these background plates and Then we had to film the student in the studio in front of the green screen, but we decided that we wanted to run it through our switching technology For the sole purpose of using the keyer right, so we could essentially verify that what we were doing would look well yeah in post.
Ryan Freng:
We were still doing green screen replacement, but we wanted to have more confidence during the shoot yeah.
John Shoemaker:
So that one we were gonna edit later, but it was confidence during the shoot it was also comes back to I guess it’s a different episode of this podcast, but talking about like kind of client proof, like proving it to the client or making them feel confident about it. You know so, when you’re shooting something and you’re shooting in front of a green screen, that can be a bit alarming for the client because you’re just like what am I looking at? I just have a person and behind them is green.
Ryan Freng:
You know none of that yeah, they just have a hope in it and a dream that something is gonna work out yeah.
John Shoemaker:
So this was a great way to kind of demonstrate to the client. Here’s what it’s gonna look like. We could really dial in the angle of the lighting and make everything look just like it needed to for the background. You know, the keying is a little bit easier to do if you’re doing it in post, doing it as an edit after the fact, but doing it live. We could kind of see if there were any glaring issues. It’s not as easy to dial in that key live because there’s funky things that go on with lighting.
Ryan Freng:
Here we go. I pulled it up, so we’ve got. This is Hannah’s husband. He is standing in the set of one of these Madison College green screen shoots and you can see a little bit of the keying issue. This is if you’re watching up in the top right, but at the very least it looks like they’re straight up in a kitchen, which was super cool. We had that foreground element which really kind of tied the room together.
John Shoemaker:
And we really needed this to be photorealistic together. And this was, you know, we really needed this to be photorealistic, so getting the uh perspective lines to line up exactly right, uh was that’s right.
Ryan Freng:
So, like the the, how we tilted the counter. Yeah, yeah, that’s right. I remember that.
John Shoemaker:
Yeah, that’s pretty killer he’s standing there and we wanted to make sure that the the counter lines up with all the lines that are in that scene, because he’s supposed to interact with that counter. Yeah, just a lot of little things that come together.
Ryan Freng:
This turned out so well and you can see in this shot it’s like the green screen. Maybe I can zoom in a little. You have the green screen on the left and you can see the foreground element and then you can see the, the background replacement and, I, I think, the final product. Uh, you know, projects actually were pretty killer in terms of um, you know how good they looked. So to be able to do that is pretty killer because, as I said at the top of the show, it can save time, it can save budget. Both of them make it more efficient. So I can’t even imagine how long it would take, because I had estimated maybe half the time was filming. It had to be more than that. We had to be filming like two-thirds of the time, so maybe like eight hours a day, times five days, 40 hours of footage that get turned into maybe 80 videos or maybe there’s a hundred, cause I think they originally said 60, but we were at that on like Thursday, and then we still had Thursday and then Friday content, you know. So there was, there was a lot in ideally switching in between those three shots. So it’s just the person which we also replaced the background, put them in different locations, then a picture-in-picture, which I wish maybe I had taken a picture of the setup.
Ryan Freng:
We ended up having three different live switching boards, so our main board and then this little board that Luke’s using for this, also something else I should acknowledge. If you’re watching this, it’s Ash Wednesday. I’m not dirty, I have ashes on my forehead and you don’t clean them off, you just leave them there. Second one yeah, was that picture in picture running through this board, I believe. But then we needed a third board to do another picture in picture that was in there, so this board was doing the keying. The other board was doing a picture in picture that was in there, so this board was doing the keying. The other board was doing a picture in picture. Put it together for that second shot, which I think some of the more expensive boards can do just natively. But it took us three different switching boards yeah, to use one which I ordered and showed up on Tuesday, so it was kind of funny.
John Shoemaker:
That’s so like it was efficient and it was the most efficient way to do it. But it was kind of funny to see how complicated the setup was for what seems very straightforward, like that’s the magic person and there’s a laptop. I just need to see the screen, yeah Right. And then this other thing is like well, actually there’s more involved there than than you might be thinking and might realize.
Ryan Freng:
And we could have. We could have done it just in like OBS, um open broadcasting system, a software that can be run on a laptop. But um, it seemed, you know, it seemed like there was a delay there. The key wasn’t quite as good. There was a couple of reasons why that.
John Shoemaker:
Well, there’s a delay of the audio and trying to make the audio match with the video and there’s delays there just through the signal.
Ryan Freng:
And I think if we were setting this up, this is something that we might be doing for the client anyway is setting it up so that they can do it more in their studio and then we can do some more complicated ones in our studio. But if we were to set it up, I probably would look more into like an OBS solution, some kind of software solution, because those let you do all the graphics in one machine because it’s a computer, right, we don’t need multiple boards. So there’s some problem solving that needs to happen with the audio and some keying and some things like that. But I think those are very solvable problems. So all they need is a camera. They could probably set it up something in, you know as small as this room, just have a camera, a green screen, and then you have OBS, which has three different scenes or four different scenes. You can do as many as you wanted and it’s all just kind of handled through the computer.
John Shoemaker:
And as long as the computer doesn’t crash, you’re golden, yeah I was thinking about other shoots that we’ve done and I’m not sure if this shoves our topic off of the main. You know, efficiency, we go where we’re shooting, but, um, the, the live conferences that we shot, uh, in studio, during and around COVID, those were pretty impressive setups too. You know, like multi-cam, sometimes we have a computer feed that we need to show.
John Shoemaker:
In the one instance, one of our clients, wishin, the Wisconsin Statewide Health Information Network, they had a Look at you, go with that acronym they had a virtual summit and they had their guests, but they couldn’t bring all their guests in, so the guests were coming in on Zoom and video calls. But then we also wanted interactivity in this virtual summit.
Ryan Freng:
So we had people, so we had to send our feed to those people as well, so it had to be two way there.
John Shoemaker:
So our feed had to go through the Zoom call or whatever so that they could actually interact, right. But then we needed to collect their video coming in from Zoom or whatever and give that for their talk or their keynote. Or we even had round tables that way, and then we had people chatting and so we would collect their chats just in another tool, just their text, and then I think I was emceeing that one on behalf of our client, and then we’d just bring up like okay, so there’s another question from so-and-so here, and then feed that up to the round table and let them answer. It was complicated.
John Shoemaker:
Yeah.
Ryan Freng:
And I do remember we tested the Zoom capability. So, again, just to reiterate the complexity of this, we had a switched event in studio so we could have multiple, multiple angles on, uh, the conference. So I think we had maybe three, maybe like a wide, maybe like a closer, and then maybe four, maybe like one on each side I can’t remember those four angles, and that was switched and then that had to go out to zoom. So we had to have a capability for that to go out to zoom. So we had to have a capability for that to go out to zoom. And it might have only been Like just the one angle, like we maybe we weren’t sending the mix out, so we were sending just one angle out to zoom that we had to take off of the, the switch, and then from zoom we had to capture that and then send that to a TV that our team in studio could see oh, that’s right, the talent could see so that they could see the Zoom meeting. And we used OBS for some of that back and forth and I don’t remember exactly what the technology was, but basically we had, yeah, we were feeding our stream and then joining that and then capturing that and putting it there, and then we had to mix the zoom. So not only was the zoom going to the TV, but it was going back into our board so we could mix in that.
Ryan Freng:
Oh, here’s the complexity. But we didn’t want the zoom because we didn’t want our client’s content to be in there, because we could mix them in. So we mixed a live angle of our client, so we had that angle. We mixed our angle of the client with the Zoom of other people, so we were actually able to take the Zoom video and separate that out from Zoom and have that be another video feed. That was a really cool, complex thing. And there was one technical issue that we ran into and it was like I think there’s a delay in audio and that’s one of those things where, even though we tested it, we didn’t account for something. And then when we got live, we ran into that issue, but we had the staff to be able to figure it out right away and basically fix it, fix it in the switching board.
John Shoemaker:
So that was a blast yeah, and you know it’s funny doing some of these things I think about. Sometimes I’m like I’m sure like news stations like have all this stuff you know, it’s all figured out but the problem is that clients, when they have a need like that, that okay, I have this specific thing, I need a conference, I need to run this virtual thing. I don’t even know. Maybe you could hire out a news station to do it, maybe.
Ryan Freng:
There’s no one in town who has this, who can do this?
John Shoemaker:
Yeah, and it’s not like they’re not standard things. Sometimes they’re on location, right, so it’s kind of, yeah, I, I mean, that’s the other side of it’s not. There’s a way to use it in the studio to make studio shoots efficient, even if you’re not going live, but then when you’re going live, you have all these things to consider that are really interesting and crazy so it’s.
Ryan Freng:
it’s to some degree there’s, there’s maybe more pre-production in the technical aspect, and then what that does, that pre-production that saves you time in the production and the post-production. Yeah, cause like we didn’t have to really edit any of that content. It was all basically edited. It was all basically in the platform for the conference, so it was already somewhat delivered. I think we just maybe trimmed it up, shaved it down, maybe put a title on it. If we didn’t have titles, put it on youtube.
John Shoemaker:
so, yeah, really minimize the back-end work so, uh, other things that we’ve that we’ve filmed, um, they’re not always live streamed. So this same client wishing for their live conferences they haven’t streamed. So this same client Wishin for their live conferences they haven’t streamed them live. I think when we did the conference for the Episcopal Church, there was a live stream for that one, I think right, yes.
John Shoemaker:
Yeah, so that one was a live stream. But there’s many times that we’ve done this where there’s not a live stream and we could just record it on all the various cameras and then later come in and edit. But again, just for efficiency’s sake, like editing live, in the energy of it, in the moment, when you kind of can anticipate when the person is going to do something, you kind of know what’s going on in the conference. You know it’s always good to record your backups of each feed, but often that output is what we end up using. It’s. It’s more efficient. Again, it’s like we’re there also, um, being a technical director in the ear of the camera operators telling them what you need. That’s gonna be necessary anyway. So, since you because we’ve talked about this before like well, does it make sense to bring the whole switching setup or do we just like record all the cameras and do it later so that we have more control?
Ryan Freng:
I think that was the question with the music video release conference, or uh concert right because that was not live streamed, was it or was it? No, that was also live stream. I think that was. That was also live streamed.
John Shoemaker:
Yeah, um, uh, there was another one I just thought of that we did. That wasn’t live streamed. Uh, it’ll have to come back to me, um, but yeah, just a question of like does it? It make sense? Oh, the Deacon Ralph ministry video. That was a four-night talk series, multicam, and again it was not streamed live. So the question was do we just record it and then edit later? But I think we think that if you’ve got a technical director sitting there who’s already got to be in the ear of all the camera operators just to make sure hey, can you focus on this, can you reframe this way, whatever then you might as well just live cut it, you know, live switch it right and then after your thing, when you’re you know, because you’ve got to monitor all the cameras. So it just makes sense to like, make that more efficient.
Ryan Freng:
Save a little bit of time, and some of these boards, too, have what’s called ISO recording, which means it records all the streams, which is really cool, and that’s actually what we’re doing now. So we’ve got three streams I guess my angle, your angle, and the computer and audio to each of these delivered, maybe delivered, and Luke right now is live switching so that we can actually just have that as the base, and this will record the live switch and all three channels, so Luke or Alexis or whoever is editing can go back and modify it if they want, or just utilize the edit as is, and we don’t have to spend hours in post re-editing this because it’s basically already edited because we’re using the live production switch.
John Shoemaker:
You wouldn’t want to have to figure out how to edit this.
Ryan Freng:
Yeah yeah, right, yeah, just just lean into what what luke’s already done and accept all the flaws as charm yeah, what part of this conversation should I leave in and edit?
John Shoemaker:
yeah, yeah, just like this sounds nonsense ago.
Ryan Freng:
It’s like, yeah, that’s just how it’s gonna go with the live live cutting yeah, so that’s that’s what we were talking about. Bring it, bring it at home. Efficiency in production with live editing switching including what we’re doing here now for podcasts is is pretty killer.
Ryan Freng:
So if you have questions about production, about video marketing, consistent story driven video marketing, other things you want us to explore or talk about. We’ve been doing this for over 17 years now and we were on a call earlier and someone is asking us to train them to do some setups because they’re the team, the marketing team, and they’re like we don’t have any formal training. And I was like, well, we have formal training, but more so we have 17 years of practical experience. So then we’re like, yeah, let’s, let’s get some practical experience for you guys.
John Shoemaker:
You need somebody to fake it. Pretend to be an MC for your event, that, and just pretend that they know what they’re talking about. I’m your guy.
Ryan Freng:
Yeah, we can do anything literally anything Um consistent story driven video marketing. That’s our stick. We help brands succeed agencies, businesses, associations, nonprofits looking to fundraise with our methodology. Reach out if you want help. Otherwise, like, subscribe, follow, do all the things, thanks.
