Wirecast Review
Go and get Wirecast now from the Telestream website. In short, I’ve been using Wirecast and Screenflow (also from Telestream) for many, many years, and they make great products.
Want to broadcast to Facebook Live or YouTube?
Below is a Facebook Live video I made using Wirecast. Once you get everything set up, it’s actually very easy. I’m only using about 50% of the functionality, but you can have a quick scrub through to see if this is the product for you.
Here are my favourite features of Wirecast:
- Nice tutorial to get you up and running. I’ve never used anything like this, and it was a little daunting at first.
- Once you have a “Template,” there is no more setup involved and you can go live in less than 5 minutes, any time.
- I like that I can do a webcam + share my desktop at the same time.
- There’s a new feature that allows you to post Facebook Live comments right on top of the broadcast, which is mega cool.
- Bonus feature that allows a second person to manage which Facebook comments go up on the screen.
The Power of Wirecast
Wow you can do a thousand things with this software. You can basically do everything a news network can. You can have multiple talking heads, people connecting via Skype, mix together live feeds and canned video, special titling, multiple scenes. The list goes on and on. Usually I just do the broadcast myself, so I can’t be switching around to a bunch of different scenes. If you had a person in a “producer” role they could do all the scene swapping, then even more is possible.
Interview with Wirecast
I did an interview with the great team over there at Wirecast. We talked a lot about quadcopters and streaming, but really about many other subjects too. You can see that interview below.
The Best Way to Use Wirecast
I suggest you carve out 2 or 3 hours to go through the tutorial and then set up your own scene for a test run. Don’t be too serious about your test run, because you’ll learn a lot. When you go live, you can just tell your audience, “Hey I’m trying to figure out this live broadcast thing!” And have fun with it! I still mess up from time to time. For example, I often forget to un-mute the audio output, so I’m 5 minutes into the broadcast and I go check the comments that no one can hear me!
It’s also nice to have a second laptop or tablet to watch the live show as the audience sees it. It’s nice to make sure the broadcast is actually going and the audio is working. And I recommend getting that “Titler” plugin working so that you can display live Facebook comments. The audience loves that stuff. Lastly, I’d say, keep it simple. Just because you can do such a myriad of things with Wirecast doesn’t mean you have to!
Grab it now
Pop over and get Wirecast now and have a ball!
Want to record your screen or edit video?
Go over and read my Screenflow review. It’s a tool I use all the time to make tutorials and edit together videos.
