u/Arnoc_

So I've posted a bit before. I'm an IT guy, and by merit of my realm of knowledge, I'm our streaming guy at work (College).

We have our graduation ceremony coming up, and we livestream it.

One of my big pet peeves is the fact that because we use an assortment of cameras, we end up with the color changing around a lot. I've slowly been able to increase our PTZ cameras from one to two; two PTZOptics Moves. Still have a Canon XA11 in the mix, and sometimes we utilize some USB Webcams depending upon the camera angles we need coverage for (We've only in the last three years gone from a 1 camera static shot setup to utilizing multiple cameras).

One of our recent things I've been able to get stressed is that lighting is an issue; we have a lot of black robes on a black stage in front of a black background, and then have to light that. It's an outside company that does that, and when they setup I help them, and for me the lights are bearable and tolerable, and we get it looking great from a live audience perspective as well as on the cameras.

Then the folks who actually have to be on stage come in, complain that the lights are WAY too bright, and they end up dimming them greatly. That's usually the last thing then they dip, before I can make any video adjustments.

This year I've been able to put my foot down and we're going to have some dedicated time to playing with the lighting situation.

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Now, to get to my question. When you guys have a mixed camera environment, how do you guys color balance things to try to get things as close as possible.

I have OBS as my main streaming platform, and I've got some color monitoring plug-ins loaded into it, including vectorscope, ROI, waveform, and histogram.

With filters I know I can apply LUTs to the cameras.

So, what should my workflow be to try to get things looking as same as possible across the cameras?

I'm also trying to get work to buy a Calibrite Colorchecker to help with getting colors adapted by giving a consistent color reference. Especially since I can't keep the VIPs all day during our run through.

But suggestions would be phenomenal! Thanks in advance.

I work for a small college. We normally lease our networking equipment so that we don't have a HUGE budget year the really taxes our finances. We're currently using Meraki for everything; about 35-40 switches and a firewall, and about 30 APs.

We had our meeting with Cisco about renewals and replacements and the total cost of a 1:1 replacement came back at like a good $700,000+. Which.... yeah. No one's happy about.

So we're exploring some alternatives. Ubiquiti is one of the main ones; we don't have any really complex networking setups, just basically connect everything together, prioritize our IP Phones, and that's about all. And my boss is of the opinion even if a Ubiquiti switch goes down and support isn't great, it's cheap enough to just buy another or have one or two on hand to just slot in and be done with it. His idea is really to keep the Meraki Firewall for it's features and then just Ubiquiti switches as the backbone. Which isn't too bad of an idea in my opinion.

But we're still in the exploration stage; we have about another year for all this. I do see Mist thrown out as a suggestion in some of my research.

Another thing to consider is, that we ARE expanding and having a new building put into place, so we have some growth we haven't accounted for either from our original Meraki quote too. That building will likely need 1-2 switches, plus firewall, and a LOT of APs.

We also are expanding our streaming events; so being able to get that traffic prioritized as well (We are starting to utilize NDI devices a lot more, and may be moving to some Dante stuff in the future for sound).

Networking is more of a generality for me than a specialty, so I'm a little out of my element.

But, one of the biggest reasons why we want with Meraki in the first place was the cloud management. Being able to diagnose issues from home; getting alerts when switches go down, fiber issues, etc. It's saved our butts a few times when stuffs happened on weekends and we were able to resolve it before the work week started. That's a functionality we would like to continue to have.

Thanks in advance for any recommendations!