How to broadcast your wedding live on the web — Part 3 of 4

OBT member Ang is back with part three of her helpful "how to" on streaming your wedding live on the internets — the perfect way to include the people who can't be at your wedding. -Megan

Now this section is assuming that you have already checked out Part 1 and Part 2. So you already have your camera (and have installed it) and have created your Ustream account, and your handy dandy camera/microphone is hooked up to your computer at this point.

So we're going to log into Ustream, which brings you to your "dashboard". We're going to click on "Your Shows", as demonstrated by the handy dandy arrow…

Now, if you've only set up one show this should be easy (if you set up other shows, like "Rehearsal," "Bachelorette Party," "Lobster Knife Fight," please choose accordingly). Once you have the show chosen, click on "Advanced."

Scroll about halfway down and you'll see "Flash Media Encoder XML File." Click on Download. As a side note, you're going to have to download "Flash Live Media Encoder." It's okay, I'll wait.

And the pop up will ask if you want to open or save it. Make sure you save. Doesn't matter where, just make sure you know where it is. I had a "Wedding Streaming Folder" and I saved mine there.

So, leave the browser window that has the Ustream site on it open, and open the Media Encoder. There are three things you want to pay attention to (going from the left arrow to the right arrow):

Video — This would be your camera. Make sure there is a check mark in the box, and in the "source" area, click the dropdown and choose from there. It might get confusing if your computer is like mine, and everything is named "USB Camera. So what I do is make sure the camera I want to use is pointing at something specific, go down the list, and when I see my special item, I know that's the right one.

Audio — Here's your sound. If you want sound, click the check mark in the box and in the "source" area, click the dropdown and choose from there. Now you might have a microphone in your webcam, you might have one built into your computer, you might have purchased one separately, or you might have some genius idea to hook it into the sound system at your venue. Can't help you with the last one, but with the others, they'll all be in the drop down and you'll have to use some experimentation to find out which is which. Unless the names show up, which is super helpful. I just blow into them all in turn, and watch the pretty little color bars on the left of the screen go up. You get all the way to the top, YAY that's your mic.

Save to File — Okay, you don't have to do this. I like to do this, that way if something goes catastrophically wrong with the streaming aspect, you still have an internet ready copy of your video on your hard drive. This will NOT be DVD ready or anything like that, it's sized for video streaming which means it is tiny. If you want to use it click the check box, pick a name, and then go to "browse" to choose where you want to save it.

Now we're going to use that handy dandy little XML file we downloaded. Go to "File" and "Open File," then find your file. This automatically puts in all the streaming info we wanted into all the important places that are confusing that you don't want to deal with.

Once that's done, click the "Start" button on the bottom. Your Hard Drive Video will start recording from there.

Go back to UStream, and click on the "Broadcast Now" button.

A new window will pop up. From here on out it's pretty simple. Click on "Start Broadcast" to start the broadcast and click "Start Record" to record to your Ustream page. This way people will be able to see past videos on your screen. When you're done, hit stop on both of them. Or next time when you log in it will yell at you and you'll have to restart your computer. Which is a pain in the butt.

We did a bit of a practice run today. Blooper reel can be seen here. Well not really bloopers, as much as my darling husband having no patience with the technical difficulties and entertaining himself.

So yay, you know how to stream. Go forth and broadcast your moments. Ustream offers a buttload of features, like Facebook and Twitter add-ons, that are pretty self explanatory, so have fun with that. Part Four is basically going to be me sharing our wedding streaming experience, and tips and tricks to make sure yours comes off much much better than ours did.