Damn Good Productions goes global for Pitney Bowes with TriCaster and NDI

Damn Good Productions, an Australian-headquartered video production company, was hired by American technology company Pitney Bowes to reimagine its 2021 annual live kick-off meeting as a live virtual event for its, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand region.

Because of Damn Good’s long experience with NewTek TriCaster and NDI -based products, the company was able to seamlessly pull together a live broadcast-quality virtual meeting that featured simultaneous English and Japanese program feeds together with real-time multi-lingual translations. The event included presenters in studio, multiple pre-recorded playouts, supers, graphics, a host in a green screen studio with a custom designed virtual set, and sessions with up to six Skype panelists.

“We had no idea how our first region-wide virtual event would work—and we were thrilled with the end result,” said Aye Verckens, Marketing Communications representative at Pitney Bowes. “Our event was like a television broadcast rather than a virtual meeting. We were impressed with how easy it was to join presenters from the US, Japan, and New Zealand with our hosts in Australia, and we also appreciated how seamless it was to produce simultaneous streams in English and Japanese. Most importantly, the audience was engaged throughout.”

Ben Alcott, Damn Good’s Managing Director agreed, “The event was a huge success with participants calling it ‘particularly engaging.’ Due to the complexity of the production components, it simply wouldn’t have been economically possible without NewTek products. This event has opened up production possibilities from Pitney Bowes businesses globally, at a tenth of what they were spending previously.”

NDI protocol is key

Seamless Integration of Multiple Programming Streams NewTek technologies were critical to making the integration of live video and streaming work together seamlessly. The main program presented in English, was anchored by an MC in a green screen studio using TriCaster’s virtual set technology. Corporate presenters were in another studio covered by three NewTek NDI PTZ cameras. All inputs were fed to a TriCaster TC1 that switched and streamed the main program.

NDI is a free-to-use software technology developed by NewTek that allows video, audio, and metadata signals to be shared bi-directionally over standard Ethernet IP networks. NDI was used extensively for the project.