A Streamer's Pedalboard

For anyone who isn't already aware, I do a lot of streaming for my local Super Smash Brothers Melee community, or rather, I used to. Ever since my senior year workload increased, it's been one thing after another: graduating, looking for a job, getting adjusted to a new job, whatever. It's been hard for me to justify continuing to stream and push footage out at the rate that I used to back when I was in college not too long ago. In general, appreciation for the stream (especially at the weekly) was waning dramatically with our weekly series becoming incredibly stale and losing PR player attendance. In addition to all that, streaming is a hell of a hassle, requiring me to be the first one in and the last one out from events, cutting drastically into my time to actually enjoy the game, and forcing me to carry around a large amount of equipment that takes an incredible amount of time to set up and tear down. 

"Oh, he'll stream his home commute but not fucking MoaL? Fuck this."

I was incredibly burnt out on streaming in general, and lack of respect for taking my time to do it from newer and out-of-Pittsburgh players caused me to just not want to do it any more. Still, I volunteered to still broadcast Pitt's Saturday tournaments out of a sense of duty and feeling that I owed it to our community, but even 200 BPM reminded me what I hated about streaming. It proved to me that the newer generation of Melee players just take stream and the people that provide it for granted. Constant questions of "when can I expect to see my VODs" from these newer kids reminded me of just how annoying it is to deal with these VOD-monsters. They hound you for footage of them getting 4 stocked or beating someone's secondary/tertiary or timing each other out on Dreamland so they can jack off to it or something. Just an FYI, it's because of people like this that I don't go out of my way to cut footage anymore; just go watch or save the Twitch VODs while they're still up. I wanted to just up and quit streaming completely after that event, and not even stream the bigger stuff in region. Besides, the tear down and set up time alone made getting the stream up and running on Fridays after a day of work to be a hassle that I really felt wasn't worth the return, given the circumstances.

"hey dude why aren't my vods from the tournament yesterday on youtube yet"

However, over the following weeks, I started to think about why I didn't really enjoy our weekly, MoaL, as much as I used to despite wanting to play Melee more now than I did at any point over the past two years. Although a lot of things I dislike are out of my control and aren't even something that can be fixed by TO staff, I can at least help it along by getting involved again and doing what I can to foster a better attitude, possibly dragging some of our old heads back in the process. Stream gave upper-level, PR MoaL-ers something to do in their downtime. Without stream and with limited setups, these higher level players had nothing to do but sit around in the cramped, less-than-desirable MoaL environment. Honestly, the tipping point for me was when I saw that people were starting to think about starting bringing new streaming setups for MoaL. I already owned all this high-quality equipment I bought out-of-pocket as well as all the graphics and software; there had to be a way I could streamline part of my process so that streaming MoaL even in an environment that I still don't fully enjoy (as in, not a Pittsburgh tournament from 2+ years ago) didn't seem like as much of a hassle.

The first thing I targeted was my setup/teardown time. It takes me a minimum of 25 minutes to hook everything up, then usually 10 or so to configure the software. This is, of course, after all the equipment is hauled into the venue AND unboxed. I utilize the BenQ RL2445HM + Sewell adapter setup, so I have two monitors that I supply in addition to my 2 full boxes of equipment and additional loose equipment that is piled into the fold-able wagon that I use to make hauling all this shit manageable. Overall setup time is typically 45 minutes to an hour, removing all time I have as a player to warm up or talk with people I only see at smash stuff. Teardown time is typically identical, so my tournament experience overall is padded by two hours for every event that I decide to stream. All this equipment has to be sorted and packed in a specific way, so I can't even really have anyone help me.

Wagons were the best idea for the Pitt Smash Club EVER. Note: Keep away from Bambi

I started to think about other kinds of event services that operated with a similar amount and layout of tech. Bands have plenty of setup and teardown that they need to do in all sorts of environments, so what sort of techniques to they use to simplify their tech layouts? I remembered a guitarist's pedalboard, a device where all of their effects pedals required for their set are pre-wired in series and affixed to a singular board, with only one input and output even though the board holds many different pedals. What if I strapped as much streaming equipment as I could to a sheet of plywood and then pre-wired everything I could? I could cut down on up to 30 minutes of the setup process with this, if it was feasible. Thankfully, I wouldn't have to design this "streamer's pedalboard" to be able to withstand being stepped on like a real pedalboard, so I could draft on just a flat sheet of cheap plywood.

Main board design

Sub-board design

My first idea was to consolidate everything to just one board, but I quickly changed this to two boards, one main board holding capture device, power, mixer and the other core streaming devices, and a sub-board that lived closer to the player monitor that had the console. This is because I realized that my laptop and the players were typically long distances from one another, separated by audio and HDMI cabling, so the boards had to be split. The only cables that I couldn't consolidate on board were the HDMI cables that would run between boards and the monitor, and the two XLR microphone cables for commentators. There are additional cables that run between the boards, but one end is affixed to either one board or the other, so it's still a massive time saver. Only having to run 5 cables between two massive boards is much easier than having to connect 12 separate ones that are wrapped up in boxes. I also included space in my design for posts to wrap cables around, although this ended up working differently in the final version.

Simple "blocking" for sub-board

Simple "blocking" for main board 

I blocked out the design on my floor, took some measurements, and headed up to Home Depot. Instead of plywood, I picked up some 1/2" thick MDF for $10 (which they cut for me for free) as it has a much smoother surface and wouldn't necessarily need covered with a cloth or something to be carried easily. To mount everything to the board, I decided on industrial strength velcro. You can pick up a roll of this for $30 for 15' x 2", although less involved setups wouldn't even need a fourth of this. I ended up using barely over 1/3 of the roll, and they sell the industrial strength in a wide variety of sizes, so make sure you don't end up buying more than you need if you plan on doing something like this for your setup.

HUGE trip to Heme Depot. Really had trouble fitting this all in my car.

Instead of posts to wrap excess cabling around, I ended up just making my own velcro cable ties out of extra velcro tape, then sticking that bundle of cables to the board using the tie itself. Cables that are "permanent" to the board are kept down with a cable tie that is then stapled into the MDF via a staple gun. One staple across part of the trimmed tie, then another staple through the tie. The staples are then hammered down into the board so that they lay flat. It doesn't matter if the staples don't actually bore down into the MDF, but just that they are flush. The cables themselves here don't hold much weight, and the big stuff is all held onto the board by velcro, so as long as they feel as if they're held on well, they'll be fine.

Completed main board 

Completed sub-board

The final product turned out nicer than I could have hoped, and although I definitely could have made each board a little smaller, I'm more than happy with these as a first go. I might change or update these to include more cabling, possibly including the 2 25' long HDMI cables that take up far too much space in the 1 remaining, now-lighter equipment box. Now that there's just one box, it's a lot more feasible for me to accept help from the many who are willing to give me a hand tearing down and setting up. These two boards should let me set up and tear down a MoaL stream in just about 15 minutes, so my "quality of life" while streaming an event should go up considerably.

Final product

Thank you to everyone in the Pittsburgh scene who supports me in streaming, as well as all the people who constantly put in the work so that I have tournaments to stream at. Thank you to Carroll for letting me stream/record as a random new kid at my first ever event and got me started in this crazy community that I love so much. Thanks to all the out-of-region homies that thank me for streaming the events that they come out to.

Proud to say that stream is back at MoaL starting this week. Fridays starting @ ~6:00 PM EST on the PGHNEOH Twitch channel.