I can think of one top reason why Zoom is the best option: Ease of broadcasting. This is by far Zoom's best feature. This is very significant.splayer7 wrote: Mon Nov 08, 2021 8:47 am I am sorry, but as someone that prides myself on my broadcast quality, albeit just Sacrament meeting, and our bi-annual Stake Conference, I can't possibly think that Zoom is the best option.
I'd wager that most tech specialists don't know how to set up a proper broadcast outside of Zoom. Many small wards and branches have someone who at best is just comfortable with a laptop. With Zoom, you just use a device with 1 camera, 1 mic, utilize a recurring meeting, distribute that recurring meeting link, and you're good to go. Each week you just use a phone/tablet/laptop/mevo camera/whatever, open up Zoom, and start the non-interactive broadcast on the preset recurring meeting. Zoom itself is excellent for clean delivery to multiple end points.
Those few of us who can outdo Zoom usually end up on the #2 option: YouTube for broadcasting, and teredek or OBS for mixing. This approach gives us all the whistles and bells and options we desire. Our stake does this, and the end result is a crisp broadcast with audio and video, and easiest delivery for the end user. The cost is that the tech assistants have more work, and the stake technology assistant has much more work.
That's definitely not Zoom's fault.the Church has plenty of money to produce professional style broadcasts, but they were using Zoom as their encoding. The audio was all over the place. The noise cancellation was going crazy and the music sound was subpar. Zoom is good for speaking style meetings. Not so good for music. Even the video they played for prelude had glitchy sound and the video stream was jumpy. Every time during the meeting that they panned the camera, the video stuttered
Zoom doesn't "fix" up the audio, it just sends it out. Good audio just needs a good mic or mics + mixer. Bad audio is likely the fault of the mic settings or hardware at some point. (I know in my stake, two of the wards have laptops where the input line feed has a Windows setting called AGC, for automatic gain control. When checked, Windows does an awful job trying to fix the audio which causes square waveforms all over the place. When we turned off AGC and adjusted the volume correctly, we got crystal clear speaker audio.)
Zoom also doesn't stutter on video, that is the fault of the hardware which is not able to encode fast enough, and Zoom is very lenient. On a prior test, I got Zoom running using emulation on Linux on a Raspberry Pi 4, and still managed to get 25 frames per second without stutter. I was floored that Zoom performed so well on such weak hardware.
As for your temple dedication meeting, yes, Zoom wasn't the right call. They should be using YouTube. Those of us operating on a small shoestring budget have found ways to produce broadcasts with HD video and crystal clear audio.