Several weeks ago, I went to a friend’s wedding, and I was given the responsibility of livestreaming the wedding ceremony. I don’t have a background in video recording or streaming, but I was able to learn how to do the livestream within about 10 minutes. If I can do it, so can you (or whoever ends up livestreaming your event). I’ve put this post together to help you stream your events, whether it is for a Anand Karaj, Nikah, Haldi, etc.
In this post, I’ll go over the following:
- Setting up a Facebook group for your livestream wedding event(s).
- Getting setup with a GoPro and the GoPro app, for livestreaming to your Facebook group.
- Some general tips that I learned, when I did a livestream for a friend’s wedding back in August.
With that said, let’s jump into the essentials.
Create a Private Facebook Group
- By creating a private Facebook group, you can achieve the following:
- You’ll be able to have a single place to provide your virtual guests with status updates.
- You’ll get to decorate your group with pictures, a cover photo, your wedding hashtags, and more.
- If you like the cover photo in the screenshot, you can find customizable wedding logos over here.
- You’ll be able to broadcast your livestream from the Facebook group.
Now that we have your Facebook group setup, let’s move on to getting the camera situation figured out.
Figure Out Your Camera Situation
For this post, I’ll use the GoPro as the example, since that is the camera I used. There are two things you’ll need for using the GoPro. First, you’ll the GoPro Quick App installed on your mobile device. The second is, you’ll need your GoPro camera. You can buy a GoPro camera off of a site like Amazon.com for a couple hundred dollars, or you can rent one for much cheaper for about $40 per day from businesses like GearBASE Camera Rentals.
Once you have the camera and the app, you can follow the instructions below:
- GoPro Quick App for your mobile device. This app will allow you to control your GoPro remotely from your mobile device.
- Once you have the GoPro Quick App, you’ll need to pair it with your GoPro camera. The video below provides instructions on how to do that:
3. Now that you’ve paired your GoPro to your GoPro Quick App, you’re ready to start streaming. The video below provides instructions on how to do that:
General Tips
Once your stream starts, don’t forget to drop a link into your Facebook group, so that all your virtual guests can watch!
Below are some general tips we have, based on our personal experiences:
1. Stream Publicly – When you start the livestream, make sure that you’ve set the livestream to be Public. If it is not set to Public, your guests may not be able to see the livestream. I ran into this issue multiple times, personally.
2. Invest in a Tripod– Not only will buying in or renting a tripod free you of having to have someone physically hold the camera the entire time, but it will generally do a better job than a human does, when it comes to minimizing camera shakiness. When I did a ceremony livestream for my friend’s Anand Karaj back in August, I found it super handy.
3. Keep Your GoPro or Camera Plugged In – My experience with the GoPro was that it ate through battery power quickly. About halfway through my friend’s Anand Karaj, I realized I needed to plug the GoPro into a power supply. I had to duck out in the middle of the ceremony and scramble around in search of a power strip. Save yourself the headache by keeping the GoPro plugged in right from the beginning.
4. Designate a Facebook Group Admin for During Event(s) – At any given time there were between 50-60 people watching the live stream and commenting. I found it helpful to designate myself as the group admin during the event. That way I could respond to comments, in case virtual guests were having any technical difficulties. In fact, when the groom arrived at the bride’s house, I realized that I didn’t setup the livestream to be Public (see tip #1). If it wasn’t for virtual guests telling me that they couldn’t access the livestream, I would have never realized that I needed to make the livestream public.
Alright. That’s all I have. If you have any questions, or run into any issues with your livestream, let me know in the comments and we’ll do what we can to help!
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