Hi!
I´m getting old and I admit I am kind of an old school guy. Still driving a petrol powered car, enjoying a cold no frills lager in my glass (not while driving the previously mentioned car of course?), thinking my music sounds best played from an LP on my record player. And I like to run our companys master control room with separates.

But all you cool dudes out there seem to be moving to software based systems and maybe I should try to embrace all this coolness before I kick it.

I have been playing around with vMix in our test environment for a while now and color me impressed! I can definitely see us using this for shorter on site productions, off tube commenting, smaller control rooms and so on.

But we also run a couple of master control rooms for live broadcasting that need to be up and running 24/7/365. Current setup is based on hardware video mixerS, hardware encoders/decoders, separate CG system, separate replay system etc etc. A lot of humming boxes and wires as you can understand.
But it is VERY reliable and if one part fails the rest can work while fixing the issue. I also KNOW that our videomixer can handle 20 SDI inputs without stuttering one frame (not that we´re using them all at the same time but it feels good to know the exact capacity).

Putting everything into one powerful windows computer is of course very tempting (and good for the wallet). But is it reliable enough to deliver uptime all day all year around? I´m just worried that this can be a risky all-the-eggs-in-one-basket where for example a corrupt videofile may crash an entire production or a windows update will make us in a very bad mood.

I would really appreciate some honest input regarding the above rambling. Whats your experience? What are the pitfalls?

Cheers!

Thanks for input!
As I posted we don´t use all of the 20 SDI:s. More realistically we run 4-5 SDI:s and one HDMI input. Output is one program SDI along with 2-3 SDI auxes for different purposes. We also use a couple of SDI:s for key/fill for graphics and the studio chroma. But some of those chores would be handled by vMix if replaced.
I could see some of those SDI inputs being replaced by NDI...

I think the challenge with VMix and such systems is to know it´s limits "on paper" to be able to plan setup. We cannot afford too much trial and error :-)

I have mixed feelings about it broadcast-grade usability but I lean toward it being a pretty good option for most places.

I've used vMix since 2013 so I've had the pleasure of seeing it add more features and become more stable. Outside of occasional frame drops when running 4k@59.94 (on an RTXA6000 no less) it's dependable and stable.

The biggest struggle you'll have is with I/O. Only having 2 hardware outputs (with latency) is a tough pill to swallow if you're trying to replace a hardware mixer.

When not doing IMAG I've never had a problem- it has done everything I ask. For small IMAG events (single operator, 1-4 cameras) it works pretty well.

In a large setup, I recommend pairing it with a hardware mixer/router.

I used to run vMix 24/7 for on-campus slides/announcements and found that as long as your drivers were stable (early BMD was a gamble) it would run forever.