Hello friends,

Somerville Media Center in Massachusetts has as specific use case and we're looking for help.

We are a community media organization providing access to production tools and cable television channel time to people from all walks of life. It's our mission to work to include people who are historically excluded from mass media including non-english speakers, immigrants, unhoused persons, senior citizens, and more - who come to us on a wide spectrum of technology skills. It is in our interest to make our tools simple in order to lower the barrier to entry for our community members. Here is our use case.

Our live "hot set" is a live, self-service micro production studio that produces 30-minute programs back to back to back. We're using a JVC KM-IP8S4 vMix Studio Switcher with two PTZ cameras, an iMac, and vMix Call enabled as video sources. No matter how much training and support we provide to our amateur producers, we fear that providing them with either direct access to the vMix GUI or the recommended JVC control surface will enable some of our lowest level users to accidentally press some button that "breaks" their live production. It's likely that these mishaps could impact the programs scheduled immediately after their programs, too.

So, we need to customize a simpler control interface for this studio and we've chosen the Elgato Stream Deck Studio (the 1RU rack mount device with 32 buttons) as a control surface replacement. We'll develop shortcuts for selecting sources, macros, and even some controls for the PTZ cameras.

But we are stumped for how to control vMix Call. That seems to require access to the GUI to setup calls, join calls, and answer incoming calls.

Does anyone have any advice on how we can build macros to handle calls and assign them to Stream Deck buttons, or maybe reveal only a portion of the VMix Calls interface without revealing the rest of the controls, or any other clever solution for how our amateur producers might enable remote guests to join their productions?

I'll be glad to hear any thoughts - thank you very much.