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.

So, first, a few questions.

1) Is there a particular reason you're opting for vMix Call over Zoom?

Both have their pros and cons, but Zoom seems like an overall better fit for your situation.

2) Who's in charge of setup?

Someone has to be in charge of setting up the vMix & the controls. Are people setting up their own workflows or are you just providing them?

3) Is someone on hand who can fix things if things need to be fixed?

Now a few statements:

vMix Calls are (relatively) simplistic implementations of WebRTC.

Someone enters the call number and they're connected to that input. That's it.

So setting them up not only requires access to something to get that call number, but it also requires them to have it in advance to give it to whomever they're going to give it to.

The vMix Call shortcuts mavik mentioned won't really do anything for you if you're the one hosting the calls, which you are.

The simplest way to do this would probably be to just have someone else do it.

Find out their requirements ahead of time, then make sure they have everything they need to fulfill those requirements (and nothing more, if you're concerned about that, which you say you are).

They tell you "Hey, we'll need a remote guest" and you give them the credentials to pass to whomever they need to pass them to (again, I'd recommend Zoom), and build them the preset they need & the appropriate buttons to push to use it.

Then the next person comes in & they get their own preset & their own buttons and so on.

Someone has to build it. Either they do it or you do it.