Greetings all. So there I am, on site, cameras working, screen broadcast up, all going well - and the main vMix computer blows up. What to do? I have separate recording of the cameras so I'll not lose data - but the screens will go dark.

How are others dealing with this? Do you have secondary computers running? Is there a way to automatically fail safe over to a back up computer? If so how?

As I start getting busy, this is going to become an issue worth considering.

Thanks.

usually I run another PC with AFLME and taking a split feed from the main camera, to cover myself. But there would always be some black in the changeover - whether its a new address or just firing off the new upload.
"Its always something"

Please define "blows up" with a little more specificity.

Design of the host computer to address potential points of failure would be a good start. Dual CPU, ECC RAM, redundant PSUs fed by separate mains power, RAID storage subsystem...all standard fare in high availability hardware.

Simple "server class" hardware can be a bit of a problem since it often ignores video capabilities that vMix requires. You may be better of with "workstation class" hardware. That tends to be higher-performance for media applications.*

In the traditional video world where HD-SDI is the standard form of signaling you could use a video router at the core of your setup. That would allow you to send all signals to both main and backup computers. You'd only need to switch the source of the output streams.

I suppose that newer routers have a mix of HDMI and HD-SDI, so it could be possible in less uniform setups.

Of course, all that parallelism carries a considerable cost.

Michael

* I once worked for a broadcast graphics equipment manufacturer. We had a tough time picking motherboards for our products because popular server mobo's often had significant problems with real PCI performance and didn't support high-end graphics capabilities.

Thanks. A search brought up no useable results.

Murphy and I are old friends. I do festivals and events 200 times a year and I have seen things that go beyond anything a script writer could invent.

A full back up doubles the cost of everything. That's killer. Double computers, capture, software, wiring, etc..I am in the process of building a second computer for both vMix and Resolume, but with our dollar the lowest it has been in 12 years I'm being killed. Talk about Murphy.

That's interesting. Thanks for the post. I am using BlackMagic Shuttle 2's for the same purpose. In the case of a full computer failure, I could reroute one HDMI from the Shuttle for a live feed.

Going to take a closer look at the Atomos unit.

But as you recall, those solutions still depend on vMix or the PC working and still providing a mixed output...and my experience with multiple events (ingesting, switching, recording, streaming and outputting) has been bad. In my experience, of the 5 events, any 4 will work...for me at one time. (I assume this is a frame rate and format issue)

The ninja 2 has dropped a lot in price, that's why we bought it :)

At b&h they are 295$ if you're in the US. Add a 1TB ssd and you got a killer backup system, + a small program monitor where you can check a few things like peaking for example.

In Europe some shops also offer the unit at reduced prices, i believe we paid 320 euro.

I think the issue here might be hardware related, your system doesn't probaly have the video capability that vMix require.

I use a workstation for all my work which is high performing and i haven't encounter such a blackout. You actually did great by backing up but i think it might black out when your attempt to change over. According to what i learnt on prime power solution, most server class hardware are not efficient as they often are not capable to handle such video quality.

I hope that helps.

prime power solution