Hi everyone,

This post could go in about 3 different forums, so I'm just putting it here.

So we used vMix for the first time streaming the US Curling Olympic Trials back in mid November. We probably did about 30-40 hours of live streaming. We did the round robin and NBC came in and televised the finals on NBC Sports.



Here was our setup. Basically just a PC, a rack for video switching. We had 14 SD cameras, 6 of which were ptz cameras over the ice. An audio rack with a digital mixer. We had 9 wireless microphones (8 for the players, and 1 for a handheld, on ice reporter). And we had 3 headset mic's for the announcers and one set for me the "director/producer".



I wish I could point you to a link of the broadcast, however the US Olympic committee and NBC own the rights, and have chosen to not have any full games put up online.

Anyway, love vMix . . . it took some getting used to for the first time. The biggest thing for me was realizing which was the preview and which was the live window. A few times, I thought the preview was the live.

We're a two man operation, so we have a lot of automation built in to the system. I wrote a custom VB.Net program that creates and controls all the graphics for the broadcast. Cycling through player stats is done with the click of a button.





To really make things easy for us, we got an external xKeys keyboard. I had each keypress of that keyboard trigger a keyboard combination (ie. Control-Alt-A). Since I have multiple programs running on the PC, I needed something global to recognize those keystrokes and send the appropriate commands to the respective program. This is where AutoHotKey comes in. This watches for those keystrokes and then activates the program (vMix or my scoring software, or the digital mixer software) and can send keystrokes or perform mouse clicks. Just think lots of automation. We basically only really needed the keyboard to run the show.



I also created a bunch of custom titles. Split screen virtual sets and other cool dynamic graphics.



Anyway, all of this ties into the bugs I found, and feature requests I would love to see:

Bugs:

#1 Desktop Capture did not remember the window it was capturing when being recalled from a preset. I captured the 'Graphic Overlays' window above, which was on monitor number 3 in our setup. I had to change it every time we recalled the preset.

#2 The preset kind of forgets the one virtual set camera input.



I found that if you switch from one layer to another, it will remember it. But if you see the "none" and click on the input dropdown, it goes to none, and you have to select it again.

#3 vMix Shortcut key modifiers. So, I found an issue with the vMix shortcut keys. The key is recognized even if a modifier (Control, Alt) is being pressed at the same time. This may be by design, but it caused some issues with my setup. Since the xKeys is sending a key combination (ctrl+alt+s). Every once in a while, vMix would see the 'S' and trigger whatever shortcut was assigned to S. I think vMix should ignore keys if there is a modifier being pressed. Or alternately, vMix should incorporate modifiers into the shortcuts.

#4 Shortcut inputs are effected by moving/adding/deleting inputs. We were doing a bunch of input changing on the fly. I found this to screw up all the shortcuts I created. I think the shortcut inputs should be tied to the input name or id, rather than the index position.

#5 I tried setting a Stinger shortcut. The stinger shortcut seemed to ignore the input selected, and always performed a stinger transition on the preview. I made a workaround by making my shortcut bring up preview of my desired input, and then called another shortcut to the Stinger.

#6 Preset Delay outuput playback speed. I'd like to see the preset remember the playback speed set for a delay output list.

#7 and #8 These could be related to my graphics card. But I noticed painting issues in the input list and my delay output was choppy. This happened on two different machines. The input list would have issues when scrolling through it:



The delay output basically looked like it was skipping.

Our production PC had two GeForce 650's FYI.

VC-231-101 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 1GB 16X PCIe 3.0 Video Card 1 0.00 0.00
VC-231-101 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 1GB 16X PCIe 3.0 Video Card 1 0.00 0.00

#9 Previewing a video muted the audio. Not sure if this is by design, but I would bring up a video (advertisement) in the preview window. And every time I did that the audio would mute. I eventually created a shortcut to unmute the preview audio. Caused some issues early on.

#10 This one I can't provide too much info. Something happened during one broadcast where vMix lost it's web interface connection. At the same time some of the custom titles I created suddenly got "squished". The positions of all the text and image fields got all screwed up. I could not fix this. I kept re-adding my titles, and they would come in messed up. I tried upgrading vMix in the middle of the event and that didn't fix it either. I have yet to completely uninstall and reinstall vMix on that machine. I'm hoping that fixes it.

OK . . . still with me?

On to Feature Requests:

#1 Shortcuts for Virtual Set layer inputs. We did a bunch of split screen shots. I ended up using the virtual set input setup to do quick cuts for that shot. I would love to be able to set shortcuts for these inputs . . . select input, select layer, and set input.

#2 Auto record when starting streaming. I can't tell you how many times I forgot to hit start record when I started streaming. Would love to see a checkbox to have it start recording when the streaming starts (and stop on stop)

#3 I love the title presets. I'd love to be able to activate them with a shortcut. Select title...select...text field...select preset number?

#4 Shortcut to start/stop stream? I think I've seen this requested before. We have a different application where I'm going to create a custom page where users can control vMix without interacting with vMix at all. I think the key thing to control in that application would be to start and stop the streaming.

That's it for now.

Love all the hard work Martin puts in!

We'll be streaming the US Nationals in early March next year. Double the amount of games . . . streaming all day long, 7 days straight. Would love to be able to automate more of the system.

Thanks!

-Brian

TESN.US

Thanks Martin!

I did mean to put a disclaimer that some of my reported "bugs" could just be user error. :-)

#1 is still happening in 11.0.0.63. What's happening is, when the preset is opened, my desktop capture is showing one of my full monitors. If I right click and check the properties, it comes up with the correct window selected. When I hit OK, it shows the correct capture area (window). Seems like it's just an issue when the preset loads.

#4 I suspected switching to local mode might fix my issues. I didn't have time in the middle of the event to go through and change them all. (I think I had 50 or 60 shortcuts setup)

#5 I guess that's just not apparent that the stinger only works on the preview. If you're setting other shortcuts like cut, or fade or some other transition, it uses the input you select. I figured Stinger would do the same thing. Glad you included the flexibility to call other shortcuts!

#7 and #8 must be my graphics card(s). The machine I'm on here is old and has two Nvidea Quadro FX 570's. My render time is right around 150ms, and when I scroll through the inputs, I see the render time spike to over a second. Not a big deal. Had I known about vMix when I was building the production machine I would have upped the graphics cards. :-)

#10 That was the first thing I checked. It did look like an aspect ratio thing, but the y position of the text and image fields changed. I tried all the aspect ratio settings for those titles. It was definitely something local to that machine. I could add the exact title file on another machine and it looked fine. No matter what I tried on the production machine it loaded incorrectly. I can get a screenshot of the title from that machine (when I get it setup again).


One other thing . . .

I'm getting more into the custom titles. I wanted to create a dynamic title. Basically one that flies in from a side, but only flies in as far as it's needed, based on the length of the text in the text field. I got this working in the codebehind for the xaml. Basically I can create a dynamic storyboard and animation based on the text length. I got it working in visual studio when debugging. It doesn't seem like it works in vMix though. So the basic question is, does vMix recognize the codebehind (.vb) file? Or does it override that and only use the xaml code?

Oh and add me to the requests for title unload animations. I liked my title flying in. Would be nice to see it flyout, rather than fade out.

Thanks again!

-Brian

I would have thought it was something with the wifi on my end except it crapped out when my custom software tried to control it. It's on the same machine. I have some code that makes simple html requests to the //localhost:8088. So I can't really blame wifi on my problem.

I forgot to mention that 3 of my custom titles got messed up, not just one. What's weird is that other custom ones didn't get messed up. I tried to figure out something unique about the 3, but they were all fairly similar.

-Brian