Recently I was at a for us big sporting event that was offering the live streaming.

As the competition was held on 3 different fields there were 3 seperate streams to be watched.
the 'compagny' apparently with ties to a national tv station installed what is to me impressive equipment:
big truck with studio, personel for each feed in and outside, full communication.

As a person who basicaly just plays a little with vMix in my case because of what I deem to be a very flexible piece of software useful for many variations of presenting material I of course was curious.

Looking into the truck I saw 2 of their systems using vMix but didnt recognize the third, be it was in fact their first system or the one they were used to .
Asking which one they actually preferred they told me their first one while admitting vMix was way cheaper but looked to them less professional or had less capability.

I did notice however they did not display the names of the athletes as they were performing on screen in contrast to what was advertised.
Apparently they had a bug with the translating the date for the feed but it was only made for their system they were used to.

It turned out they didnt even know how easy and flexible vMix in fact is to quickly manually rescue the situation and typing in names in fact from anywhere in the area using tablet or phone or other laptop even fieldside to make sure the athlete performing is actually the one on the list everyone had around ( spectators and teams etc)
They had no idea about the API but they did know how to program ( been told).
As a small fish I actually gave them the httprequest code ( and printout of the helpfile) in hope to save the situation at least for the next couple of days.

Next day I looked again an yes they have very nice lower third , animated with everytime the correct name on it, they comunicated with the cameraman to verify it was indeed that athlete ready to perform ( yes somethimes an athlete drops out for example) .

BUt I was a bit flabergasted when I noticed they in fact had prepared a seperate clip for each person they needed to load first in order to display rather that a quick script to just send a name from a list in stead of the initial manual typing each.
We are talking several hundreds of names in several diciplines.

Many of us are not professional or even have material what many in this forum talk about , nor do even fully understand many of the requests we might atually not find usefull and problems some people have but we like to play with scripts, maybe 'invent' little ways to be able to produce something alone or very few people assisting with what vMix allows us to do.

I often wonder if we are less or if our ideas to be able to produce things with far less people and far less professional equipment by tinkering and using some fantasy is worth informing a professional of ideas and ways we find that helped us ?



PS. Not showing pictures as in the end for the viewer it didn't make a difference so the show was good.

Making the jump from a system that you are highly invested in, that you have configured and tweaked to do the things you need it to do, can be a very difficult one to make, especially if the product you are considering is significantly cheaper, has a seemingly less attractive and customizable GUI and requires a whole new learning curve to master. In high stress fast paced "Live Event" broadcasting, you have to go with what you know, and not take chances with the unknown...
Give it some time and more opportunities to test with vMix, and I'm sure you'll see a lot more of it's use in such "professional" environments.

Just my thoughts,

Ice