Hey guys,

I’m currently heading up a basic broadcast service for our local church in Melbourne and I’m looking at further enhancing and stabilising my broadcast to our congregation with recently upgraded hardware and potentially new broadcasting software.

Firstly, some context.. I’ve got a Surface Pro 6, i7 1.9ghz quad core CPU, 16GB RAM, 256SSD HDD, Intel UHD Graphics 620, Windows 10 home edition.
I’ve also got a MacBook Pro quad core i5 2.4ghz CPU, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD HDD, Intel Iris 665 graphics, running latest version of Catalina.

I’ve been using a combination of OBS and you tube live to broadcast our church services and have mostly been getting good results.
I’m currently pumping the feed via a Canon SL2 camera, connected via a AverMedia Gamer GC550 external video card and Roland Rubix 24 external sound card, both connected via USB 3.0 and into my Mac or PC.

Also running a bunch of Apature Amaran series LED lights (3 x LED’s including a transulent white umbrella for the main light).

I’m running the stream through a Telstra 4G hotspot (as our church does not have internet) and I’m getting about 7000-9000mbps upload, so I’m running full 1920x1080, 30FFP video, 320kpbs audio and seems to work fine, no buffering or dropped frames.

Microphone is a combination of Shure mic’s and a Deity V.Lav Omnidirectional Lavalier mic that sits on the preacher’s tie. Works really well.

My biggest concern is the stability of OBS as I’ve recently had some very stressful run in’s with the product during the Sunday service broadcast, where the audio tracks (for our worship and singing) wasn’t coming through and it was tested perfectly fine 24 hours earlier with NO changes to the config or my computer. I had to reimport all the music again and reintroduce it to the feed live today which was a huge head ache.

This has now got me thinking about investing in some better, more stable encoding and broadcasting software and I’m looking at vmix as a possible option.

The only issue is I am very used to the way of doing ‘scenes’ In OBS, whereby I have setup 4 or 5 scenes specifically for the Sunday service e.g

Scene 1 – Pre-Service loading screen (where I have used canva with a downloaded animated mp4 file that says ‘commencing shortly’…
Scene 2 – Live stream, which then activates the SLR camera and the lav mic… this is the actual English service goes for abourt 30 minutes
Scene 3 – We have what’s called “Prayer time” where we cut to precorded messages from other people, and some more hymns played via mp3 music.
Scene 4 – Live stream again, same preacher, but now the second part of the service
Scene 5 – Outtro or conclusion with some more worship music played including some Christian hymns

I usually prep these scenes on a weekly basis as the music is always changing as it the text that’s written on the waiting and outro screens.

Is there an easy tutorial that I can follow that explains to me the differences on how I would go about using vmix instead of OBS?
I also understand OBS is both PC and Mac but vmix is PC only?
Will my hardware above suffice or will I need to invest in a new PC/laptop?

Also, does vmix include lower thirds and waiting screen countdowns, etc similar to a product like wirecast? I want to get away from having to create everything in something like adobe after effects or yet ANOTHER product and I'd much rather just do it from a single application. Does vmix provide this capability?

Thanks to all you expert Vmixer's out there and looking forward to reading the replies to my post ! :)

Cheers

R.

Hi, Am also in Melbourne and happy to help where I can. Please PM me. Andrew