My clients and I love, love, love MultiView and use it for every show. MultiViews are at the core of virtual panel discussions which are more necessary and used in these pandemic times than ever before. There are a number of elements of multiviews, though, that are slow to set-up, don't work as expected or require work-arounds - some of which are, thankfully, available through shortcuts. Here's my short-list of problem descriptions and feature requests for consideration.

1. Copying position settings from one overlay to the next in the same multiview.
While there is currently this great feature throughout Vmix that lets one copy settings from one input to another, there is no apparent way to directly copy the settings from one overlay layer to another. Here's the problem, the current process is exacting, but slow. I find it necessary to use paper and pencil to capture and then manually input values rather than copying and pasting each individual value. A "copy from" function with a drop down showing all the other overlays in the current input's multiview might be one way to improve this.

As much as I would like to see related functionality like "align" and "distribute," I realize that this could require a greater architectural change in Vmix; working across all overlays in a single multiview simultaneously, I'm not sure this would be worth the time and effort.

2. Borders and their impact on merges
Sometimes you just need, or your clients want matching borders on the overlay boxes. The method of doing this in traditional production switchers is adding a border and controlling its type, width, color and softness or transparency from within the "key" settings of each overlay. In Vmix, this requires a bit more work; first creating a color background (the border color) and then adding an overlay with a slighly zoomed out image (typically video) - and then adding that composite as an overlay in another input. The problem surfaces when you try to merge that input with another. The backgrounds (borders) move independently of their overlays; they aren't bound together. So, you end up having to make a decision about whether to give up the merge capability in favor of borders or give up the borders in favor of the ability to properly merge.

I'd love to see Vmix adopt a similar approach to traditional production switchers for adding/managing borders; either including this functionality in the "position" interface for each overlay or in its own interface - complete with the "copy from" functionality described in #1 above. I would expect that taking this approach would also solve the issue with "unbound" borders moving independently during merges.

Also, over the last few years we've seen a semi-transparent beveled edge border become increasingly popular. It would be great if that border type could be included too.

3. Changing overlay inputs on the fly
In a fast-paced, live, virtual panel discussion, it's hard to predict how the conversation will go and what parings, tripplings or other groupings of moderator and panelists will be needed. It takes a lot of time to open the input to multi-view and change inputs used in the overlay. Thankfully, you can do this in shortcuts and I've used a Streamdeck to launch these shortcuts. The time it takes to set these up is non-trivial, though, as you have to plan for each possible combination of panelists in, for instance, the left box of a two-box layout or the right box - and with 7 panelists and a moderator, that's a lot of possible combinations. Then, if you have a three-box layout, with moderator always on top, you have to set up all those possible combination again. I tried to use mix busses for this purpose, but you can't have more than three.

Though I don't yet have a strong opinion on how to improve this, one thing I wonder is if we could have access to this through a web interface, so that an assistant can do this, rather than the technical director himself. I did have an assistant operate the Stream Deck for me as I called, "two box, Jake on left, Martin on right" and that worked pretty well, but the set-up time was significant.

How can we improve this?

Thanks.

-David

I think I heard there will be something coming in vMix 24.



That is a good example how the Dynamic Inputs feature could help in setting up and managing the shortcuts:
https://forums.vmix.com/...-Functions-for-Shortcuts

Maybe you want to +1 it. :)

Yes, but I believe only 3 are available at a time - which isn’t enough.

+1

+1 to everything that has been suggested here.

X-Y-Z axes? I agree, this is not a CAD software...

And many +1's to a Control Z (Undo) feature.

-L