Hello,

I am deciding about moving to Vmix from years with Wirecast. I will be using Vmix for live streaming sports productions. As you may know, Wirecast has five separate layers for assets. Since the cameras get switched in my external Roland switcher, I tend to put the camera feed on the bottom layer and it basically never gets turned off. So all other assets go on layers above and once you push the cameras live, they stay live until you take them off. This means if you play a few commercials, after the last commercial, the camera feed is already there underneath. Meaning I do not need to select the camera to put it in the preview and then push it live again.

In learning Vmix, it seems if I have the camera input live, playing a commercial would take the cameras away. So if I wanted to go back to cameras at the end of a few commercials, I would need to select the camera input, place it in the preview and push it live. During a 4 hour football broadcast, that is a lot of selecting the camera feed!

Is there a way in Vmix to recreate the Wirecast of approach of always having the camera input active etc...?

P.S. We also have a lot of commercials that only consist of a logo with a voiceover. For these we have a semi-transparent gray layer on the screen which allows for the live camera feed to be seen underneath. At this point, to recreate this I assume I would need to have the camera input be part of every commercial's layers?

Thanks for your help

As previous beta tester of wirecast I can highly recommend switching to vMix. vMix has a different concept than wirecast. vMix is more comparable with a hardware mixer. So I highly recommend getting used to the vMix way of doing.
But, there is a way of corse to mimic the wirecast way. You put your cam to live and whatever you want to show above it so to say -like the layers in wirecast- you use the overlays 1-4 for that. One thing to remember with vMix is that you have access to everything to be controlled with shortcuts or commands. Make use of it as is simplyfies productions a lot. Every input can have multiple layers (10) as well. So another option would be to add the camera and put the other inputs as a seperate layer into that shot and switch layers on/off with a shortcut. There are also miniMixes that can be use as overlay or in layers.
Have a look at vmix tutorials to give a an idea how to use overlays and layers.

Just follow as I said.
1. set you cam into program.
2. add other sources like commercials, ads, sponsors or what have you.
3. Under each input you see numbers. 1 2 3 4. Click these numbers (turns red) and the input will be shown above the program (cam from #1).
4. click the number again and the red indicator goes off and your cam is visible again.

If you have a lot of clips you can load them in a list.
You can set a trigger (on complete) to turn the overlay (1 2 3 4) off. This makes just one click to overlay an input and it goes off magically when it ends.

A possible way to do this is to use the Layers each input comes with with vMix mixes. Your camera will be the Layer 1 by default so merely add a vMix input as layer 2 and default that mix to a "clear" image that doesn't alter the camera image (a zeroed alpha image). Then you can set your advertisements up in list inputs for each ad break that play the ads serially from the list in the Mix used for layer 2 and make that clear image be the last item in the list so the ad break ends by the images over the camera going back to the "clear image" input. Then set up triggers so when the clear image is replaced by an add the sound for the program is cut off and when the clear image is restored so is the program sound.

Under the particular input that you are activating, there is a button labeled "audio". Make sure it is enabled (green). Normally this is the default when you add new media inputs, but you may have accidentally turned it off during your experiments. If you still don't get any audio, go to the audio mixer and make sure it is outputting to the master audio channel.