I saw the news the other day that you guys had written a video mixer for Linux, with integrated Chyrons, transitions, and all that. That's great work, but I do have a question about the motivation behind it.
As a former television technical director, I was curious what made you choose to write a custom software video mixer. The alternative, of course, would be picking up a cheap digital mixer, like a Grass Valley, and encoding its program output instead. Was the impetus financial in nature? Technical, since making a video mixer train work is a little challenging unless you have experience (reference signals, CCU if you have fancy-enough cameras, and so on)? Are you mixing audio in your software suite as well, or do you have an external mixer? (The rationale for each is the same, IMO.)
I'm just curious. Not saying the work isn't valued, just steaming ahead on writing a custom software mixer is an interesting decision. Production houses usually have old digital mixers in storage and might be willing to donate to your effort, too.
Launches are done in the Baltic Sea, 30-40 km. east of the Danish island Bornholm. In order to stream live we managed to get a wi-fi connection going from Bornholm to the mission control ship 40 kilometers away, but we couldn't reliably get enough bandwidth to stream all our camera positions to Bornholm. Furthermore internet connection on Bornholm is not very good. The result being that we needed to do the videomixing at sea. Only problem was that the broadcast studio, and thus the people that need to do the vdeomixing, were placed in Copenhagen. The result being this videomixer where we can send two streams from the launch site at sea: the livefeed and a mosaiq of available camera positions. The studio in Copenhagen can then remotely mix the livefeed based on the mosaiq using a webbased interface, or a commandline.
Ah, that makes sense, so you're sending a program and sorta-preview from this custom tool to a fuller production studio and it's remote-driven. That makes more sense.
With the studio consisting of our speaker, Peter who wrote the snowmix mixer, me and a few laptops in a backroom in the local planetarium. So a studio is probably overstating it. But hey, that's what you can get with a budget of 0.
I saw the news the other day that you guys had written a video mixer for Linux, with integrated Chyrons, transitions, and all that. That's great work, but I do have a question about the motivation behind it.
As a former television technical director, I was curious what made you choose to write a custom software video mixer. The alternative, of course, would be picking up a cheap digital mixer, like a Grass Valley, and encoding its program output instead. Was the impetus financial in nature? Technical, since making a video mixer train work is a little challenging unless you have experience (reference signals, CCU if you have fancy-enough cameras, and so on)? Are you mixing audio in your software suite as well, or do you have an external mixer? (The rationale for each is the same, IMO.)
I'm just curious. Not saying the work isn't valued, just steaming ahead on writing a custom software mixer is an interesting decision. Production houses usually have old digital mixers in storage and might be willing to donate to your effort, too.