This is a setup that was created by SLP for Greenwood Community High School that took a number of years to implement to the extent that it has(due to budgetary restrictions). The idea initially started when the CEO of SLP was in middle school and completed his sophomore year of high school. This initially was a completely mobile setup but recently because of NDI and Dante we are able to accomplish a main static control room for all of the locations that we broadcast from (football/soccer field, main gym, baseball field, softball field, etc.) and this greatly reduced the setup time and allows for us to have much better control solutions. This is a very versatile setup that could be used in other high schools or broadcast environments.

The video switching that we are doing is being handled all within VMix. This allows us to directly integrate NDI, have dynamic titles, use multi-camera replay, encode to more than one platform, have backup recordings in different encapsulations, and obviously all of the other features in VMix. We use a powerful Dell workstation to run VMix, Dante VIA, and Bome Midi translator, and over the years a number of upgrades have been made to the platform.

Rather than using expensive purpose-made controllers like X-keys, we used midi controllers for control surfaces for VMix. It is important to note that using multiple controllers in VMix requires some Midi translation for VMix to understand the differences between the different controllers to take data from them and return the lighting data to the controllers. The software takes the incoming midi messages and then translates the command to the one midi link actually going into VMix.

The primary mixer is VMix. For ambient audio, we use a couple of Rode Video Mics connected to a few of the cameras, and then we take the embedded NDI audio in VMix. For commentators, it's a little bit more complicated.

The cameras we used are a combination of Canon Vixia G30s, G40s, and G50s camcorders but all of them are standardized down to 1920x1080 59.94p. For NDI encoders we used six of the BirdDog Mini's. POE has also helped to reduce a lot of power cabling that would be otherwise required. The camera mount also makes it a compact solution as pictured above.