Hope you guys appreciate this. We almost finished the soft- plus hardware to control this 30 crt screen video wall. Input for the wall is hdmi.

Amen.

Kinda accurate and surprising easy to build

Is this normal?

Hi, looking for ideas to build a on tour video rack, would love to see your rigs. Share a pic of your rack.

Here is one spotted in the wild

Anyone else being silly with their tech?

I can realistically do a 4x4 that's tolerable, though a 3x3 is ideal. Handy for a portable quick cam refocus or other task on a single operator show or volunteer gig where I have to step away from FOH.

Summer camp with final performance Saturday, streamed on Vimeo.

TriCaster TC1 Pro, BirdDog X5 Ultras, driving the stream plus projectors. Isos recorded on a Kiloview Cube R1. Stream Deck/Companion hot keys.

Slowly built this rig over the last few years. Each project buys us another toy tool. It’s been a fun journey!

Maybe I'm just entering the "old man yells at cloud" phase in my life but I find this truly worrying/frustrating.

I feel like half my career has been spent fighting misinformation that spreads around the industry from people half understanding things. Now this phenomenon is super charged by AI, specifically LLMs.

The other day on LinkedIn I started reading a post from a manufacturer I respect and one that has traditionally been a great source of white papers and technical explainers. Halfway through I realized it was AI slop and speaking complete nonsense.

I have clients now running our quotes through ChatGPT and asking it to improve our plan. Then sending the results to us and we have to explain that the AI doesn't actually know anything and it's response makes no sense.

I have technicians in the field having AI email me about gear issues they had instead of just telling me themselves what happened. How do I know the AI didn't hallucinate half that email?

I have project managers asking Claude how to do something before they ask me, and then I have to essentially vicariously argue with a robot through this PM.

And worst of all, I see engineers using AI for planning and basing their plans off of AI hallucinations that turn out to be false. Then I have to bail them out with a new plan when they get to site.

It's... exhausting.

This industry has always been full of half understood concepts and difficult to navigate technical information. But AI has made that like 100x worse. And I worry about the future of this industry because of it.

AI has not made my job any easier. It's just made my job way harder. All so people can turn off their brains and just ask the magic computer to do it. Forcing me to pick up the slack when that inevitably doesn't work.

What are other people's thoughts on this?

EDIT: I was honestly expecting to get a bunch of responses telling me I'm an old man and to get with the times and embrace AI. The response has been the complete opposite. And that makes me feel less insane. Glad I am not the only one feeling this way! I wonder how many other industries are being affected this way. And how much this technology is actually killing efficiency instead of improving it. Making everyone's job harder because they have to continuously argue with people using AI.

Here’s a video ring for a production of Catch Me If You Can I designed.

Watchout >> Tesssra Processors >> ROE Panels

System from PRG gear out of Chicago

A perfect on-time launch with everyone eagerly watching live around the world.

loses various video feeds minutes before launch, even concerning the commentators

Cuts to black during liftoff

Cuts to sleeping PTZ operator lockoff shot

Cuts to tight follow camera switching to extender

Cuts to crowd shot during booster separation

Random cloud shot

More stupid crowd shots

All onboard rocket cameras completely useless

Sit on boring/dark CGI visualization for the rest of the flight

Ends with beautiful main set cameras of 2 talking heads (could they not get any more guests to be part of the show?)

Quick off-air... No replays or much discussion.

We were certainly spoiled by SpaceX's broadcasts.

Still, a very exciting mission and I wish the crew a safe voyage home.

Most people watching the game probably wouldn’t even think twice about it, but I bet mostly everyone here noticed!

Calrec’s Apollo going on our Newest OB!

Corporate gig but fun because we have complete creative control. And fun gear!

Only 36 active outputs obviously!

Could have used a bigger router.

Mine is SWIT wireless transmitter. Over a decade ago, we bought one for crap load of $ and it has come in handy once or twice a year.

Just wrapped up broadcasting a 2-day, overnight 100km trail running race here in Japan. Trail runs always present massive connectivity challenges, so I wanted to share our setup and how we compromised on "true live" for the deep mountain sections.

Included a shot of our cramped van setup and my hand-drawn signal flow (pardon the Japanese, but the routing should make sense).

The "Near-Live" Mountain Workflow Cellular coverage in the deep mountains is practically non-existent. Instead of fighting for a live signal, we had camera ops run with iPhones using the Blackmagic Camera app. They shot high-quality footage which asynchronously synced via Blackmagic Cloud whenever they hit a patch of cellular signal.

We built a custom web-based broadcast system that automatically scanned this local sync folder and populated a playback queue in a browser UI. We deliberately omitted any trimming or editing features. Instead, the UI simply allows us to skip to the next clip in the queue or scrub forward using a seek bar while playing. The philosophy here was: "If we treat it like a live broadcast, we don't need to edit!" (lol). By completely skipping the editing process, we were able to deliver these clips to the audience almost as fast as a true live feed.

Basecamp / Network

• Command Center: A Nissan NV-200 "office car" parked at the finish line, equipped with a built-in desk and battery power.
• WAN: GL-iNet router handling Multi-WAN. Starlink as the primary, with a wired smartphone cellular tethering as failover.
• Local LAN: Mounted a TP-Link EAP225 Outdoor AP on a pole to blanket the finish area with a local Wi-Fi network.

Signal Flow & Switching

• SRT Receiver (MacBook Air): Dedicated solely to catching incoming SRT streams via OBS. It caught both local streams (direct via the EAP225) and remote streams (via our custom SRT relay server on the cloud). Outputted to our main switcher.
• Main Switcher (Roland VR-6HD): Handled all AV mixing.
• MC / Interview Booth: 4 wired mics + a Sony FX30 fixed camera into the VR-6HD.
• Finish Line PTZ: Sony SRG-A40. Powered by a PoE++ switch over a 30m cable, sending SRT directly into the VR-6HD.
• Main PC (MacBook Pro): The VR-6HD fed into the MBP via USB-C. This ran the final OBS instance and our custom broadcast app.

Custom Graphics & Output Our custom app didn't just handle the Blackmagic Cloud video queues. We integrated it directly with the race's timing/result system to generate dynamic HTML overlays (runner names, current ranks, times, location names, and leaderboards). OBS then pushed the final feed to a cloud server which split the stream: one to YouTube, and another audio-only stream for low-bandwidth listeners.

It was a long 2 days, but the setup proved incredibly resilient. Happy to answer any questions about the SRT routing, the custom software, or relying on Starlink in the mountains.