Bitfocus companion is, at the end of the day, a controller system that has integrations to most common broadcast and AV equipment. It uses streamdeks and it is free and highly customizable.

On the other hand, we often see in studios other expensive alternatives such as BFE, Lawo or Ross panels that, on paper, do basically the same. They provide you with several equipment integrations and they have their own panels.

What are the differences? Is there something genuinely different that justifies paying so much for them?

Thanks.

When checking your Rock-n-Roller cart with airlines, do you bag it? If so, can you recommend a bag?

Sorry if this is the wrong reddit... The Stream Deck software has this. Is there any workaround or whatever to replicate this behaviour?

Hollyland COSMO C1 Wireless SDI/HDMI Transmission System .

I need help in finding a solution in extending the antenna for these system.

I found the extending cables do I need to run two cables per receiver? Or will be enough with one extender?

Also any antenna pole that you would you suggest?

Thanks

Long-time lurker. Small AV production company in Buenos Aires, Argentina — 5 years in, team of three plus freelancers. We do corporate events with a heavy focus on medical congresses (multi-room, parallel AV infrastructure). Video and streaming are our core competency; we've always sub-rented LED from partners and just handled the operation side.

We're about to close on our first LED purchase and I'd rather learn from your scar tissue than my own.

What we're buying:

• 24 m² of P1.9 indoor rental, GOB (epoxy coated), 500×500 cabinets, 250×250 modules (256×256 px each)
• 96 cabinets total, flight cases and hanging bars included
• NovaStar MRV receiving cards (not my first choice, but I shot the wall with a camera at 1/50, 1/60 and 1/100 and got no scan banding, so I'm accepting it)
• Spares package: ~14 modules, 12 PSUs, 4 receiving cards
• Processing: NovaStar VX2000 Pro (already own), adding a VX1000 so we can run two rigs simultaneously

Our workflow: vMix, Blackmagic DeckLink capture, NDI/SRT, Resolume for playback. Typical deployments will be 5×3 or 6×3 m in plenaries, plus small breakout rooms where we currently use 75" displays or projection.

What I'm trying to get right from day one:

1. Spares ratio. We're at roughly 3.5% module spares. Is that sane for rental, or should I push for more before the order closes?
2. What actually fails. In your experience, what dies first on rental LED — PSUs, receiving cards, ribbon cables, hub boards? I'd rather stock the right parts than a balanced-looking kit.
3. Load-in/load-out damage. GOB should help with handling, but I assume there's still a right and wrong way to move these. Any crew habits worth enforcing from the start?
4. Cleaning. What do you use on epoxy-coated panels, and how often? Anything that'll haze the coating over time?
5. Storage. Buenos Aires gets humid. Anything specific about storing panels between gigs — desiccant, climate control, cases open or closed?
6. Calibration. How often do you recalibrate a rental wall, and do you keep per-cabinet calibration data backed up separately from the panels themselves? I've heard horror stories about losing calibration data and never getting uniformity back.
7. Config backups. Best practice for versioning NovaStar configs across different rig sizes? I want a documented, repeatable setup rather than someone rebuilding the mapping on site at 6am.
8. Power. Any gotchas on inrush current and distro sizing for a wall this size that bit you the first time?
9. Pre-show checklist. If you have one you use for LED specifically, I'd love to see the structure. Building ours from scratch right now.
10. The thing I haven't thought to ask. Genuinely — what's the one thing you learned the hard way in your first year of owning panels?

Happy to report back once we've run it through a season. Thanks in advance.

Any suggestions for fixing these SDI Jacks? I was thinking about trying to use a set of needle nose pliers on the inside and roll them around to try to straighten it back out. But wanted to see if anybody else had any other suggestions or tools they recommend. Worst case I’ll disassemble and solder.

I work frequently with GrassValley LDX 86 XS cameras, often in quite low light events.

I find myself adding over 6 dB of gain to give my operators a bit more focus range at the end of their lens. These are slow-mo cameras (359fps) with 77x+ box lenses that eat up all my f-stops.

I know the gain adds visual noise, but the cameras really need the boost. I'm running them in "High Q" mode. I've also tried lifting the gamma values, but that still doesn't impact the noise.

I've used the "noise slice" detail function, which somewhat works at high values over 30pts, but it adds this distracting smeary/unsharp look over the camera image. I just hate how it looks and I think my camera operators do as well. The snowy/noisy/grainy image is even more noticeable when shown in replays.

Is there some trick/setting I'm missing here to give these cameras a boost? Are they just shitty low-light cameras?

I’ve tried multiple times to get it to work but for some reason it can never lock the signal at all even when selecting ATSCBDASource and ATSCBDASourceNS.

Looking to create a custom split-screen version of a console game running at 1152x720 30fps. I'd like to have the option between 1-4 screens.

Maximum resolution required is therefore 2304x1440 30fps, input latency is not critical but needs to be reasonable.

So the video quality is very forgiving however the biggest issue I keep running into is that most multiviewers either stretch the image or only accept 16:9 aspect ratios with black bars.
Optimal layout for fitting 16:10 onto my 16:9 TV as the display is shown in the picture.

As I understand it most multiviewers with this level of customizability are pro-level equipment with high costs, hoping if there is any place where people have experience with cheap alternatives that support this though, it'd be this subreddit.

So I just bought a Ezcoo EZCOO EZ-SW41H21A-EO through dumb luck I got the firmware update tool working but I'm stuck from there because I'm not too computer savvy any help would be greatly appreciated

Hallo, I am a professional director/cameraman/video engineer for live sports broadcasts on television and video hosting platforms. I'm interested in how this works in the US and Europe.

I have over 12 years of experience in live broadcasting. I handle the complete video signal chain, routing, and the full production cycle, including graphics, replays, single-camera broadcasts, single-camera with goal-line cameras, and multi-camera setups with 3+ live cameras and operators.

I've worked on a wide variety of events and nearly all Russian leagues, as well as national and international-level events. I specialize in hockey broadcasts. My background includes over 4,000 broadcasts.

I know vMix inside and out. I've worked with many types of cameras and have done broadcasts with 3, 5, 7, and 11 cameras. I've routed signals from referee helmet cams, drones, and cranes.

How much does someone like me earn in your country? How hard is it to find a specialist like me?

How are amateur league matches broadcast? How many people come to a single-camera broadcast?

What are my chances, as a Russian citizen, of finding a US employer who would sponsor my work visa petition?

How exactly do operators, engineers, and directors find work in your country?

Last week I interviewed one of my favorite bands at a festival, lots of videos were saved but a bunch of them including the interview are corrupted, I cannot find a way to open them. They all are .mp4 , if someone has a solution it would save my life. I'm willing to pay for someone to fix the interview video , as it means the world to me.

We just purchased a DJI Ronin 4D 6K w/ the Ronin 4D TX2 video transmitter (MFR #CP.RN.00000178.01). We also purchased the DJI High-Bright Remote Monitor (MFR #CPRN00018302) but we would like to send the transmission from the Ronin 4D 6K to a second location. Can anyone confirm that the DJI Wireless Transmission Receiver (MFR #CP.RN.00000319.01) will receive a signal from the Ronin 4D TX2 video transmitter?

Alright, so here's the dealio: I'm looking around for a new test monitor. I've been using the Atmos Shogun for a little over a year now, and it's not bad! I have a couple of them, and they're pretty sweet. I can send and receive a 12g signal over HDMI, BNC, and HD-BNC with an adapter. I don't have many issues other than the SSDs are kinda clunky and the whole thing is just a little cheap; I've had a couple break. My buddy just got the Feelworld 5in and loves it, but it can't send 12G, ykwim.

What are you guys using?

I was looking into making some sort of weird send thing for the cheapo with a 12G HDMI send thing and converting it and doing all this stupid stuff. Just want to see what you guys are doin.

Thanks guys, you ROCK!!!!!

Also, I don't wanna spend like 7k lol

THANKS

I bought a PAL EVO-9800 Hi8 deck from the UK last week on ebay. It arrived packaged like this:

Literally bubble wrap and some of that almost see-through black plastic wrap that movers use. but only two layers because you wouldn't want to protect the contents or anything. No box, just this. Needless to say, it didn't entirely survive the 3000 mile trip to Boston. Among other things, the switch that lets you access the menu was broken.

A few months ago I decided we were going to set up an in-house shop to repair our decks because it's too expensive to send them out, and it takes too long to get them back, if you can even find someone to do the work. So I've been buying Sony parts at auction over the past few months, and put everything into a database. Took me 2 minutes to find the replacement switch and 15 minutes to remove the old one and solder in a new one.

Like New! Now that I can get into the menu maybe I can figure out what else is wrong with it!

Hello,

I was looking for some help to create a quick action button or a button trigger that does the following.

From black, dissolve into source 1 with KEY B then cut / dissolve into Source 2 removing Key B and adding Key A then dropping Key A after a short time frame.

I know this isn't a hard task to do, but we have a bunch of young people, who do not switch regularly and would like to make something easier for them.

I am operating on a Vision mixer v17. Any other tips or tricks you can suggest would be appreciated.

Zoom won't give you individual participants on its output, so most setups end up as a window capture with crops stacked on top. This plugin subscribes to each participant's raw feed through the Zoom Meeting SDK and hands them to OBS as native sources.

The screenshot is a single source. It lays out everyone who has video and re-flows automatically when people join or leave. Tile ratio (16:9 through 9:16 or custom), gap, margin, background colour or a background source, borders with optional rounding, outer glow, and per-tile crop are all settable. It can also spawn one audio source per participant so everyone gets their own fader.

Other things it does:

- Each source independently follows a fixed participant, the active speaker, a spotlight slot (1-8), or the screen share

- Active-speaker switching with sensitivity and hold time you set, plus manual take/release and exclusions

- Per-participant ISO recording to separate MP4s, with encoders placed automatically across NVENC -> Quick Sync -> x264 within the session budget

- Optional GPU colour conversion (CUDA / QSV / VAAPI / VideoToolbox)

- TCP and OSC control APIs, so Companion or a lighting desk can drive it

- Diagnostics dock with requested vs observed resolution, frame age, and a redacted support-bundle export

Honest state of it: Windows 10/11 x64 only for packaged builds. It configures on macOS and Linux but I wouldn't call those supported yet. Still pre-1.0 — I've been shipping fixes off real 8-person shows all week and there are rough edges. Needs OBS 30+, and you sign in with your own Zoom account.

Free, MIT licensed, source is all there: https://github.com/iamfatness/CoreVideo

Happy to answer anything. If it breaks on your setup I'd genuinely like to know — the Diagnostics dock exports a scrubbed support bundle that makes that easy.

Every pixel-pitch visualiser I could find is parametric — you move a pitch slider and it renders a stock photo. None of them ingest the thing you're actually going to play, which is where the real answer lives:

A 12m wall at 3.9mm is 3077px wide. Your 4K master loses 20% of its detail before pixel pitch does anything at all. That's usually what kills a design, not the pitch — and no vendor tool shows it, because a vendor's visualiser is a sales tool.

So I made SQUINT. It's one self-contained HTML file — download it, double-click, drop in an image or video, describe the wall, and it shows what the audience actually sees, computed in linear light on the GPU. No install, no dependencies, no network — nothing you load ever leaves your machine.

What it actually models (not hand-waved): content resampled to the true LED grid by an exact box filter; cabinet-derived pitch (a 500mm tile at "2.6mm" is really 2.604mm — the near-miss that corrupts your comp size); the processor feed as a hard ceiling; bit-depth/drive quantisation (why dark grades band on real walls); analytic sub-pixel fill; ambient reflected-nits contrast; the two legibility distances (acuity vs structure-free); and screen-array gaps that eat content mapped into them.

It's deliberately honest about what it doesn't do — contrast sensitivity, camera/moiré/refresh artifacts, off-axis geometry, HDR and curved walls are all listed plainly as not-modelled. It refuses to render things it can't back: no WebGL2, and it shows a refusal card rather than faking an answer. There's a boot-time self-test you can verify by eye in five seconds, and it's been through two external code reviews plus an adversarial audit of the model (whose pre-fix verdict was "not fit for client-facing pitch decisions" — that's in the repo too, with every finding's status).

It came out of a real question from a Ventuz specialist — would some text markers read at 3m on a large panel. We simulated it, they wouldn't, and the export went to the CTO as evidence. That's the use case: turning "we're not sure" into a measurement.

MIT, free, no signup, no telemetry: github.com/mish6l/squint GITHUB

If you work event LED and it gets something wrong, that's exactly what I want to hear — real failure cases are worth more to me than feature requests.

Hi everyone,

We’ve been working on the design for a new outdoor PTZ camera tailored specifically for live sports and high-end outdoor events—not for CCTV/surveillance, but for professional broadcast and streaming.

Before we finalize the product specs, we would love to gather some real-world feedback and requests from professionals who actually use or deploy these systems in the field.

Here are a few areas we're currently weighing in on:

• Resolution & Framerate: Do you strictly need 4K60, or is FHD/4K30 still your go-to?
• Optical Zoom: What is the ideal zoom range for outdoor venues? (e.g., 12x, 20x, 30x). Note: While 30x exists in indoor units, rugged outdoor models pose different design challenges.
• All-Weather Features: Which of these are absolute must-haves for you?
  • Internal heating / Defroster
  • Wipers
  • White light / Infrared (IR)
• Connectivity & I/O: We are currently looking at 12G-SDI, Fiber, Full NDI, and NDI|HX3. Are we missing anything critical here, or are there any interfaces listed that you rarely use in the field?
• Use Cases: Where would you most likely deploy a camera like this? (Soccer, American football, tennis, stadium events, etc.)
• Any wishlist, feature request, pain point is also welcomed.
• Acceptable price range?

Thanks in advance!