Notes from the control room on switching, signal flow, streaming and running live shows.
Our journal collects practical articles written by the crew, covering vision mixing, control room design, streaming and operator habits. New pieces appear about once a day.
Deck rental
A practical walk-through for producers hiring a portable production deck and technical crew for an outside broadcast or studio day, from the first brief to the wrap.
Live streaming
Priya Sandhu sets out the questions worth answering before any streamed event is booked: signal, bandwidth, monitoring, roles and rehearsal, so the day itself stays calm.
Control rooms
Most control room problems are decided long before the first camera is plugged in. Callum Whitaker walks through the planning and build errors that cost teams time on air, and what to do instead.
Costs
A plain look at how operator-run playout, graphics, replay and remote feeds are priced, and which choices on your side make a live broadcast cheaper or dearer.
Customer story
Daniel ran a small events venue with no vision mixing experience. This short account follows his team through our operator training sessions and what changed in the gallery afterwards.
Live switching
Priya Sandhu, our lead vision mixer, explains how to prepare a multi-camera switching plan for the shorter days, colder venues and busier schedules ahead.
Trade terms
A plain-words guide to the term day rate when hiring a portable production deck with a crew: what sits inside it, what is charged separately, and what to ask for.
Live streaming
Two ways to run a streamed event: hire a full production crew to handle encoding, routing and monitoring, or train one of your own people. Here is how they compare, and which we suggest.
Control rooms
How we plan and fit out a small control room, from the first rack sketch and monitor wall to the cabling runs and intercom testing, told by the producer who sits beside the engineers.
Live operation
The question we hear most is what operators do once the broadcast starts. Here is a plain account of playout, graphics, replay and remote feeds, and how they are shared out.
Operator training
A look at how our practical training sessions run, what in-house teams practise on the desk, and how we move people from following a rundown to holding a live show steady.
Live switching
Hannah Doyle walks through the switcher layouts, talkback habits and rehearsal methods our vision mixers rely on when a live show is cut across several cameras, graphics and replay.
Deck rental
Callum Whitaker sets out the questions worth settling before you book a portable production deck with a technical crew, so an outside broadcast or studio day starts without surprises.
Live streaming
Hannah Doyle walks through the errors we see most often when a live event goes out online, from encoder settings to unwatched feeds, and the habits that prevent them.
Pricing
A plain walk through the figures behind a control room build: what sits in a typical quote, which choices push it up or down, and how we put a price in writing.
Customer story
A short account of one customer evening, told with a first name only, and of how trained operators handled playout, graphics, replay and a failing remote feed.
Training advice
Seasonal advice on using the darker months to train your own operators: what to rehearse, how to pace sessions and what a team should be able to do before the winter schedule.
Trade terms
A plain-words explanation of preview, programme and the take, the rule that keeps live multi-camera shows safe, written by the vision mixer who cuts them.
Deck rental
Priya compares renting a portable production deck on its own with renting it alongside a technical crew, and says which route she recommends for most outside broadcasts and studio days.
Behind the scenes
A walk through the real order of work behind a live stream, from the first signal check in the morning to the last frame leaving the encoder at the end of the event.
Live production decks, control rooms and crews for television and streaming teams, based at 14 Trafalgar Lane in Brighton since 2013.