The 2020 Streaming Media Producer 25
Featured Products: VR-1HD, GO:LIVECAST
Another outfit with undeniable audio chops (and roots) is Roland, recognized most often here for its range of high-quality video switchers featuring exceptional built-in audio mixing capabilities. Several months back, Streaming Media’s Robert Reinhardt sang the praises of Roland’s compact and affordable V-02HD, and other Roland switchers like the VR-1HD and V-60HD have received high marks in these pages. But all the buzz right now seems to focus on Roland’s new GO:LIVECAST. Described as a “live streaming studio for smartphones,” the mobile-specific, vlogger-oriented GO:LIVECAST suggests an intriguing new direction for Roland and webcasting gear in general.
Featured Product: Cine 7 500 RX
While 5" and 7" monitors are essential gear for most pro producers, their basic capabilities are fairly uniform, and it takes some pretty innovative thinking and design to build one that stands apart from the pack. SmallHD, well-known for its solid lines of on-camera and studio monitors, has distanced itself from the crowd with an ingenious family of wireless monitors. One that’s caught our eye is the Cine 7 500 RX, which comes with a built-in Teradek Bolt 500 receiver, a super-bright 1,800-nit screen, and cinema-level color accuracy.
Featured Product: Soonwell FB-21 Flex Bi-Color LED Light
In one of the more glowing reviews of lighting gear that Streaming Media Producer has run in recent years, Anthony Burokas put the Soonwell FB-21 through its paces and raved, “For situations where bulky or heavy setups need to be flown over talent on stands or arms, the lightweight Soonwell FB-21 offers distinct advantages to alternative bulkier and heavier setups, while still offering considerable lighting color and brightness options and spill control.” High praise indeed.
Featured Product: Switcher Studio 4.3
Along with Cinamaker and SlingStudio, Switcher Studio has made live-switched streaming with mobile devices a viable reality for professional producers, ushering in a new level of agility, flexibility, and have-video-will-travel braggadocio for pro video producers. Switcher Studio in particular seems to be keeping its foot on the gas, breaking in cool new features like scoreboards, video chat, improved audio level controls, and— in its most recent release, 4.3—cloud asset storage and multiple plan options to give producers more flexibility.
Featured Product: Wirecast Gear 420
Telestream’s Wirecast, which reached version 12 last year, has been a cornerstone of professional multicam live-streaming production since time immemorial, in many ways defining softwarebased pro streaming production as a viable approach. Of course, no matter how featurerich the software, pro streaming cannot live on software alone; you need a powerful system to process your video and push your live-switched stream. Wirecast Gear, available in three models, with Wirecast Gear 420 at the top of the pile, is Telestream’s purpose-built solution that delivers all the video-processing horsepower you need and more. It also ensures live streaming to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter (Periscope), or Real-Time Messaging Protocol (custom); Facebook Live comment administration; NDI input and output; and animated 3D graphics and titles via NewBlue Titler Live Complete. And of course, it includes Telestream Wirecast Pro production software. Never bet against the house.
Featured Product: Orbit PTZ
Teradek has released a number of groundbreaking and best-of-breed products over the years, including the Bolt, the Cube, and VidiU Go, a compact streaming box that was a slam dunk with the live-streamed Streaming Media West interviews in Los Angeles last November. There are any number of innovations we could focus on here, so let’s just go with the latest of the greatest, the Orbit PTZ, a Bolt-driven all-in-one control and wireless transmission system for PTZ cameras that shipped in March. The Orbit PTZ makes it possible to configure a remote camera system without requiring cable runs between camera positions and a control room, sending wireless video directly to switcher hardware.
Featured Products: Mevo Start, Vimeo Create
Vimeo has always been a popular video platform for production pros, but the most intriguing question about the company in the last couple of years is how it would leverage its 2017 acquisition of Livestream. One answer arrived at CES 2020 with the unveiling of Mevo Start, the long-awaited new version of the direct-to-Facebook Live compact camera introduced by Livestream in 2016. The even compact-er new Mevo promises 6-hour battery life, 1080p support, a handy smartphone app, new image enhancements, and support for other popular platforms. Vimeo also recently announced Vimeo Create, an AI-driven, template-based system for online video editing and optimized delivery to multiple social streaming platforms. Well-played.
Featured Product: vMix 23
In acclaiming vMix as a best-of-the-decade solution in live production and streaming, Streaming Media’s Anthony Burokas and Shawn Lam wrote that it “does most everything you can ask of it, from video mixing, playback, animated titles, and streaming to more complex setups requiring macros, multi-layer scenes, integrating spreadsheets of data into a video production to automate tasks, titles, and more.” According to Lam, “The best part about vMix is that it works well on my smallest-to-largest productions and I can build and operate multiple solutions of different sizes and capabilities with the same underlying solution at work.”
Featured Product: Wipster
Client review is a critical component of corporate and commercial video work, and online solutions that provide direct commenting, documented feedback cycles, and version control are as indispensable today as they were desperately missing from the process before the products that enable them became available. Wipster’s visual annotation features streamline the review process, and its team-only comments capability is a nuanced privacy and communication feature that makes it a standout solution in this field.
Companies and Suppliers Mentioned