Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: This episode is brought to you by Ros Video.
From video switchers, graphics and routing. Whether sdi, IP or even in the cloud, Ros makes live production easy. Trusted everywhere from the biggest sports stadiums to city council meetings, newsrooms and more. Are you ready to upgrade your workflow? Kiecode Media offers the best Ros video pricing and a free consultation so you get the right products the first time.
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3, 2, Red 1 Crystal welcome back to Broadcast to Post. Today we're tackling a question we're hearing from you and just about everyone else out there because there's two major trends now that are colliding on the corporate or business side. Professional video is exploding. Over 90% of businesses now use video, and many of you are moving from simple zoom calls to full studios for your internal and customer communications.
And I know often you're part of a small team, but many of you are killing it by finding smart ways to produce at a very high level.
At the same time, those of you in traditional broadcast teams are being asked to do more with less. In 2025 alone, over 17,000 entertainment and media jobs were unfortunately cut, forcing many broadcast operators to rethink workflows and of course, staffing.
So we have two different worlds, but the same question.
How do you simplify live production while still delivering professional results?
And that's what we'll tackle today.
First, I'll walk you through our key considerations for simplifying your live production. A key code guide focused on reducing steps, optimizing your resources, and designing systems that you and a small crew can run with confidence.
Then I'll be joined by Chris Burgos from Elgato to talk about how modern crews are making their tech work in the real world. From presets and automation to stream deck workflows that act as true crew multipliers. It's a great interview, and I can't wait for you to hear it. If you're building a live streaming studio that needs to be reliable, repeatable, and usable by more than just one HERO operator, this episode's for you. Let's get into it.
Okay, so we've established the problem. Cool. Now let's talk about what you can do about it. Starting with the stuff people skip and then later, regret. Now, a couple of these are fundamentals. Miss them, and the show is gonna get spicy. The rest are advanced moves that make small teams feel bigger.
Number one, design the room, desk, and workflow for the operator that you actually have, this is the most important step. And yes, it's still the one that many teams skip because it's not glamorous. There's rarely a cinematic slow mo shot of good cable management, Although I'd certainly lobby for more of it. But the first design decision is human, not technical. Who's running the show and what can they realistically manage at one time? Now, most teams no longer have a dedicated TD, an A1, a graphics op, or multiple camera ops. They have one person, sometimes two if you count the person who was asked to help just five minutes ago. So room layout matters. Where the operator sits, sight lines to monitors, or what's in reach. What forces them to stand up, turn around, or do that frantic where's the mute dance desk Layout matters, too. What's one button away, what's buried in a menu, and what steals attention from the actual show. If your setup assumes staffing in an ideal world, it will fail under real world conditions every time. See, here's the rule. If it only works when a HERO operator is in the room, it's not going to be done consistently.
Now, once the space fits the person, we need to deal with the next problem. That person is still expected to drive multiple systems at once.
Number two, centralize control to reduce your cognitive load. It's pretty risky thinking a single operator can run a dozen different UIs under pressure. They just can't. And if your plan is, they'll figure it out. That's not a plan. That's a hopeful wish. And hope just isn't a strategy. See, everyone understands the idea of a control surface. Great. The advanced move isn't more buttons. It's putting switching graphics, camera presets, audio states, and streaming actions behind one control layer so you're not menu diving mid show like you're trying to disarm a bomb with only seconds left.
And here's the part nobody wants to hear.
It's not just hardware. Yeah, I said it. It's muscle memory. Practice until it's instinct. Because in live production, there's rarely time to think through steps. You have to recognize the moment and execute. We see teams do this all the time by tying multiple systems into one surface. In fact, one operator told us that I mapped my camera control pad to automate graphics, load animations from playback, and manage audio from one surface.
It's radical, but it works.
See, that's not about a product. That's about consolidating responsibility into something one person can actually run, but run well.
Once control is centralized, you've reduced where the operator has to work.
Next, reduce how many decisions that the operator has to make during the show. Because decision fatigue is real and live just doesn't care.
Number three, build shows around presets, scenes and moments.
This is where small teams survive. If something can be decided before the show, it probably should be future. You deserves nice things like camera positions, lighting looks, audio routing and graphics layouts. Presets don't just save time, they remove hesitation. And hesitation can kill your live production.
Now the advanced move is going beyond device presets and designing show moments. Like a show open, maybe a two shot discussion remote, guests going full screen, rolling video, or even the wrap up. Each moment should fire a macro that moves multiple systems together.
Switcher graphics, audio, cameras, and even lighting if you're feeling fancy. Because if remote guest full screen requires five clicks across three apps, you didn't build a workflow, you built a trap.
Now the operator isn't executing steps, they're calling moments. But the second you rely on scenes and moments, you're now relying on automation. So let's talk about the part that people ignore until the day it really hurts.
Number four. Automate confidently, but always give your operator an escape hatch. Automation only works when operators trust it. And trust comes from two predictable behavior and a fast escape hatch when reality shows up and chooses chaos.
Tracking cameras can be incredible in controlled environments, lecterns, classrooms, and even fixed presentation zones. But every automated system still needs instant manual overrides like a one touch wide shot, a known safe framing, a get me out of trouble button. Because the audience will forgive a wide shot, they won't forgive a camera hunting someone's forehead while the speaker is delivering the most important update of the year.
Good system design balances automation with human control.
That's how you avoid panic and keep productions feeling steady instead of brittle.
And here's the uncomfortable the More systems you connect, the more fragile things can feel. Unless reliability is is priority from day one.
Number five Design for reliability first, not complexity And I can't believe I'm saying this out loud, but this is the advanced truth. Complex systems impress people. Well some people reliable systems save shows. When systems are unpredictable, production becomes stressful, operators slow down, we double check, we hesitate, we start just encasing everything and suddenly you're back to manual operation. Reliable systems behave the same way every time they start in known states. This means cameras and audio routing correctly without manual fixes.
Monitoring makes us immediately clear what's live and what the audience hears. And here's a non negotiable automation should never fail silently. If something breaks, the operator should know instantly and have a clear path to recover.
Not go find the one laptop with the app open that only Dave knows the password. For Dave, the goal isn't removing people, it's building systems that feel calm, predictable and easy to run under pressure, especially when you don't have a full crew.
So the path forward is pretty straightforward design for the operator that you actually have centralized control.
Build your show around moments, automate, but keep an escape hatch and prioritize reliability over complexity. And if you want, chicode Media can share examples of how teams map these ideas to real rooms with small crew, high output and repeatable shows. And ideally much fewer with we survive somehow stories afterward. When systems are designed around people and not just ideal diagrams, you can do more with less. And that's where live production is heading. And if you're looking for a faster way to get there, this is where Keycode Media can help see. As a trusted nationwide systems integrator and dealer for over 200 leading product lines, KeyCode Media offers TV studio starter bundles designed specifically to simplify the conversation that includes an essential studio starting at 75k with cameras, lighting, video switching, teleprompter, intercom, audio routing and all the support you could ever need.
Now, if you want to learn more about the bundles or talk through what makes sense for you and your team, contact Keycode Media and schedule a free consultation. Even if you're just starting to plan, we're happy to help.
In this segment, we're talking about how modern crews are doing more with less. And we're talking with Chris Burgos at Elgato. Chris, welcome to the podcast.
[00:12:12] Speaker B: Thank you so much Michael, for having me. This is the first time I think I'm speaking a podcast since a lot of big changes. So I'm very excited to get into today's Topic.
[00:12:21] Speaker A: Oh, I'm interested to hear about all those changes, but a lot of people listening already know you, right? You've spent over 10 years at both Newtek and Vizrt and you were there right in the middle of NDI as it kind of reshaped production workflows. But now you're at Elgato and you're working closely with broadcast and live production teams around this stream deck, which I love and have one behind me. And it's honestly become one of the hottest tools in production right now.
You've always had a pulse on how crews adapt.
When budgets shrink, teams get smaller and of course every year the expectations go up in terms of production value. So having you on today kind of felt like the perfect conversation to follow up on our key code segment on simplifying live production. So as a big picture, what have you been seeing as the big trends for live production teams?
[00:13:08] Speaker B: So I think we see this often now. You can't be fragmentized. Like you can't have these sort of like individual pieces of your production anymore. I think in sort of the, you know, the days before or you might have someone who's strictly doing post, strictly being a td, strictly working on audio. And today because of the way teams are shifting, you have people doing more and more. Your audio op probably might be part of the streaming team. You may be having your TD also doing graphics, also working the cameras so you can't have these individuals anymore. And with that we see a lot of software driven workflows, we see a bigger push into ip, but that tends to be the biggest driver is I have less staff inside and I have to do more. And that means that I want my workflow to be as simple as possible because I'm not wearing one hat, I might be wearing three.
[00:14:00] Speaker A: So Chris, let me pull on that string a little bit. Right, so on one side we're seeing broadcasters scale down control rooms and staffing because the control room was built for more people. But now it needs to be right sized for a smaller operation but at the same, but actually at better quality. And on the other side we have other groups like corporate teams who are scaling up and that means moving from basic and come on, let's be honest, fairly low quality video solutions like Zoom or Teams and they want to convert those into real multicam productions for internal and external communications. So from your vantage point, what trends are you seeing right now and how teams are being structured and how production responsibilities are shifting with working with smaller crews?
[00:14:42] Speaker B: Yeah, you bring up a great point because we See the convergence of a lot of technology. I think we see more broadcast teams using what would be traditionally considered AV technology or you know, things that might not have been looked at in the past now have to be incorporated. And at the same time we have these, these teams in corporate spaces. They are doing more podcasts, they're doing more live events. So this trend has been sort of a meeting in the middle of the highest levels of traditional broadcast heavy iron equipment coming more and more democratized and getting more software it simultaneously. We have these sort of like once freeware apps trying to punch above their weight and hit these production goals. And what we end up seeing, and I'm sure you guys end up seeing a lot, is hey, we need to make more with less is a sort of recurring theme. But now everyone's kind of working with the same tool set and everyone kind of has essentially the same needs on the day to day. Maybe your top tier of broadcast, they're the only exception. But that's like sports. They still have those traditional like large control rooms. Everybody else is working, working with things like more PTZ cameras, more workflows that are incorporating remote callers.
So regardless of what the studio looks like, they all have the same goals for high quality audio, high quality video. Everyone's kind of beholden to we need this to be as efficient as possible. And I think that is this constant trend of it doesn't matter where we are, we want to do this for consistently, as easily and widely as possible. Because we have a studio in New York, we have a studio in la and that's a broadcaster or a corporate or you know, houses of worship are looking at these same kind of scenarios.
[00:16:20] Speaker A: You kind of mentioned engineering and automation. And I think that's a great thing to talk about because learning switching in control software really isn't a herculean task, right. But getting good at it, right? That you can do it live and on the fly in the heat of the moment, that takes a ton of time and practice. Right. Just having the gear doesn't make you an operator. Right. And that's why we have presets and automation to automate many of these things, which is quite frankly a survival tool for small teams. So when crews get smaller, presets become one of the biggest time savers in production. And as you mentioned, it's not just cameras. Right. So how are you seeing teams use presets, scenes and M&Es across production workflows to make single operator or small team productions realistic?
[00:17:06] Speaker B: I'll even take it a step Further, you know, these presets are very vital and it's interesting because I think we looked at sort of the me world on the broadcast side, like that was the goal, right? We want to be able to do our DVEs, all these kinds of moves and things, and that was the standard. And then on the other side of the world, we have small teams and houses of worship using software based production tools. What's a scene like? I want my scene to be very simple. It's a two bucks. Like I'm going from one camera to the two box.
In this sort of progress, we starting to see we need to do more with this. So not only does my scene control the visuals, but it's also triggering the audio automation. It might also be triggering things within the graphics.
You know, when I switch to a given scene, ready to get my lower thirds up, you know, if I'm going to be highlighting a panel of guests and someone in particular is going to be talking, maybe I automate so the audios get a little ducked down on some of the other guests. That's all much more possible today. But as an individual, if you don't have that automation in play, you're going to want to have three more arms to be writing the faders and clicking the right buttons and everything. And that automation tool just becomes so useful. So if it's built into the architecture, amazing. If you need to, having tools that can build that externally starts to become a better solution. Because if a tool is agnostic and not just playing in one person's ecosystem, then you could say, okay, well, I have my Yamaha Mixer with Dante and I have these kind of lights and this kind of setup and my controller can actually help do that automation. I can actually have somebody come into the space and operate my production at, let's say 80% efficiency because we did so much in automation. And to your point about those, you know, standout real live operators, they'll add that extra bit of polish and they'll do those extra bits live. But I can, with automation, make the full floor of my production as high as possible.
[00:19:02] Speaker A: Can you think of a live production team that really had it dialed right? They really said, you know what, we're going to embrace this automation workflow and kind of what the before and after.
[00:19:13] Speaker B: Looked like a couple come to mind.
And what's interesting is you would think that the top dogs in the space would be the people who are the best at this. And it tends not to always be the case. It tends to be the sort of like people who are willing to be a little pioneer who really isn't break ice.
So I look at a team like Belive, which is out of New York City in Brooklyn. They have done some really interesting pushes into all levels of production. Using automation, using app driven approaches, mixing cloud into their productions, doing these hybrid things. It's necessity that you start to adopt these pieces. And now they've grown to doing all kinds of productions because hey, look, we have this automation in our back pocket. There are some major sports leagues that have standardized actually using Stream deck and they recently had playoffs where you could actually go to anywhere in their facility and you would see the team's logos on the interface. So if a given team was playing at home, you would click their logo and actually be able to control every element of the production. The PTZ cameras, what was appearing on the boards, all from their New York City HQ location. It was just so amazing to say, like the tools are actually there.
It is approachable now you sort of get to define your own ideas. And these guys really went the whole way where the team's colors actually changed the button logos. So instead of our traditional, you know, red on program, green on preview, they were using the team's colors for their home and away jerseys. So that when you were operating, you had every piece of information visually to see, okay, I'm controlling this team setup. And what was interesting for me is they were so confident in the technology. We actually went in the day before their final started, so they were getting ready to get everything revved up. And you would think that this is the most stressful time. Everyone was cool as cucumbers. And like within five seconds of walking into the control room, they hit a button. They were able to control the camera. We got audio feeds and they said every station in the facility is able to do that. And I think that's that final sort of conversation is universality. Like I need this everywhere to operate the same because the production shift. Maybe I need to have a different crew in a different space operate it well because we're so much smaller and leaner. That means it's actually really easy to take what was traditionally blowing out the budget on one major studio. I can make a lot of smaller footprints in my space, still have that same level of control. So looking at these two organizations is really interesting. And then I would be at, you know, they would shame me if I didn't say this. There's so many esports orgs that are doing things way, way differently with their respect of incorporating remote feeds in their implementation. Of IP standards.
Riot has this just insane facility out in Dublin that is loaded to the brim with just about every form of configuration, of signal, of resolution and distances these are coming from globally. Automation is key and paramount to making sure that not only are the production's going well, taking a step back at engineering their, it needs to be sure that there's the level of redundancy that if a feed coming from California needs to travel a different path to us that were built into it. So even at the very tops of the food chain, we're still seeing that automation be progressive to the entirety of the production, even in ways that you might not be expected to think.
[00:22:51] Speaker A: For folks who aren't at, shall we say, the high end of the food chain and they're using a stream deck or other elgato products for these automations. Could you talk about maybe some of the more run rate or the more common automations like triggering cameras or system presets or maybe switching scenes and showing states or coordinating graphics with lights and camera angles. Can you go over some of the more common automations that you're seeing?
[00:23:17] Speaker B: Yeah, I think some of the most straightforward common stuff is like a start a show button.
I think we tend to see users fall into two very distinct camps. We still have some professionals coming into these spaces and they're going to configure their stream deck to basically do every element of their production like they might do with a traditional switching board. So they're going to have some really complex workflows that might be something like your eye might want to do because, you know, hey, I got all these buttons, let me really get into some cool pieces and I really kind of want to pick and choose everything.
So that's the benefit for me. Then another common thing we'll have is we're going to build our sophisticated panel. Then we're going to have a tab over to the next page and we have our simple like six button panel. So common pieces would be a starter show which is going to do things like start your record, start your stream, make sure the audio is all ready to go, load in any graphics you have. You know, really like prep your show with that one button, stop show similar and your show setups, you're typically going to bind your graphics to the first time you're going to trigger like a given look. So if we're going to cut to a remote caller, we'll give them their sort of lower third or whatever's powering your graphics based if it's HTML5 or et cetera.
We're also, if we're doing something in studio, we're probably going to have everything set with that starter show. So if it's a DMX control or if you're using something like our key lights, you're going to want to have that all ready to go. With that button press even something like prompter. You might have some simple prompter controls on your stream deck. Because we have two prompters out there just to do something like make the text a little bigger. We've all worked with somebody and we see they're all the way leaning in and you know, or you know, different people have different reading styles, slow it down a little bit. So incorporating these things is a lot easier. Now, simple things like a little volume up, volume down button, like just give me two more db, like just a quick button so I could punch it up. Some simple mutes. So when we're going to go to maybe an isolated shot from a given panel, hey, make sure we don't hear anything from anybody else. And then after that, I think one of the most common things that I continue to see time and time again is something that allows me to play content and then easily stop it, but also easily go to the next piece of content.
And while in some of them were traditional broadcast workflows, we're used to having a tape operator or someone working the DDRs on the other side of the world. It's like a bunch of files in a folder and they're using something like vlc and the managing of this is like somebody on a mouse and keyboard and like maybe they made a good playlist or something. Just having a dedicated button for their media ends up being a lifesaver. And just be able to give that to somebody and say, here you go, here's your dummy proof shot caller.
[00:26:02] Speaker A: So all of those tools and tips and tricks are things that internal teams are being told we have to do. Right. We want to make the zoom or teams call look like a professional production. Right. It's got to look professional. And we see this especially in corporate spaces. Right. There's always that CEO who wants to look like a sports broadcaster for their company meeting. So from your experience, what's the first mindset shift that teams need to make when they want to level up a meeting into something that feels more, I hate using the term, but quote unquote, broadcast quality.
[00:26:33] Speaker B: Yeah. It's so simple. I think once you remove, when you remove all the ideas that you might have about like what the technology is, you got to remember The C suite doesn't know anything about what that looks like. So the second you try to have anything sophisticated in front of them, you can just turn out the window. Even, even changing platform, it can be a herculean feat for them. So whatever you're using has to do a lot of the work for them and has to be controllable. I start to think about the idea of using something like a nicer webcam. Right? Using the Facecam 4K as a product we have, right? It's easy, it's set up and just plugging it in, it does a lot of the work for you. We are taking that approach with a lot of our products where it's like once they're plugged in, they just kind of do most of the work for you. So anything you can control from a remote perspective is going to be important. And then a little bit of lighting goes a long way. And the new prompters, I brought them up earlier, but we have a prompter that actually fits on the front of the webcam so you can actually just give them their script or give them the remote call in app so they can be interacting and looking directly at the team's call, the zoom call, whatever platform they use. So just a simple thought process of forget anything about having a camera operator. They're not going to operate their own OBS layer. Even if you put one of our products in front of them to have them do all that, there'll be that fear. So you want to be able to control that from a real perspective and just reduce all the friction. So the right tools help and being able to control them is obviously beneficial. I start to think of some of the things we've seen where companies want to send a kit out.
And again, that kit has to be very simplistic because, you know, they're operating out of their house, inevitably somebody's on Netflix to the WI fi. Isn't that as good? What's a network cable?
What do you mean, what's my speed on my network? Like, the second you have to ask any of that, you've already made that thing probably way too hard. But if you have some simple, ready to use tools out of the box that are easy and just work within the setups you like, that's going to go a long way. And then you're going to do all the magic on the other side of the world, getting those feeds as cleanly as you can, whether it's using something like NDI and IP or some other IP protocol, or doing something where you're converting into baseband, like, make those feeds nice and clean, get a decent webcam, a decent amount of lighting, and then you can do all the magic on your side of the world.
[00:28:53] Speaker A: So as we conclude this, although I'd love to talk about this for, for quite a bit longer, let's talk about one piece of advice that you would give to people and let me kind of set the stage. If a team is either moving from single cam to multicam live streaming, maybe from a zoom call to a mini live streaming studio, what's the one piece of advice that you'd give them? Chris, before they buy anything?
[00:29:15] Speaker B: There's a lot that you can research and there's a lot that can sort of lead you down like a particular rabbit hole. But there are a lot of organizations today that are dedicated and specialized in making this easy.
There are a lot of professionals you can talk to and say, hey guys, this is what we're looking to do. So you don't waste three months going down forum rabbit holes and getting some free software from some weird website that you know you've never used before, or even wasting time on components that you know are the least expensive option, but certainly not the best efficient. So I would say if you wanted to make your life easiest, talk to some professionals about it. There are organizations literally dedicated to that. And while it may seem counterintuitive to say, like, well, start with the pros and they're going to guide you the best way. I know from experience that there are so many little pitfalls in, you know, did you go to the right subreddit and ask the right question and are you talking to somebody with your best interest in mind? Are they pushing their own application for you? Are they pushing some weird third party card from a company who you can't read the instructions from? There's so many weird ways to go into that. Whereas literally this could be as simple as having a phone call and literally just saying, hey, we're just trying to get something off the ground. There's a lot of different experts out there who just give you the right information. And I say that coming from seeing a lot of studios who went, what I could get that was available, like what was available on Amazon, what are the people on the Facebook group I'm on tell me to get? And there's a trail of a lot of issues that come off of that. And you'd be wasting your money going for the least expensive option because of the headaches and heartache where you could have had a phone call for free talk to an expert and literally come away with everything you need. And your production on day one is easy, effective, and you're not having to worry about spending months and months and months going back and troubleshooting. I know that seems like the, you know, a very canned kind of answer, but it is the absolute truth. Talking with the right group is going to be just miles of difference.
[00:31:26] Speaker A: So as I was coming up in the industry, I had a mentor, and one of the things he taught me was Michael the Greats give back. And if I look at folks in the industry, it is very easy to find Chris because Chris has been nothing but sharing of his information, sharing of his experience, and then being on our podcast today. So, Chris, thank you. You're one of the greats because you do give back. Thank you so much, Chris. I look forward to seeing you at nab. And if we haven't told you, we are finishing our podcast studio at Key Code Media. And so that means next time you are on the other coast, when you're on the west coast, you come by and we'll have an unscripted conversation about the industry and where things are going. So again, Chris, thank you for joining us.
