QUESTION · TUESDAY FOCUS

In some of your previous posts on X, you showed yourself working and running a production from home. How do you connect to your office equipment from home? Big fan of the work you do.

ASKED BY · Juan · SPARKS, NV · 27 OCT 2026 · ▶ 00:30:17

THE PANEL'S ANSWER

He uses a locally hosted cloud production on the Willamette network via VPN or Tailscale to access vMix and Companion; this works for baseball with permanent installations but requires physical presence for mobile sports like football.

Summarised by AI from what the panel said. Watch the moment for the full answer.

IN THEIR OWN WORDS

From the transcript.

Machine-transcribed, so it may contain errors. Every timestamp opens the episode at that second.

30:00And it's just that way all the time. So big lesson there for anybody who's kind of getting into this. You know, think about what the failure points are ahead of time. And if you can fix it before it becomes a failure point, you're way ahead of the game. Let's go to the next question. Another one from the QR code. Juan in Sparks, Nevada is asking,

30:21in some of your previous posts on X, you showed yourself working and running a production from home. How do you connect to your office equipment from home? Big fan of the work you do. Oh, that's nice. Remy, so remote broadcast and stuff like that. What's your side? I know. Okay, Remy-ish. Yeah, and it's, I call it, it's locally hosted cloud production. which is kind of counterintuitive.

30:47I can't do it for, I mean, I guess I could. What I'm doing is setting up a cloud production on the Willamette network. And so I set everything up on Willamette's network. And then I can use Willamette's VPN or Tailscale to get into the network. And once I have access to the network, I have access to vMix and Companion and I can do all the things.

31:15And so it's one of those things where I am, because I'm not a, like, I'm not going places. I'm not, like, our football games are always at our football stadium and our basketball games are always at our basketball. Like, we're not going other places to do those. And so I have the luxury of, I have all the infrastructure. Like, it is a home game advantage, right?

31:39This is my home. All my infrastructure is there. It's all on our network. and if it's on our network, then I can access it via VPN. And that is something that only, really only happens for baseball. And that's because for us, baseball is set up in a way where it's always set up. The cameras are permanently installed. Everything's set up. Everything's on.

32:03I can just remote in and turn those on. So you can just turn on coverage for a baseball game. For baseball, yeah. Yeah, but that doesn't work for the football games. Or do you cover soccer and field hockey? Yep, it's the same thing. For all those other things, I've got to take a camera and physically install a camera on a tripod. I have to bring something somewhere.

32:23I've got to plug something in somewhere. And so that is something where I could, if I had two of me, one of me could do all that while me at home remoted in and did the directing. I could do that. But the real the real the hurdle with that for a lot of our productions is I physically need to be there to set things up.

32:46And that's one of those that's one of those cases where, you know, the student work I have is not for most of our productions are not at a level where I can just be like, here you go. And so you're that Elon. Chris needs a humanoid robot that he can plug into his neural cortex and it'll do everything he does. Good luck with that.

33:09Next question. here's one from Courtney Gooden in Hollywood California Chris what are you using for sideline or field action sounds mics on end zone cameras always an excellent question because Courtney I like a lot of the professionals who hang out around here always thinks of how do I get sound covered kind of first almost in front of the visual stuff so Chris what's the deal so

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ALSO IN THIS EPISODE

16 more questions
from Days to Kickoff: Building a Live Football Broadcast.

The whole episode →
▶ 00:22:26So what if you woulda got $100k, what would you have done different?▶ 00:25:59What happens when Chris Sabato leaves Willamette and someone else has to run the show?▶ 00:28:03Chris, football season is here. What is your audio, video, and software setup like for your small Northwest college, and how does it compare to the big boys?▶ 00:33:11Chris, what are you using for sideline or field action sounds? Mics on endzone cameras?▶ 00:34:35What is that shoulder rig and rail system?▶ 00:40:35A live stream glitches and chat loves it. Is imperfection the last thing AI can't fake convincingly, or just its next feature?▶ 00:41:39Can you explain how you use these ESP32 devices for scoreboard data extraction and what they replaced?▶ 00:43:16How did you build a custom RCP-like shading control station, and what was the cost savings?▶ 00:44:38What is software switcher and what does it run on?▶ 00:46:31I've heard that you use vMix in your sports broadcasts. Would you please show us how you use it?▶ 00:52:41If remote, how is the latency and quality of the picture? Is there a quality slider to adjust?▶ 00:53:18Chris, what all-in-one PTZ cameras do you use when not using your camera rigs? What video output do you use for those?▶ 00:54:34So why spend all that CapEx money on a hardware vMix server? You could have done it cheaper in the cloud and spend the CapEx difference on hardware purchasing.▶ 00:56:44The Esports World Cup in Paris ran 7 weeks, 8 stages and 35 languages on Riedel. Is esports the toughest live job?▶ 00:57:26Looking for information on the Quantel Cypher character generator—most famously used on NBC's coverage of the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Does anybody know if there's any decommissioned surviving units?▶ 00:58:26Do you have 1st and 10 and yards to gain lines overlaid in the wide camera? I feel this feature was a way out of reach for small productions, but AI is changing everything.