We produce a three-hour live show with remote guests on Zoom. The host and panelists need program return, clocks, audio meters, guest video, and producer info. We currently use multiple Zoom feeds. Is there another way to feed all of this into Zoom without having Zoom instance for each screen?
ASKED BY · Unknown · 17 OCT 2026 · ▶ 00:05:15
Use vMix to aggregate Zoom feeds into a customized presenter view with clocks and graphics, or use MXL (media exchange layer) with Zoom ISO Cloud for lightweight compositing without encode/decode overhead; both approaches reduce bandwidth compared to multiple Zoom instances.
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5:15Okay. The next question is from me. And it says, we produce a three-hour live show with remote guests on Zoom. The host and panelists need program return, clocks, audio meters, guest video, and producer info. We currently use multiple Zoom feeds. Is there another way to feed all of this into Zoom without having Zoom instance for each screen? Go ahead, Mark. You wanted to provide some more information.
5:46I was just going to provide more information in that when I started thinking about all the bandwidth we're using, trying to have all of these Zoom instances for each show we're producing. I'm just wondering if we get to a remote site and we don't have the same capacity, are we going to end up shooting ourselves in the foot and have to dump clocks and program return and all that?
6:09Okay, and Guy? Yeah, typically we've used vMix. It's pretty heavy iron to do this. The nice thing is that you could even customize it with your own logo in there. So you're using vMix layers and you could make that return look like whatever you want. You could make, you know, if you have a prompt or something or run a show, you could make it bigger.
6:32But it is spinning up something. It does require some engineering. It's funny because just this morning I was playing with my little app here that I had made for MXL. and I was asking it, what's the big deal about MXL versus NDI and having a switcher where it's like vMix, just you're paying $1,200 for that software. And it was like, well, MXL is when you're pretty self-contained on the same computer
7:01because what it's found, and this is over the last couple of days I've had it doing these tests over and over again, is it actually has some numbers. Let me see if I can zoom in a little bit on this screen. so you guys can see it. Oh, yeah, it's going to be super tiny. Yeah, I don't think you guys are going to be able to see this.
7:18But it basically proved that because you're not doing that decode cycle and, let's see, where is it? That decode cycle and encode cycle, you're saving a bunch of bandwidth. So that's one thing to think about is if you do the vMix thing, you have to have a vMix computer or you have to run it in the cloud. So when I've done shows with Jonas and Tucker and these guys, that's what they do is they have a separate instance that takes all those Zoom feeds and then puts it into a nice, pretty presenter view.
7:51And then they push it over and that comes back and they say, pin this one tile and you'll have all your stuff right there. And so it's really cool. But again, it's engineering and that you have an engineer on standby to handle just your routing. Because over comms, they'll say, hey, could you make that whatever the talent wants? so you can make this bigger or smaller.
8:11So would that remove the issue where the more panelists you have and the more administrative tools you're using, the gallery just starts to get, everybody in the gallery gets smaller and smaller. Yeah, because you just tell the talent. You can't even read the clocks anymore. Yeah, because sometimes, like for this one show we were doing, the talent had a bigger screen, and it was right below the camera.
8:31So it wasn't a teleprompter. It was just a below-the-lens monitor, and they would say, pin this tile, make it full screen. and we had to do it every show because Talon always forgot how to do it. But then we could customize it. And after 50 shows, you get into a rhythm and you know what should be on there and what works. But yeah, that's pretty common.
8:51I mean, there's ways of doing it in hardware. We've done it on-prem with an MV4, so just the Blackmagic multi-viewer in hardware. So then somebody from afar could program whatever they want. but then it's a basic you know four up quad split display so it's basically sdi in and then you you put whatever you want each of those so but what that does is offers that the host uh a screen to
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