For seven years I ran the engineering side of VSporte, a company that builds software for sports broadcasting. Everything described here is VSporte product development, done by the company's engineering teams. My part was the architecture and the calls about where the work went next.
Our on-air graphics started where most production rooms start, as a folder of vMix titles files, and over a few years they left vMix completely. vMix still does the final mix. The graphics are not inside it.
This is the part of the story that shipped. Three steps, and the useful thing about them is not where we ended up, it is that every fix created the next bottleneck. If you work in broadcast you will recognise at least one of them, probably the first.
Step zero: vMix and a folder of gtzip files
The setup we started from is the one standing in most production rooms. vMix on a workstation, and the graphics living as gtzip files, which is vMix's proprietary titles format. The operator loads the pack and configures the titles inside vMix by hand. Presets exist and they make a repeat setup cheaper than the first one, but the data behind every graphic still has to be carried through, match after match.
