Hello Everyone!

As you may have seen, we are doing a lot with vMix data sources and it’s been a fun ride learning about what can be done with live data in our video productions. One of our long-term goals is using live data to power a 24/7 live stream on YouTube that allows users to automatically interact with the live stream. We have also generated a starter kit for anyone interested in learning more about building what the industry calls an “Audience Response System”. You can download our vMix Data Sources jump start kit here – ptzoptics.com/landing/audience-response.html.

vMix Data Sources custom google form questions

Using vMix Data Sources:

We have found that Google Sheets are one of the easiest ways to bring in data into vMix Data Sources. We like using Google Sheets because it was a great integration with Google Forms allowing us to populate the google sheets with information from our audience and then into vMix Data Sources. But, we are also testing out some of the other ways to use vMix data sources such as RSS, XML, JSON, CVS and Text files.

Practical vMix Data Source Examples:

vMix Social Integration

A couple examples we showed on our last live stream demonstrating vMix Data Sources is displaying a list of the latest YouTube Subscribers and a live count of our total subsribers. We also, asked our audience to submit a custom google form that asked what their favorite bands were from the 80s, 90s and today. This information was then displayed in custom vMix titles that we created to display our vMix Data Sources inputs. As you can see, one question asked live viewers to rate their favorite live streaming platform: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter or Instagram. We also, used vMix social to bring in pictures from social media outlets.

Polling your live audience:

So we decided to poll our live audience using a Google Form which again populated our Google Sheets integrating with our vMix Data Sources. This was a great way to bring in the data live. We then used the vMix Data Sources Loop feature which allows us to cycle through the data rows on a timer. You can set a custom amount of time you want vMix to wait until it changes the data in your title to the next row.

Conclusion on vMix Data Sources:

We found vMix data sources incredibly easy to use and powerful. We are still testing some of the more advanced data integrations but Google Forms/Sheets was intuitive and feel like almost anyone can get this set up without tearing out their hair 🙂 Much more to come from us on vMix data sources where we are looking to integrate our 24/7 live stream channel with more data.

Here are some of the vMix Data Sources we hope to use:

1. vMix Social: Brining in live social media posts into our live stream from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram
2. Displaying Upcoming Shows: This will be managed by a Google Sheet Integration
3. Display Live Subscriber Count: We will be using StreamLabs for this. Streamlabs can create updated text files we can send into vMix Data Sources
4. Displaying Latest Subscribers: Currently, we may need to use Google Sheets unless StreamLabs comes up with an easier way.
5. Donation Count: Every week we donate to charity. So it’s great for us to be able to show the total given year to date. We will use a Google Sheet for this as well.
6. Live Comment Display: For this the plan will be to have a PHP developed. It could integrate with the YouTube API to display the latest chatroom information on a really cool custom title…

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