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On most Sunday mornings, I run the sound board at a church. If you've sifted through the previous posts here, you might have gleaned that I previously worked in live sound and have a résumé that includes some household names.
From time to time, my old boss responsible for those great opportunities has been featured in national and local media, from trade publications to the local newspaper. The interviews sometimes mention the pride he has for employees that have moved on and up, after learning the ropes at his company. I once got a shoutout (of sorts) in one of those articles, which mentioned one guy that went on to work as a "Grip" on the the show "CSI". That's me, only "CSI" is instead "NCIS" and "Grip" was actually "Post Production Assistant". It can be hard to keep track of all the specifics.
For about a decade, I had been out of the live sound business. In the TV business, I had worked my way up to Producer, in a specific role that often requires me to use my eyes more than my ears. Nonetheless, when the pandemic started ramping up in 2020, I heard about a Sound Tech job opening at a church, working on Sunday mornings... That was the quickest job interview ever, and "Sound Tech" quickly became just one part of my job. We needed to pivot to live streaming, fast, so I was enlisted to research equipment and figure out the best way to make the services online look and sound more professional.
Some members of the church are entertainment biz pros, and I consulted with a TV editor about some of my equipment discoveries. I found a great deal on some nice cameras, learned how to boost HDMI signals over long distances, and found that a new product - the Blackmagic Design ATEM Mini Pro - could get us up and running at a great price.
The Mini Pro was about about $600. It featured 4 HDMI inputs and included software that makes the presentation look and sound even more professional, controllable by any computer you have on the local network. Also, this capability was really important for us: the USB-C port could be hooked up directly to a computer, and Zoom would see it as a webcam. At that point, the services were entirely through Zoom, and that feed was then "broadcast" on Facebook Live... With church access being limited during the pandemic, Zoom was a really important tool, so participants at home could read The Lord's Prayer and offer reflections during "Communion Meditation". This setup should have been awesome... but it wasn't, and the fault was with the ATEM Mini Pro switcher.
At first, the Mini Pro --> Zoom --> Facebook Live feed was flawless. Then, the computer started seeing the Mini Pro as a webcam only intermittently. I took the equipment home and ran a series of tests during the week, then more tests during the following week.
The video switcher was very finicky. I tried all kinds of cables and adapters and, eventually, I could only get Mac and Windows computers to recognize the Mini Pro when it was connected through a USB-C hub.
I contacted Blackmagic. They suggested some basic troubleshooting tests that I had already performed. Upon sending them the problematic ATEM Mini Pro, they sent me a replacement. That worked fine at first, then it didn't. The USB-C port slowly stopped working, again. Re-opening the thread with Customer Service, we kicked around some outside-the-box ideas, like bad electrical wiring in the building, voltage surges, and the like. They didn't think the problem was electrical-related, and all of our gear is plugged into surge protecting power strips anyhow.
During this communication, the Customer Service team did hear from one of their techs that the USB-C port on the original unit was certifiably dead. After the port on the second unit failed, we made another exchange. Guess what? The exact same thing happened on the third unit. It worked, then didn't. Clearly there's a design issue with this device.
Now, I will clarify here that you don't have to run the ATEM Mini Pro video feed through a computer at all. We just needed that approach since our workflow included participants on Zoom, and the "device-as-a-webcam" was certainly an advertised featured. Otherwise, if you hook up the video switcher to the internet via an ethernet cable, you can control the live feed via another computer on the network and send that ethernet signal directly to Facebook Live, YouTube, or whatever your preferred streaming platform is.
Once the third unit unit crapped out, I convinced the church to upgrade to a different model: the ATEM Mini Extreme ISO, which has 8 HDMI inputs. Guess what happened? The USB-C port on this model stopped working.
We got tired of chasing this problem and Blackmagic not having an answer. Since then, we modified our workflow. I donated an old computer (still a beast of a machine but old, circa 2009), which could be used as a direct HDMI feed to the 8-channel Mini Extreme ISO, during those rare times we have a presenter joining us from off-site via Zoom.
To conclude, the Blackmagic Design ATEM Mini Pro and Mini Extreme ISO units stopped living up to the company's promises. The gear does offer a lot in a compact package, both on the hardware and software sides... but it's been a point of frustration for a long time, and the shoulder shrug, "we checked out your equipment, it doesn't work, and we don't know why" isn't acceptable. A part of me loves the ATEM series, and a part of me also has great disdain for it. In a consultant role, recommending these products would depend entirely on the workflow needs.
If you need any clarification for the issue described above, leave a comment below and/or watch through this video I made:
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If you would rather buy something, have a look at these photo prints on Fine Art America.
"Tech Review: Blackmagic Design ATEM Mini Pro Video Switcher" (2023)
Written by: Justin Kilmer
All images and media on this site are © by Justin Kilmer, unless otherwise noted.
This page was written entirely by a human, and it was last updated in Nov. 2024.
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