How to Virtualize Live Production

The purpose of this whitepaper is to provide an overview of virtualized live production, the challenges that make it difficult, and the reasons why it’s worth the effort. The case for going virtual is all about the business benefits that these technologies promise in addressing four major challenges: utilization of equipment, flexibility, centralization, and improved resilience. During our initial attempt to virtualize our Ross XPression motion graphics system, we encountered three major roadblocks: high bandwidth, traffic shaping, and maintaining a precise clock. The paper will go into detail on the steps that were taken to address these challenges and provide an explanation of the model that was used to ultimately achieve success. Our first attempt to stand up XPression in a virtual machine to produce uncompressed streams ended in failure, so we made a number of changes and several trade-offs before we were able to achieve our current solution. To conclude, the paper will provide a stream analysis, present a discussion of the findings, and answer the question of whether it’s worth it to virtualize live production.