Roland HD Video Switcher (V-8HD)

Board is great if your know what your doing it was too much for me and my production I sent it back

Satisfied

It’s a perfect switcher!

So far, no dislikes, just a lot to learn! This mixer does so much! It is used for live streaming church services.

Livestreaming, using a HD camera so that we can livestream in HD

Highly recommend!

Don't listen to some of the uninformed reviewers who say this is an out of date relic. This is a control surface which puts the most commonly used controls in front of you when you're under pressure. You don't want to be directing a live shoot with a mouse and a PC. Sure you can cobble together everything to make this work completely from your laptop. The potential for failure is much higher when you kludge a system together. There's a reason why higher end Tricaster and Ross boards look similar to this and are used in broadcasting. They are intuitive to use, reliable and made to work under grueling conditions. This is eight capture cards in one unit with scalers on channels 7 and 8. Two rows of inputs make it easy to transition from one channel to the next or put down five downstream overlays. You can then connect this board to a laptop with Vmix or OBS or use a dedicated bonded hardware encoder like the Teradek Cube or LiveU Solo for a bit more reliability. I use two LiveU encoders in my setup with this board--though I may upgrade to the new V160 for the SDI and HDMI inputs. Don't worry that it only does HD. Most streaming jobs are still only 1080p or 720. Most news/doc/film deliverables are still 1080. Most people watching streaming content use their phones or their small laptop screens. It does have a somewhat noisy fan that won't be ideal in very quiet settings. The fan does keep the board cool and reliable. I used to have an ATEM Mini and that thing had a quiet but inefficient fan that didn't cool enough. So the ATEM would just randomly freeze up when the climate was hot and when you had a lot of inputs. The Television Studio models are the only ones I'd trust in the BMD switcher line since those are industrial grade and made to operate for long periods. No scalers on any of those inputs, though.

15 years ago this would have been a fantastic video switcher, in fact it may have even been my goto for small productions with its ease of use and commonly sought after features that a lot of times were only found in larger production units. But it's not 15years ago, this is 2020, where 4k is now the de facto standard and PC hardware is now affordable enough the a much more capable 4k solution with 8 HDMI inputs could be had at the same price if you were willing to use a software production switcher instead. In fact a 1080p solution with even more features could be done on a PC for half the price (including the cost of the computer itself).So while this is a great unit that I cannot fault as long as I look at it in a vacuum void of information about its price or alternative solutions, knowing the price I simply cannot recommend using this in any production environment.