It started with a thin line.
I was mapping a video onto a surface with a fairly strong distortion, the kind you need when you place a screen into a set at an angle. Across the image ran a seam. Not a big one, but on a live program it was impossible to unsee.
I searched for a fix and found the bug report instead. It was about fifteen years old.
That was the moment the question changed. It was no longer how do I work around this? but why are the tools we use every day built like this?
Tools that grew by addition
Once I started looking, I saw the same pattern everywhere.
The production software I had used for years was designed in another era. It was reliable and it had served a lot of shows, mine included. But it had grown by adding things to an old core, not by rethinking it.
- A scene could hold a fixed, small number of layers. Organising a complex show meant fighting the structure instead of using it.
- Effects existed, but only a few, and not per layer. You could not simply stack them where you needed them.
- Scripting was there, in a dated language, with thin documentation and an environment that made writing code feel like a chore.
- Overlays and stingers worked, as long as you did not ask too much of them.
- Audio had buses, but no real signal graph and no way to listen to something privately before it went on air.
- And there was no notion of 3D at all.
The flexible alternatives had the opposite problem. They could do almost anything, because they tried to serve everyone. Every new need became another plugin, another dock, another panel squeezed onto the same screen. There was no point of view about how a show should actually be built, so every operator had to invent one, often live, under pressure.
Guests, rooms, return audio for remote callers: each of these needed another tool or another workaround, glued together until it held.
None of this is a missing feature. It is structural. You cannot patch your way out of a core that was designed for a different job.
A gap between two worlds
There was something else that bothered me even more.
On one side there is the world most of us work in: 2D production. Cameras, graphics, lower thirds, scenes, a switcher. Fast, practical, built for live.
On the other side there is virtual production. Real-time 3D sets, tracked cameras, content placed convincingly into space. It looks like the future, and in many ways it is. But getting there usually means stepping into game-engine territory, with its own pipelines, specialists and a level of complexity that most live productions simply cannot carry.
Between those two worlds there is almost nothing. Either you stay flat, or you take on an entirely different discipline.
I kept wondering what a bridge would look like. A tool where you start in the 2D workflow you already know, and 3D arrives gradually: first a matched camera and layers placed in perspective, later a real virtual set, without having to become a game developer along the way.
That is still a wish, not a product. But it is the direction.
So, something new
This is how Muxivo Studio began. Not as “another switcher”, but as an attempt to answer one question properly: how should a live show be built today?
The answer we are working towards is opinionated on purpose:
- One workflow, end to end. Layouts as reusable templates, scenes built from them, overlays as their own channels with queues, and a clear path from Preview to Program.
- A modern core. GPU composition from the start, so effects belong to layers and do not live in a corner of an old renderer.
- Audio as a signal graph, with the ability to check a source privately before the audience hears it.
- Graphics anyone can design. Overlays are HTML, so any animation is possible, with or without AI, while one shared platform feeds them live data.
- Automation that is part of the design, not added at the end.
- 3D as a first-class idea, growing step by step towards virtual production.
Some of this already runs. Some of it is in rehearsal. Some of it is still a plan. This log is where I will be honest about which is which.
Why a devlog
Because opinions are cheap until you can see them working.
Over the next posts I will show the parts as they take shape, what works, what did not, and the decisions behind them. If you run live productions and something here sounds wrong to you, that is exactly the feedback I am looking for.
The show is in rehearsal. This is take one.