Beyond Hardware Mixers: A Resilient Cloud-Native Architecture for Real-Time Remote Video Production

Abstract

Professional live video production has traditionally been limited by proprietary hardware mixers and monolithic desktop applications, which impose prohibitive costs and restrict scalable, command-line-based implementation for remote integration (REMI) workflows. To address these limitations, this article presents Voctomix 2.0, a containerized and enhanced live video mixing architecture based on the open-source Voctomix framework. This research introduces a production-ready extension layer that adds dynamic multi-layer overlays, operator-level stream-blanking control with coupled audio muting, and an asynchronous AMQP telemetry framework on top of the upstream mixing engine. The architecture was empirically evaluated in local, Docker, and single-node Kubernetes environments under varying workloads, ranging from 1080p25 to 2160p50 (4K). Results under a continuous four-source 1080p25 workload showed that, in a single-node deployment, containerization and orchestration impose no appreciable processing overhead, with a median host-level CPU utilization near 90% and a stable RAM working set of around 13 GB on standard hardware. The median command-to-output latency within the mixer was 293 ms, an internal switching latency that does not include camera capture or wide-area transport. Forced-failure experiments validated the architecture’s self-healing capability, which autonomously recovered blocked camera signals in approximately 1.8 s while maintaining a continuous live program feed.