The Client
Kolade Fashola runs a digital media company in Abuja that produces live event coverage — corporate conferences, award shows, government press events, and cultural programmes. His production unit handles everything from on-site multi-camera capture to real-time graphics overlay to simultaneous streaming to YouTube and a proprietary platform. The operation is lean: a crew of five, operating equipment that has to work every time without fail, because live production failures are not recoverable after the fact.
The machine at the centre of his operation — a production PC that ran vMix, a live production software suite — was three years old and increasingly unstable. Frame drops during streaming. Occasional crashes during graphics-heavy segments. Thermal throttling that showed up as stutter in recordings reviewed after events. He had absorbed these failures with workarounds and apologies. He wanted to stop absorbing them.
The Challenge
Live broadcast production is technically one of the most demanding workloads for a single PC. Kolade's vMix setup needed to simultaneously:
- Ingest 4 live camera feeds via capture cards (4K SDI sources)
- Run a graphics engine generating real-time lower-thirds, full-screen titles, and animated transitions
- Encode two simultaneous streams (YouTube at 1080p60, private platform at 720p30)
- Record a clean 4K programme output to local NVMe storage
- Run a multiview display showing all sources simultaneously
This workload hits every part of the system simultaneously: PCIe bandwidth for the capture cards, CPU for encoding, GPU for graphics rendering and multiview composition, storage throughput for 4K recording. A machine that's fast in single-threaded benchmarks but mediocre in sustained multi-threaded performance will fail at live production. Consistency over hours matters more than peak speed.
The existing machine was a consumer gaming PC that had been repurposed for production — it was never designed for sustained professional workloads, and it showed.
The Consultation
We reviewed Kolade's vMix configuration and the specific capture cards he was using (Blackmagic Design DeckLink cards — professional SDI capture, PCIe x4 each). The machine would need four full PCIe lanes per card, which meant a platform with enough PCIe lanes to host four capture cards without sharing bandwidth. This immediately pointed us toward a workstation-class platform rather than a consumer one.
We also talked about redundancy. A live production failure is not just an embarrassment — it is a contractual failure that can end relationships with clients who paid for a professional service. We designed the machine with a standby hot-spare SSD containing a fully configured vMix environment, switchable within 90 seconds if the primary environment became unstable.
Power protection was non-negotiable. This machine runs at corporate events where the venue power is often sourced from event generators — notoriously unstable. The UPS had to provide clean, stable power regardless of what the venue supply was doing.
The Build
Live Production Workstation — ₦7.8 million:
- CPU: Intel Core i9-14900K — high core count for simultaneous encoding tasks; high single-core speed for vMix's compositing engine
- RAM: 128GB DDR5 — vMix holds large portions of media assets in RAM for instant recall; more RAM means faster transitions
- GPU: NVIDIA RTX 4080 Super 16GB — hardware NVENC encoder handles streaming duties without impacting CPU; GPU compositing for real-time graphics
- Capture card slots: 4× Blackmagic DeckLink 4K Mini Recorder PCIe cards (client-supplied) — each on dedicated PCIe x4 lanes from the CPU
- Storage (programme): 2TB Samsung 990 Pro NVMe — primary recording drive; 7,400 MB/s read ensures no dropped frames in 4K recording
- Storage (media): 4TB SATA SSD — vMix media assets (graphics, lower-thirds, video clips)
- Storage (standby): 1TB NVMe in M.2 slot 2 — full vMix environment, bootable standby configuration
- Networking: 2× 10GbE NICs — one for production network, one for streaming uplink
- UPS: APC Smart-UPS 3000VA pure sine wave — designed for broadcast equipment; clean, stable output regardless of input quality
- Case: Fractal Design Define 7 XL — quiet (important in production environments where machine noise can bleed into audio) and roomy for all the PCIe cards
We stress-tested the completed machine for eight hours with all four capture card inputs simulated, full encoding pipeline running, and graphics engine active. Zero frame drops, zero thermal throttling, GPU temperature plateau at 71°C, CPU at 68°C after six hours of sustained load.
The Result
Kolade's production unit has completed 11 live events since the new machine was deployed. Zero production failures. Zero frame drops detected in post-review of recordings. The vMix multiview, which previously lagged perceptibly during complex graphics sequences on the old machine, is smooth at all times.
The UPS has been critical at two events with unstable venue power. At a conference in a hotel ballroom, the venue generator cycled twice during the event — both times, the UPS absorbed the transition invisibly. The production director watching the output stream from a separate location noticed nothing. That seamlessness, Kolade said, is the whole point.
The standby NVMe environment has not been needed — which is precisely the outcome you want when you build in redundancy. It is there as insurance, not as a crutch.
Key Takeaway
Live production is unforgiving. There are no retakes, no opportunity to apologise after the fact, no way to recover a missed moment. The hardware at the centre of a live production workflow needs to be designed for sustained professional performance — not repurposed gaming hardware that might handle the load. Capture card bandwidth, encoding performance, storage throughput, and power protection are all equally important, and all need to be thought about before a single part is ordered.
Running live event production or broadcast work in Nigeria? Talk to our team about a professional production workstation. We understand the workload and the stakes.