The Graphics Seat.

A corporate general session asks the same thing of every screen: the right content, on cue, every time.

The seat I take most often in the DC market is V2 — the graphics operator’s seat — and its answer is two of everything: two playback machines, two graphics machines and one control laptop that runs them all.

The backups are not spares waiting to be swapped in.

Each is a complete, independent setup, often networked to its partner machine and fired at the same moment from Stream Deck and Companion. Each arrives at the broadcast system as its own live input, so losing a machine is a take on the switcher — a cut to the backup — not a recovery the room can see.

Mitti or PlaybackPro carry anything bound for a single screen: animations, produced video, sponsor spots, lower thirds, video backgrounds.

The graphics machines run whatever the presenters bring — PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides, Figma or a client’s own presentation tool. When a surface outgrows a single output — 4K-and-up canvases built from several outputs, or many screens from one source — the show moves to Millumin or Resolume.

The control laptop hosts Companion, edits assets in Creative Cloud and stands by as a spare Millumin, Mitti or Keynote machine.

Even the seat that runs the backups has a backup.

Not every show streams; every show is prepared to.

For the stream, vMix or OBS compose screens and switch sources while recording. Zoom, Teams or Meet bring remote speakers into the room or cast the session to a closed remote audience. An extra GPU machine can take backgrounds and lower thirds.

The hardware changes with the gig — playback and graphics machines, chosen per show — and the setup does not.

From a DC base, my work has taken me to more than twenty US cities, Halifax and the US Virgin Islands. The same skills cover the other V2 seats: projectionist and streaming technician.