Roland introduces $1,500 camera-mixing deck for pro live-streamers

As your Twitch career starts to take off, you’re likely to find yourself with increasing amounts of disposable income and the desire to elevate the quality of your broadcasts. That’s where Roland, the company best known for crafting highly renowned electronic music equipment, has a new product to help you out. The VR-1HD is a mixing deck with a difference: it does a few familiar audio modulation bits, like adding reverb or music jingles, but its claim to fame is the ability to also manage up to three cameras on the fly, allowing you to put out professional-looking, multicamera live broadcasts.

The focus of the VR-1HD is on making live streams as slick and engaging as video that’s been edited and refined with the addition of clever transitions and multiple camera angles. To that end, the mixing deck — which is fed via three HDMI inputs, two XLR jacks for studio microphones, and one line-in input — includes a selection of automated transition modes. One has the video follow the audio, which would be ideal for podcasts, wherein the camera automatically switches to the person speaking into the microphone associated with a certain video feed. Another, well-suited to musical performances, switches in rhythm with the tempo of your music. You can also just preset a constant rotation between the cameras or use those chunky buttons on the board to switch manually.

Roland also notes that its new live-streaming tool makes it a cinch to stream gameplay from old-school consoles, and it also helps offload CPU-intensive tasks from the PC you’re gaming on. In all cases, the maximum output resolution from the VR-1HD will be 1920 x 1200 at 60 fps. And you’ll need to buy all the necessary cameras and microphones to make this system sing, as no input devices come bundled with it.

The VR-1HD will be available in the second quarter of this year for the mighty price of $1,495. It looks set to be a useful tool for people getting serious about their live streams — but only for those who are already making money from the venture.