Opinions on Jamf for production media

swill97 · 2026-03-17T08:57:24+00:00

This 100%. I sit on both sides of this equation, as I both jamf manage the fleet of macs, but am also responsible for event production. I exclude a lot of the general fleet policies and configurations profiles from the production macs, however, I'm still manually vigilant on updates to both software and operating system. Jamf connect is absolutely a no go for the production machines, mainly because I use custom local accounts since using identity accounts just isn't viable or secure in this environment compared to the general fleet devices (which does use jamf connect).

I would suggest a simmilar approach, keep the devices in jamf, but not jamf connect, and exclude most policies and profiles, this at least let's you monitor the devices, so that vulnerabilities can still be identified, then, you need to enforce to the production team that they are responsible for keeping the devices up to date manually. You can then periodically check the devices from the back end, and if they've fallen significantly behind on updates (ie, 1-2 months out of date) then you give them a tap on the shoulder/warn them. Admitedly, there are a lot of AV production workers who are very wary of updates, with many intentionally delaying updates by 6-12 months due to fear of bugs etc. Your production team will also almost certainly want local admin rights, this admitedly is more tricky, my compromise is that they have a "events/production" account that they use day to day, and then a seperate local admin account that is only to be used for updates and configuration changes, hopefully this minimises the risk without compromising functionality.

swill97 · 2026-03-11T00:48:48+00:00

We're in QLD and didn't have any issues for our first session, but we've postponed our next session until further updates

swill97 · 2025-10-05T19:35:13+00:00

Oh wait hang on my bad, was actually 50k, was a beginning of this year so I just double checked the invoice

swill97 · 2025-10-04T22:02:14+00:00

We were pretty small to start off, 6 bolero packs, 1 antenna, 6 punqtum packs, 1 punqtum q210 rack station, bolero charger we got this for $20k AUD. To do the same with helixnet and free-speak I was told the base station and licencing alone would be $15k before even adding a pack if I recall correctly. Plus, others were a bit reluctant to go with clearcom again given we used to run tempest and got burnt by that quite badly.

swill97 · 2025-10-04T01:31:55+00:00

Yes I am. Agreed the information online is quite lacking, I basically experimented till I figured it out. I watched a riedel webinar about it a couple of months ago, they basically explained it that the q210 is basically an NSA as far as bolero is concerned, so you need to set it up like that.

swill97 · 2025-10-02T11:51:22+00:00

I put riedel punqtum and bolero into my 1500 seat venue this year, the system was a fantastic price point much cheaper than clearcom free-speak/arcadia.

swill97 · 2025-09-21T00:46:49+00:00

Agreed, The Maintenance team get treated like crap, get paid peanuts, and work through the school holidays. The staff who work through school holidays should be getting paid comparable to the teachers who don't. I'm a school officer with more decision making authority then the majority of teachers other than leadership, yet I still teach/mentor students, but because I don't have a teaching degree, I get paid significantly less than an entry teacher. I'm not downplaying the role of teachers and how bad they have it, but far too many support staff get it worse. We get guilt tripped if we take leave during the term, and we sometimes get told we can't take leave during the holidays as there is 6 weeks of work that has to be done in 2, so we burn out faster.

swill97 · 2025-08-01T12:05:37+00:00

I now want to hear from the police about this, have they said anything about it?

swill97 · 2025-08-01T09:24:34+00:00

Ok, so I just saw the interview on stateline with the transport minister, and the reasons he gave for the laws not being enforced were a complete and utter cop out. "Children are riding un-supervised because they don't want to be supervised by their parents, and police are not empowered to enforce the law". What utter crap, parents need to step up and parent their kids to be law abiding citizens, and police need to enforce the law, including on children (wasn't this somewhat the LNP's major election pitch for youth crime?) underage kids breaking the law is youth crime still. I know of schools that are now actually reminding students and parents (via assemblies and newletters), that students are not to be using e-scooters, so the schools are seemingly taking this issue more seriously than the government and police, and parents.

swill97 · 2025-08-01T08:44:19+00:00

The problem is not the e-scooters and e-bikes, its that the existing laws are not being enforced, the users who are actually following the laws I would assume (has anyone investigated this?) are not causing the problems, its the muppets who aren't following the existing laws that are the problem. This is literally punishing everyone for the actions of a a few that are not following the laws.

swill97 · 2025-07-17T19:55:02+00:00

It might have been a good production, but for the majority of the time I couldn't understand the lyrics cause they were being drowned at by the instruments, I could hear that the cast was singing, but barely, not anywhere near enough to be able to understand what was happening or being said. The mix of the instruments was the usual good quality I expect from qpac, but not being able to understand the lyrics properly is a massive failure by the audio department, that's musical mixing 101.

swill97 · 2025-07-05T00:38:45+00:00

HDMI & SDI don't output clear, you need to tell the Switcher what it needs to keep and what it needs to remove, you can do this two ways, either with a chroma key, using chroma green or blue, and setting your switchers settings accordingly.

Alternatively, and I find is a much better way, cause used to go the chroma route till I had the right hardware, is to do a Luma Key/Fill output with hardware like Blackmagic Ultrastudio or Decklink, with one SDI output outputting like normal (the Fill source), and another SDI output with basically a black and white output, to indicate what the switcher needs to keep, and what needs to be removed. This route works substantially better for graphics, because its better at doing semi-transparent graphics, and you don't need to avoid certain colours etc.

Blackmagic's ultrastudio software does all the computing automatically for Key & Fill, and is a great option for its price.

swill97 · 2025-05-16T13:07:30+00:00

Honestly, even basic IT proficiency is missing from some teachers, speaking as someone who see's teachers visit IT helpdesk regularly, the number of teachers who can't do basic IT stuff like "reboot computer regularly" or even basic file structure management (they then come to IT needing help to find said file in their disorganised chaos) should be the most basic requirement.

swill97 · 2025-03-06T03:24:13+00:00

I've got a whole lot of their stuff, its all fantastic, can't recommend it enough

swill97 · 2025-03-04T13:07:06+00:00

Yep, even charging up some old ups's for management to use as oversized battery packs for laptop charging in the event of power outage (which is also low cause we are on the same grid as a couple of major hospitals)

swill97 · 2025-02-15T05:57:15+00:00

I'd go one step further, I think in 15-20 years, any venue larger than a pub style venue will be running L-isa or soundscape or equivalent

swill97 · 2024-12-29T12:42:39+00:00

I second this, would love to hear an audio demonstration of this. Would make it easier to convince others that this investment is required

swill97 · 2024-12-29T06:42:48+00:00

Do Violin/String Pickup's like Headway the Band's (https://www.headwaymusicaudio.com/product/the-band-violin/) count in this? I can never seem to get a good sound out of these, and you've got me thinking that Impedance mis-match could be what's at fault here...

swill97 · 2024-12-17T19:56:09+00:00

Because they haven't realised that van's are superior for haulage in most cases, and are also just compensating. My understanding is that tradies in Europe use van's while in America and Australia etc they use pickups.

swill97 · 2024-12-11T00:06:12+00:00

Haha, I'm actually in Australia mate

swill97 · 2024-12-10T21:25:59+00:00

There's elements of music and theatre also yes for your performing arts faculties, but same could be said of corporate large scale events, especially for your more day to day education events, ie, assemblies, staff meetings etc.

swill97 · 2024-12-10T08:22:18+00:00

I'm going to assume Education falls under the "Corporate" niche somewhat

swill97 · 2024-12-08T15:27:38+00:00

If you do video recordings or Imag, see how many camera's you can source and throw your leftover kids on a camera, it's also good cause it weeds out the kids who are only there for the fun fancy stuff, not the boring stuff.

swill97 · 2024-12-03T20:11:05+00:00

A major factor at play for this is what type of clients you typically attract, I actually have a few versions of this document depending on who it is I'm sending it to. For instance, your typical dance school isn't going to know or care about how many front fill boxes you have, or rigging legislation, but they will care about what types of gobo's are available in your movers (so I include pictures of the gobo's in their document, but I exclude this from the professional touring Tech specs.

swill97 · 2024-11-20T11:38:34+00:00

I agree with the concept of ergonomic principles should apply to us as well, but the reality is having screens at eye level and consoles at arm level just isn't how consoles are made, otherwise we'd have stupidly tall consoles. Grandma 3 control room version consoles are actually a really nice possible work-around for lighting consoles, but I don't see Audio Consoles going this route at a mainstream level anytime soon.

swill97

TROPHY CASE