Magewell Director Plus Turns a Folding Table into a Launch Day Control Room

• The Customer: Pablo Fuente, Órbita Infinita, Florida, USA

• The Challenge: Cover live rocket launches from Kennedy Space Center solo, in Spanish, without a dropped feed or a moment of dead air

• The Solution: Magewell Director Plus, four HDMI camera and graphics inputs, NDI and the Director Utility app as backup, Ethernet and cellular connected at once

The story

Pablo Fuente hosts Órbita Infinita, a Spanish-language channel covering spaceflight from Kennedy Space Center. When he covered the launch of the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope live for his channel from the press site, it summed up what the job actually involves. As he puts it, a launch broadcast isn't really about the launch, liftoff lasts thirty seconds, the show is the hours before and the hour after, when the audience is either still there or gone. The goals were simple: never cut away, never go silent, never look improvised. He mixed pre-recorded segments on the story behind the mission with live shots of the rocket, then cut to a long lens as the vehicle cleared the tower before re-engaging his audience. Director Plus ran the whole show from a folding table.

Closing the language gap

Órbita Infinita exists because most serious launch coverage is in English, leaving Spanish-speaking space fans to follow along in a second language or miss half of what's said. The channel has grown to 130,000 subscribers on YouTube and close to 200,000 followers on X, spread across Spain, Latin America and the United States.

The challenge

Pablo was already a Magewell user, running a Director Mini before this. He liked it, but his show had grown to three cameras plus a laptop for graphics and the NASA feed, and on the Mini that meant at least one source had to arrive over the network. That's rarely a problem, except at Kennedy Space Center, where the press site network is shared by a few hundred journalists at the worst possible moment and nobody covering a launch is willing to trust it. Everyone runs cable for everything.

Where Director Plus fits

Director Plus is the whole control room. Everything arrives at it and only the finished stream leaves. HDMI 1 carries the presenter camera on Pablo himself, HDMI 2 the long lens pointed at the pad, HDMI 3 a PTZ camera for wide shots and tracking, and HDMI 4 the laptop running the NASA feed and mission graphics. Audio runs through a small mixer over USB-C, NDI stays in the kit for the rare source that can't be cabled, and the Director Utility app turns his phone into an extra roaming camera when needed. Network runs Ethernet first with a cellular connection as backup, both connected at once, and power switches between an adapter and hot-swappable batteries without ever going dark. It streams to YouTube and records locally at the same time, so the edited episode is half made before he packs up.

Why Magewell

Four HDMI inputs made the difference between one compromise and none. Pablo still uses NDI, and is glad it's there, but every source at Kennedy now arrives on copper. Moving to Director Plus wasn't a leap of faith so much as the same idea as the Mini, sized for the show he'd grown into.

Favorite features

Beyond the four HDMI inputs, Pablo builds scenes and shows the night before, naming scenes, placing graphics, setting audio levels, so on the day he's switching, not building. Countdown timers, lower thirds and mission graphics stay controllable live, and a short replay buffer covers the single most important moment of the day so he can show it again while he catches his breath. Hot-swappable batteries and simultaneous Ethernet and cellular keep him on air through long, unpredictable coverage, all running from one box under a permanent sunhood, because Florida sun at midday isn't kind to screens.

The result

Pablo stopped producing around his equipment. Setup time hasn't changed much, it was already fifteen minutes or less with the Mini, but those fifteen minutes now buy him every camera connected exactly the way he wants, with nothing in the chain a compromise he's talked himself into. He can still work alone, which matters for an independent Spanish language channel: it's the difference between covering a launch and not covering it. He's continuing to cover SpaceX, Blue Origin and NASA missions out of Florida.

“It is a full control room in the space a laptop used to take, which is what lets one person cover a rocket launch properly.”

Pablo Fuente, Órbita Infinita