Graphics & switching
Most pipelines treat graphics and switching as someone else's job — a vision mixer upstream, a graphics box alongside, and a transcoder that only sees the result. Norsk puts compositing, overlays, and source switching inside the workflow itself, as components you wire up like any other. The switch, the overlay, and the encode are one pipeline, so there's no extra hop to synchronise and no second vendor to blame.
How it works
Every visual operation is a node on the canvas with a config panel, a live preview, and a runtime API — so what you design visually is what runs, and what runs can be driven by an operator or by code.
The videoCompose processor overlays multiple video sources on top of a primary reference stream, with each source placed, sized, and layered independently. That single primitive covers picture-in-picture, side-by-side and quad layouts, L-band and D-box arrangements, and full-screen takes. Scenes are saved and recalled as presets, with configurable transitions between them, so a layout you build once becomes a button an operator presses.
onscreenGraphic burns image overlays — bugs, lower thirds, sponsor idents — onto a video stream at configurable positions. browserOverlay goes further and renders a live webpage over the picture, so scoreboards, tickers, and data-driven graphics come from HTML you already know how to build and update, driven by whatever feeds it. zoomTo and videoTransform handle the crop, scale, and framing work around them.
smartSourceSwitch moves between audio and video sources based on availability and priority — the safety net that keeps a programme on air when a feed dies. hardSourceSwitch cuts instantly between sources without transcoding when latency and quality matter more than a transition. makeProgram then groups the result into a single coherent program for delivery.
Use cases
Graphics and switching stop being a separate stage the moment the workflow that encodes your video is also the workflow that builds it.
A live event needs a full-screen camera one moment, a two-box with a remote pundit the next, and a persistent scoreboard over both. Doing that with a separate mixer and graphics system means more hardware, more sync points, and more to fail on the day.
videoCompose holds the layouts as recallable scene presets with transitions between them; browserOverlay renders the scoreboard from a live web page fed by the match data you already have. One workflow, one place to change it.
Talk to us about live production →A playout channel needs branding on air continuously — a permanent bug, an L-band wrap during promos, a squeeze-back over the credits — without an external branding engine sitting in the chain.
compose builds the L-band and squeeze-back layouts, onscreenGraphic carries the bug and idents, and the playout component sequences the underlying content. The branding lives in the same workflow as the channel.
See Norsk Playout →A contribution feed drops. Without automated switching, that's dead air until someone reacts — and reaction time is measured in the seconds your audience is already gone.
smartSourceSwitch watches source availability and priority and moves to the next-best source automatically, falling back to a slate or a backup encoder if it must. The switch is part of the workflow, so it happens whether or not anyone is watching the gallery.
Talk to us about failover →Capabilities
Four things to understand about how Norsk handles graphics and switching.
videoCompose overlays multiple sources onto a reference stream with independent position, size, and layer order — which is what picture-in-picture, quad splits, L-band, D-box, and squeeze-backs all reduce to. Layouts save as scene presets and recall with configurable transitions.
onscreenGraphic places image graphics at configurable positions for bugs, lower thirds, and idents. browserOverlay renders a live webpage over the video, so data-driven graphics are built in HTML and updated from your own feeds rather than authored in a proprietary graphics tool.
smartSourceSwitch moves between sources on availability and priority — automated resilience. hardSourceSwitch cuts instantly with no transcode when a clean, immediate take matters. Both are components, so the switching logic is visible in the workflow rather than buried in an appliance.
Every component exposes runtime commands and HTTP routes alongside its config panel, so the same scene recall or source cut can be triggered by a human in a dashboard, by an automation system, or by an AI agent watching the stream — without changing the workflow underneath.
Whether you're building a branded 24/7 channel, a multi-camera live event, or a workflow that has to keep itself on air, get in touch and we'll map it to your sources and your look.
Talk to us