Review: Magewell Director Plus
In this review, I’ll tell you about the new Magewell Director Plus … and how I tried to kill it.
As I write this, it’s July 2026, and Magewell has just released the Director Plus (see Figure 1). This is the culmination of the Magewell Director series that started with the Director Mini and continued with the Director One. Each device in the Director series is an Android-based tablet that puts an entire live production studio in your hand.
Figure 1. The Magewell Director Plus
I’ve spent more than 5 years using various all-in-one (AIO) tablets to produce weekly shows. I also have experience with vMix, TriCasters, Wirecast, and a host of other hardware switchers and solutions, as well as multiple Apple and Android tablet production apps.
All In One (AIO)
AIO production solutions are not just “switchers.” They attempt to do everything that a production needs in one device. This includes physically plugging in cameras and incorporating a range of sources into a production, such as networked cameras, screen shares, media from websites, stored video playback, stills, and more.
From within each device in the Director AIO series—including the new Director Plus—you can cut, mix, build multiview or supersource, or create graphics, scoreboards, web overlays, PiP, and more. You can record ISO feeds; record Program; do instant replays; send video over the network via SRT, NDI, RTMP, etc.; and live stream via the CDN(s) of your choosing.
All of these tasks used to require a truckful of gear and a dozen or more people. The technology has been simplified and squished, but you may still need to separate tasks, because on an AIO device, switching your one screen away from program to adjust audio levels means you’re not watching what’s happening. On simple shows, you can often “set and forget” many elements in the production, but on a more complex show with a lot going on, having the ability to distribute tasks to other screens and control surfaces for other people to handle is important. All of the Director models provide multiple ways to manage a show.
Magewell now offers three Director models (see Figure 2). The Director Mini (MSRP $1,299), introduced in 2023, was the first out the door and is aptly named for its mini 5.44" screen size. This HD video switcher will down-convert any 4K sources. It lacks internal cellular. Video out is over a combo USB-C that could be connected to a big external touch monitor for video and control. Antennas are internal, and the fan is in the middle of the back of the unit.
Figure 2. The Magewell Director Series
The second device, the Director One, released in 2025 (MSRP $1,599), augmented the Mini with some user-requested features: a bigger 7" screen, a 2x brighter screen, a better fan design, dedicated full-size HDMI video out (which means sacrificing the “combo” capability), internal cellular, and multiple-level battery indicators. Because it featured the brain and capability of the Mini, plus some upgrades, I would have called this 2025 edition “the Director Plus,” instead of the Director One.
Likewise, if Magewell had asked me to name it, I would have called the new Director Plus simply “the Director.” It is everything Director, all grown up and refined. It’s almost the same size as the Director One, but a little thicker and with more mounting points all around the frame. It comes in a bigger box with a stronger power supply (5A versus 3A for the previous models), a metal sunshade (like the others), an all-new table stand that’s adaptable between landscape and portrait modes, and a slide-on plastic screen cover tucked away under where the four antennas are packed.
The Director Plus (MSRP $2,099) inherits all of the enhancements of the Director One, but steps up the internal cellular from 4G to 5G, making the Plus unique among all of the AIO solutions today. More importantly, the step up in processing power enables true 4Kp60 UHD production from ingest to stream and recording.
The Director Plus has two 4K HDMI inputs in addition to the two HD inputs (see Figure 3), as well as multiple 4K-over-IP inputs. There are 10 IP inputs in total and two HDMI outs. It also boasts video playback, replay, four separate encoders (one 4K, three HD), internal recording, and streaming—4K all the way through.
Figure 3. 4K inputs on the Director Plus
In addition to the two HDMI outs, there is a USB-C out. There’s even a new control panel screen that lets you easily assign what goes to each of the two HDMI outs and to the USB-C. Compared to the Director One’s single audio input, the Director Plus gets two physical stereo inputs. I see a lot of people using multiple wireless receivers fed into a mixer, so handling two receivers without an external mixer is a good addition.
All of the Directors use standard, external NP-F batteries. Two can be clipped into the slots on the back. The Directors use one battery at a time, so you can hot-swap them. With the Director Plus model being shipped with a 12v 5A power supply, I’d recommend using only the NP-F970 (the biggest size) so that you have more cells to handle the potential amperage needed.
On the Table
Although mounting the Director Plus on the new stands puts the device at a slightly steeper angle than I prefer, it’s still perfectly usable, and the orientation of the ports really makes sense. All four HDMI are on the right. There are four antennas across the top—two cellular, two Wi-Fi—using standard SMA jacks, so you can use directional or other antennas as you see fit. The left side has Audio input and output, USB-A and USB-C inputs, and MicroSD. The bottom has power, HDMI out, USB-C out, and Ethernet (see Figure 4). Magewell has increased Ethernet to 2.5 Gb to handle the potential of multiple 4K IP sources, including Full Bandwidth NDI.
Figure 4. I/O on the Director Plus
Internal recording expands to four separate recorders. According to Magewell, at this time, when one encoder is set to 4K, the others will need to step down to lower resolutions (2K and HD are available). This applies to Replay as well. For now, you’re not going to get four channels of 4K replay on a small device like this. We’ll see what technology may bring in a few more years.
Magewell says that multiple Full Bandwidth NDI streams and multiple HX streams can be ingested at the same time. At the time of this writing, because of the increased bandwidth and CPU demand of Full Bandwidth NDI, the exact “this or that” trade-off has not yet been published. I don’t have enough devices to test it, but Magewell told me that the Director Plus will handle up to eight phone cameras (using their app), up to 10 NDI-HX3 sources, or some mixture of IP sources, up to 10 total.
Magewell has added all of this capability and I/O while essentially keeping nearly the same size and weight of the Director One before it, which is impressive. However, I’ve seen many Director One users complain that they want a bigger screen. But I feel that Magewell sees value in keeping it small enough that it still works as a camera-top monitor-type accessory. If you’re going to use it on a table, you can still add a 15" touchscreen, although the interface doesn’t change, and what you’ll see on your external touchscreen will be the same as the UI shown on the Director’s internal screen.
But the one change that perplexed me was the addition of a MicroSD card slot. I’ve never been a MicroSD fan, mostly because they’re so fiddly, and most devices require you to push them in so far that people like me with very trim fingernails always need to use the tip of a pen or another MicroSD card to get it in far enough. Plus, most often, when a client hands me media or photos, it’s on a regular SD card, if not a USB stick, but never a MicroSD card. Not having a standard SD card slot might be an issue if you don’t remember to bring a media reader dongle.
Thankfully, Magewell’s implementation doesn't require that much push to get a MicroSD card to stay. This also means it’s easier to remove, because when it comes out past the double-click, I’ve found it’s easy to grab with my fingers. But I still dislike MicroSD, and I feel there’s enough space in the middle of the bottom panel, below the screen, where Magewell could have placed a full-size SD card slot.
The Interface
For those unfamiliar with the Director series or other tablet AIO solutions, let me give a brief overview of how these devices work. AIOs are Android-based tablets with physical ports for video, audio, Ethernet, USB connectivity, and more. Your inputs show up as sources along the bottom of the main screen. Audio for each of the sources will appear in an internal audio mixer you can call up. Unique to the Director series is that an audio fader can be “global”—which means that the source in question is always going to be that loud—or the volume can be unique to each scene. For example, my microphone can be turned off in my preshow countdown scene.
What is a “scene,” in this context? Each input is a multi-layered scene (see Figure 5). You can put four moving layers, background music, and graphics in a scene. Each of these could be a supersource, a multiview, an ME-1, a PiP, etc. Every single item you touch can have layers, or they can just be camera shots. Or you can duplicate the shot with and without graphics on it.
Figure 5. Scenes in the Director Plus UI
There is also a separate area for graphic overlays (see Figure 6). These can be internally created overlays like full-screen graphics, lower-thirds, timers, countdowns, sports scoreboards, and more. Or you can bring in images, video, or web sources as graphic overlays and call up each of these graphics over the program as needed.
Figure 6. Applying multiple overlays on the Director Plus
On any device in the Magewell Director series, you can do the following:
- Switch by touching the items on the screen
- Touch the virtual buttons on the Director’s Shortcuts screen or an external touchscreen
- Run the Director using the Director Utility app on a logged-in phone or tablet
- Use a USB or Bluetooth keypad/keyboard and assign keystrokes to shortcuts
- Program OSC control
- Leverage an Elgato Stream Deck and/or Companion/Central Control
- Directly connect a USB control surface like a MiraBox Stream Dock for control
- Control the device via a web browser on a computer or tablet on the local area network
If the Director is connected with a Magewell Control Hub cloud account, it can be logged into and controlled from anywhere on the planet. There are even APIs so you can program other control systems to call directly into the Director using existing smart room tech.
This flexibility can enable multiple producers to run different aspects of a show on different control surfaces. For example, one person can run the sports scoreboard. Another can mind the audio mixer. Another can run lower-third graphics through the show. Another can handle viewer comments coming back from YouTube and Facebook. Another can take care of instant replay. They don’t have to even be in the same room.
The Director Plus offers up to four channels of replay, which is perfect for sports events. You can even include a cool stinger to transition in and out of replay. There’s chromakey for any of your inputs and an onscreen pen for telestration. You can scroll and click on web inputs and have the audio follow the video so that a camera’s audio is only heard when that video is in Program. Or you can have the video follow the audio, setting up a multi-microphone podcast to essentially switch itself depending on who’s talking.
If you’re using a PTZ camera, you can adjust its position and presets on the Director. You can also bring up viewer comments and add them to the program as well as set up different scenes into a playlist and have them play automatically.
New to the Plus is the ability to switch between apps on the tablet, so that if a camera uses a webpage to adjust parameters, you can use the internal web browser to do just that, without needing an additional computer just to tweak a remote camera’s exposure. With regard to using Speedify for bonding, the user can update the third-party apps independently on the Director hardware.
Your production, or Show, exists as one of many potential saved shows. These shows can be vertical or horizontal, but not both at the same time. You can have kids’ baseball on the weekend with logos, graphics, colors, replays, streaming destinations, and sports scoreboards that are visible every time you open it. Then you can change to a business podcast with completely different graphics, preshow countdowns, viewer comments, lower-thirds, and recording and destination settings. These shows can also be saved and exported from one device and loaded onto another. There are even checkboxes for you to send the media that’s used along with the Show file.
Lastly, for recording, there’s internal storage, or the user can record to an SD card or to media on the USB-C port. I leveraged that USB-C port to connect a dongle with media slots to use my regular SD card full of graphics and backdrops.
Stress Test
I spent 2 weeks testing the Director Plus and deliberately trying to get it to fail. When it comes to the device’s ability to withstand the challenge, I have to say I’m impressed. I stress-tested the Director Plus in HD first, because I believe most streamed content does not benefit from 4K. Shooting streamed interviews, talking heads, and the like in 4K really doesn’t look any better than in HD—maybe there’s a little more detail in the hair, but that’s about it. Your content should drive your production choices, not the maximum resolution of your camera. Anything with a lot of detail—sports, training, and so forth—is more likely to benefit from being shot in 4K.
In testing, I created a live HD show. I connected 16 inputs, including 4K over HDMI and 4K over NDI. I had video playback, overlays, scoreboards, and multiviews. I recorded using all four of the device’s internal encoders. The overlays included an animated lower-third, a countdown timer, a stopwatch, and more. The program feed featured three live cameras over video playback. I was also watching the live thumbnails for 20 inputs update on a laptop connected over the network. It was doing all of this at the same time. Now, the Director Plus was giving me a “red alert” border (see Figure 7) because I pushed the CPU to 94%, the memory to 88% and the DMC (Dynamic Memory Controller) to 41%, each shown in red in the Dashboard. But it did not crash. I don’t think the PC-based vMix setups I have for my typical corporate quarterly marketing clients could do everything I was making the Director Plus do.
Figure 7. I pushed the Director Plus into the red zone in testing, but it did not crash.
I let the Director Plus do all of this for nearly half an hour. The device never crashed. The video never got choppy. The device never became sluggish to use, except when I called up the audio mixer, which had to render out 22 audio faders. That’s how much audio was going through the Director, and that’s a lot of inputs for an AIO to keep track of and render onscreen. So, I forgive it for taking a few seconds before the audio mixer popped up onscreen.
The fan revved up to 4,500 RPM, and, if I leaned over the Director, I could hear the fan, but it never got loud. It was never “wheezy.” And the entire device was never hot to the touch.
Then I switched to a 4Kp60 Program. Now, the memory usage ramped up quickly. With just two 4K HDMI sources and two 4K NDI sources and no other inputs, I was getting the red alert border, with Memory at 83%. CPU and GPU usage were still considerably lower, at about 45% and 35%, respectively. The DMC was in a comfortable 30% range. But Memory seemed to be the limitation.
I checked with Magewell, and they noted that this should be well within the Director Plus’ capability, so I rebooted the device and did it all again. This time, Memory went up only to the mid-70% range, and the red alert border did not appear. Apparently, I had left other apps running in the background or something after so much testing, which caused the initial overload. I added four records: Program at 4K, Program at HD, and two ISO records of two cameras. The ISO records do not give me the ability to change settings, so they seem to be recorded at whatever bitrate comes in to the Director.
With the four records, the CPU went up 20% to the mid-60% range, and the GPU went up about 10% to 45%—still both comfortable and within recommended limits. Interestingly, the Memory did not go up with the records. Then I added HD sources and multiple moving, animated, and counting graphics. There was little change to the Dashboard measurements, telling me that graphics are not significant in comparison to handling 4K video (see Figure 8). So, when planning a show, managing which sources (and many) are 4K will be the most important thing.
Figure 8. Device status readings at the peak of my 4K testing
Through it all, the Director Plus continued to run smoothly. At the end, with five 4K sources and three HD sources in a 4K program, with four records—one of them in 4K—and all of the animated graphics layers on top, it just kept doing what I asked it to do.
In a previous Streaming Media article, I wrote that “bulletproof” needs to be a standard feature for production gear. I dare say that, as much as I tried to overwhelm the Director Plus—and get it to crash—by asking more of it than I have ever asked of my vMix Desktops, the Director Plus prevailed. It’s as close to a bulletproof device as I’ve seen. I can’t ask more of a device than to do what it says it can do. It’s not magic. Just do it reliably. The Director Plus did just that.
There will of course be nuances when it comes to what all can be 4K. You’re not going to get four 4K ISOs, four 4K replays, and 10 4K IP inputs in addition to the two 4K HDMI inputs, as well as 4K streaming to four destinations simultaneously. Keep in mind that this is an Android tablet that fits in your hand. There are limitations.
But also, based on Magewell’s previous updates to Director models, the Director Plus may get even more capable over time. However, I can’t guarantee that. So, as with anything, I always say test, test, test. Before using it on a gig, make sure you understand the limitations of the gear because you’ve tested everything you want it to do.
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