Magewell Interview – Amy Zhou & Darryl Spangler

This year Amy Zhou and Darryl Spangler announced some exciting new products at the 2018 NAB Show. The most important announcement, released exclusively on the PTZOptics Live Show, is the “Magewell NDI Bridge” which works with all Magewell capture devices. This Windows-based software should be available in the coming months allowing all Magewell customers the ability to easily convert inputs from capture cards into the NewTek NDI IP protocol. The recommended specifications for building a Magewell NDI IP video machines is an i7 processor with at least 16GB of Ram.

The very first new Magewell product Amy & Darryl share with the audience is a compact HDMI encoder which can live stream to multiple CDN (Content Delivery Networks) at the same time. This stand alone HDMI encoder with HDMI loop-out, includes USB recording and internal storage. The product is the first of it’s kind that includes a smartphone app for control. This allows users to easily log in to their favorite live streaming service and authenticates without having to retrieve lengthy streaming keys. The smartphone application also allows users to download recordings stored on the devices internal hard drive. The new Magewell compact encoder is clearly made for ease of use featuring only two buttons. There is a green stream button and a red record button.

The next product Magewell shared with us is their professional 4K SDI capture card which features a 4K SDI loop out. The new professional 4K SDI and HDMI capture cards from Magewell now feature line in and line out audio for monitoring and embedding audio into your SDI capture card. This is ideal for receiving audio over an SDI cable or embedding a microphone into the USB 3.0 audio signal coming into your computer. The standard magewell capture cards start at just $299 and the new professional frame grabbers start at $459. One the main differences with the new 2nd generation professional capture cards is the transition from the miniature SDI connectors to the full sized SDI connectors.

One of the most popular Magewell product categories are the PCIe capture cards being used to build custom live streaming computers. Magwell offers a wide range of PCIe capture cards and this broadcast Amy and Darryl brought along the 4-port HDMI card for display. One feature many people may not realize about Magewell PCIe cards are their ability to scale to multiple resolutions and frame rates. The Magewell capture cards are extremely versatile and reliable for high-end video productions. An important tip shared in this broadcast reviews the rotary switch on each Magewell PCIe card used to identify PCIe cards if multiple cards are in use in the same machine. In the PTZOptics live streaming computer, we had to use the rotary switch on our second HD-SDI 4-port capture card in order for the additional SDI inputs to be recognized properly inside vMix.

The final product Magewell shared with us is the Mini SDI capture cards. These Mini SDI capture cards are built to be compatible with the micro-PC motherboards used for Intel NUCs and other miniature computers. Darryl explains that there is a shift from Mini PCIe to the M.2 connectors being used to deploy smaller and more powerful video production machines. You can learn more about these mini PCIe and M.2 capture devices from Magewell here.