In the Season 2, Episode 14, Post Show, Jim Davis from DVS Direct reviews the NewTek NDI, 4K vMix, Latency and Image Magnification in this YouTube Live exclusive stream. If you missed the first part of our show here, Jim reviewed IP camera control with NewTek Tricaster’s for PTZ cameras, the NewTek Connect Pro App, the NewTek Transmit app and color grading. We review how the NewTek Connect Pro App can take four video sources and make them NDI compatible with a i5 Windows computer (or higher i7).

We discuss vMix supporting the Newtek NDI with 4K support and what that could mean for 4K live streaming and video production. Jim discusses latency in “IMAG” Image Magnification environments and we review the latest BirdDog NDI HD-SDI and HDMI converters. As we review the possibilities for IP video production using the NewTek NDI Jim mentions the use of local areas networks to connect low latency 1080p video from various TriCasters in different use cases.

As an experienced broadcast and video production engineer Jim naturally talks about the limitations of the technology such as long distance cabling runs for live streaming car races and baseball games. The ethernet RJ45 cabling used for extending local area networks used in video production with Newtek Tricasters and NDI have been tested up to 300 feet but Jim plans to extend these tests using Fiber cabling as well.

Live Show Transcript

Jim Davis on camera color grading

NewTek NDI, vMix 4K, Latency, Gen Lock, Image Magnification, Bird-Dog and more

Paul Richards:  Tess is learning some of this stuff as of so many other people are learning about this stuff for the first time. One of the things I wanted to just briefly show you guys is that there is about 2 minutes left and we’ve got a record number of 364 entries, wow, so we will be pulling that up in a moment. Can you, I guess Tess you want to just read off some of this crazy chat room questions we have.

Tess Protesto:  First off they caught us whispering, we decided at last minutes I was going to talk about the giveaway and I was like “wait what?” so that was just me and Paul bantering, we’ve got a lot of comment here, I love Tom Sinclair “NDI fixed breakfast for me this morning”, that’s a good one. Okay Gizepie says “And yesterday I heard about a new software from Sienna called NDI outlet that converts from NDI to HDSDI using a black magic design output device.

Sienna.NDI

Jim Davis:  yes that’s for the MAC users I believe. Basically I just got the email on it so I haven’t researched it a lot yet but I believe that it’s kind of like NDI connect pro but it runs on the MAC, so you can generate an NDI stream from a blackmagic card and output it from the MAC. Again I’m kind of talking out of turn here because I haven’t researched it, I’m not a MAC guy so I don’t know a lot about it but I know enough to be dangerous, so MAC guys might be able to better expand on that.

Paul Richards:  Well I think we’ve got about 60 seconds until the give-away so I’ll ask you Jim, it looks like in the chat room Daniel Tremble is saying he doesn’t think cropping in vMix will create NDI output. From what I understand vMix can take anything and make it NDI, can you make all of your video Input-output NDI-outputs? Because if you can then you should

Tricaster vs vMix

Jim Davis:  On a tri-caster you can, every output is an output and I believe so in vMix too, but in other to process the video, I believe that’s going to become one of your …I forget how many output martin gives you, NDI output and vMix, one of the vMix guys probably knows, but you could probably do it that way but the individual output you may be right, NDI is resolution dependent so it would output a 4K signal but you may not be able to read it into something that isn’t 4k like I may not be able to take that output and feed it into  tri-caster, but one of the vMix guys might know better on that, like I said vMix is not my forte, I’ve just started playing with it, but I did see somebody doing something like that with a 4K camera, but I’m not sure exactly …I think they might have been taking outputs and …does anybody know how many outputs you get off of vMix?

Paul Richards:  I know at least one, let me do a quick …let’s see if someone in the chat here. You can take all externals, you can take all cameras so the question is can you take a 4k camera, create 4 virtual inputs and I don’t know if those would go or not.

Jim Davis:  that might give a good feature request to send to Martin.

Paul Richards:  Definitely, let me draw the winner

Jim Davis:  That would be really powerful if you could do that

Live Giveaway – NewTek Connect Pro

Paul Richards:  Alright so I’m going to draw the winner. I’m going to draw the winner for the NewTek connect pro app and then they have to be here. Is John Mazerick here? So we’ll give him a moment to get here if he is here and if he’s not here then we’ll just draw another winner. Sorry about that Jim, I didn’t mean to cut you off there.

Jim Davis:  Well that’s okay, like I said that would be definitely a very, very powerful feature you can add to vMix if you could do that, I think you could set up the multi-views to do kind of what I’m talking about I think, and then send them as two output but again I don’t know how many output you can get out of vMix, it will probably be limited by that, but it will be a cool feature request and Martin is a smart guy I’m sure he can figure out how to make it work.

Tess Protesto:  Tom Sinclair said vMix has 2 external output with 4K addition or higher, one crab to camera input can become an NDI source using external tube. We’re getting lots of chat here.

NewTek NDI on vMix

NewTek NDI on Vmix

Paul Richards:  Yes, but there is also a button in the NDI that I’m looking at here, that allows you to do camera’s like all camera’s like here, I’ll just show it right here. See this NDI, he’s probably seen down the return video. So you can have recordings external and output, you can have external-2 which is what Tom’s referring too  and then it looks like all camera’s there’s a check box for camera’s

Jim Davis:  Somebody might check this too but I think if you output a camera directly which I’m pretty sure you can do, there is going to be output added to its resolution, so if it’s a 4K camera it’s going to be a 4K NDI stream, so if that’s the case then whatever you are sending the NDI stream to has to be able to deal with that and I can say for sure that I don’t believe that tri-caster can, I might be wrong but probably to another vMix system, you could because vMix does support 4K.

Paul Richards:  Okay, Jonathan is here, so Jonathan, you won the NewTek connect pro app. Michael, you won a set of free PTZOptics virtual sets, our set of our premium virtual sets.

Tess Protesto:  Jim we are getting a lot of churches, NewTek products, which one will be good for churches?

Newtek Tricasters for Churches

Church Streaming Band

Jim Davis:  Well it depends on what you want to do in the church, one of the popular things to do in churches while streaming is one application, but the other one that we’ve done quite a few installs in is what we call IMAG or image magnification which is where you put monitors up in the sanctuary the problem with that is you’ve got to really pay attention to latency and latency is the delay between the camera seeing something and it being displayed on the monitor and everything in the productions chain will add latency to the signal so you got to be real careful with the projectors you are using, you’ve got to be real careful with the cameras you’re using and the production switcher. Most production switchers list a higher introduction switchers like a tri-caster or the broadcast Pixar, probably with Jim Lock source or probably about 2 frames which is pretty much as good as you’re going to get but when you add in latency – the camera man, the latency – the projectors are usually the biggest offender we found, the other things I’ve found is keeping everything …seems like 720p is keeping progressive 720p seems to minimize that effect as far as which tri-caster? Any of the tri-caster you can gen-lock and on to 410 and 8000, if you gen-lock the camera’s you can also turn off the frame synchronizers which will eliminate almost one train of latency so if they are really picky, you’ve got to have camera’s you can gen-lock, you’ve got to have a switcher you can gen-lock and you have to have a time based generator to do all that and probably the next question you’re going to get in the chat is “What is gen-lock?” is anybody asking that question yet?

Tess Protesto:  Not quite yet.

Gen-Lock and Latency for live streaming

Jim Davis:  well I’ll go ahead and explain it. Gen-lock is basically what we call timing signals or house timing, so we can take our switchers, our camera’s, everything in the production chain and time it together so they are no longer free running and in most switchers you bring the videos in from the camera’s it’s free running the camera’s or the production switcher needs to lock on to it, they usually take about a frame of video to do, and then from then on out pretty much everything stays in time but if we really want to minimize that latency, if we can gen-lock everything, we can minimize that at least one frame of latency in the whole signal chain. The other app would be the live production in streaming and anything that …whatever customers comfortable with, they are used to using is probably the best choice for them, it’s not quite as critical but what we are finding is a lot of our church customers want to do both, so if you want to do both they got to be …as an integrator, the worst thing I want to do is walk into a situation where I have the pastor yelling and screaming at me because the monitors have the Japanese monster movie effect, usually 4 to 5 frame of latency becomes pretty obvious

Tess Protesto:  yeah, we struggled we that just in our live show so we all feel the pain of latency

Jim Davis:  It’s not so bad when you are doing something like what we’re doing but when you are doing it live, in a sanctuary and the audience is in the same room as the monitors and the camera’s once it becomes over 5 to 10 frames it becomes really annoying.

Tess Protesto:  right, we are getting people say it’s a sin.

Paul Richards:  That is funny, Jim, I got a quick Video for you and what you were saying kind of reminds me of constant bit-rate versus variable bit-rate, something that Tom Sinclair was doing I think they were trying to  stream off of multiple PTZOptics cameras and there was problem with the latency between both of those because they were on variable bit-rate streaming which actually as bandwidth changes on the network can actually loose synch but if you do constant bit-rate streaming, they stay in synch much better, can you explain this video we have here Jim, where you were actually showing the NDI latency between …and I think you even have this set-up here, can you explain this?

NDI vs HD-SDI

Jim Davis:  So what I did is that I took a camera, ran it through SDI distribution amplifier, so I basically had the same reference video going to the two NDI connect boxes and the tri-caster, then I built that video you just showed in as an ME or one of them mixed effect boxes to kind of demonstrate how much of a delay was being generate by sending the video over the network versus coming directly and locally and as you can see NDI is really good, you can see that we’re seeing very little if any, in fact in that test, there wasn’t any and typically I was seeing anywhere from nothing to one at the most 2 frame of latency. There is something else I want to show you guys too if you want to bring back me live. If you could go full screen for a second I want to show you …cause I was kind of messing around with this so what we are seeing here is you’re PTZOptics camera coming in SDI on the left hand side, and on the right hand side, I’m using, I’m coming out on RSTP stream, is that right?

Paul Richards:  yes.

Jim Davis:  RSTP stream, that one right there, so RSTP port 554, and as you can see, it’s probably about 2 frames of latency there, I’m very impressed with that because typically when you do something like an RTMP stream, when I do the same test using a standard edition tri-caster and coming in using the NET input so that I can bring in an RTMP stream, it was a good, almost a second  of latency compared to what we are seeing here, and the way I’m doing this is I’m bringing the PTZOptics camera network feed in through NDI connect pro.

Paul Richards:  Can you show us that app?

Jim Davis:  yeah, hold on a second, so let me bring up this input right here and let me …I’m going to have to move for a second so…

Paul Richards:  sorry Jim, we got to show everybody this

Jim Davis:  No that’s okay because this computer is on the other side of the room so I got to kind of move over here real quick

Tess Protesto:  What would you say our latency is?

Paul Richards:   Jim, I’d like to hear from you

Jim Davis:  My testing on …you got to remember that the one I have here is a Gen-one camera

Paul Richards:  And there has been a few changes

Jim Davis:  yeah, so I don’t know what it is on the Gen-2 camera. But on the Gen-0ne camera as close as I can tell from the camera head to the SDI output is about 3 frames of latency and I think I talked to Andy about that and he kind of confirmed that. So if you look here, can you see the NDI connect pro screen now?

Paul Richards:  Yes, I can.

Jim Davis:  So we are down here, I’m going to open up this menu, and I’m going to open this up and you see where it says NDI camera right here? I open that up and I’ve already set up your camera but if I wanted to add another camera then you see I have options right here, PTZOptics I select it, I enter the IP address, the Port number is already populated for me and its working. Again NewTek makes things really easy for you.

Paul Richards:  And this is quote on quote the way to make the camera an NDI camera, right?

Jim Davis:  Basically that’s what … you know, one of your competitors was bragging about and I’m not going to say who, but one of your competitors was bragging about being an NDI enabled camera and this is how they were doing it, so take it with a grain of salt, nobody has come out that I know of yet with a truly NDI camera or NDI integrated camera. I think actually didn’t Tom Sinclair do a video about the other manufacturer I’m talking about?

Paul Richards:  I think he did.

BirdDog NDI Converters

BirdDog NDI Converter

Jim Davis:  I think I saw what he did there, he kind of called them on it which I would have too but he beat me to it but anyhow now that I’m thinking it about this, one other thing that is coming out, it’s not out yet, I was hoping to have one for this web show but when I get one, maybe we’ll do another show for that, Paul and I talk about this. It’s a product called Bird-Dog. This is very, very cool, so what the Bird-Dog, if you want to look up this birddog.tv I believe is the URL, they have a website, it’s an Australian company, so what this is, is kind of like a black magic mini-converter, it’s a little box that is basically an NDI  interface so you take this little box, hook it to your network, hook a camera into it and you’ve got an NDI output and I think it’s bi-directional so you can also send an NDI feedback to it.

Paul Richards:  Is this it?

Jim Davis:  No, I think its Birddog.tv

Paul Richards:  How many bird-dogs are there?

Jim Davis:  Apparently there is a lot

Paul Richards:  One of the reason’s we wanted to show that is because if you had a bird-dog and a PTZ camera you would essentially have the ultimate NDI connection and one of the benefit of that is not just the fact that you can make the PTZOptics NDI compatible, though they use the video feed from it, it’s got loop-through and I believe you can do HDMI or HDSDI and technically you can put the bird-dog in your network rack so you wouldn’t actually have to run Ethernet cable you could just run SDI cable which Is…

Jim Davis:  Okay it’s www.bird-dog.tv I’ve got one of the first ones coming in to beta-test so when I get one In I’ll give you a report of what I think of it but you are right, I believe the box is going to be $900, so you can see what it is, you can use that …so we are anxiously awaiting our evaluation unit in to play with this because this is exciting stuff or even using it with PTZOptics camera’s or the NDI just a standard camera if I need to do a camera feed and by the way, here is another cool option that we’ve been playing with because I had a customer call me up and say “Okay I’m doing car races, but some of my cameras are going to be half a mile away and I need to get that video back into the control room, how do I do that?” well the ubiquity network some of you people know who they are, they make this back channel radio’s and they basically give you according to the manufacturer the spec is 15km, if you can get line of sight, which means they’ve got to see each other or for my application, half a mile line of sight is just a tall ladder, but it’s a gigabyte wireless bridge. According to them, up to 15km, a gigabyte wireless bridge, with a gigabyte I can probably do 3, 4 maybe 5 NDI streams, so I can set that remote system up, put a radio in that end, put a radio on this end and wirelessly bring several NDI feeds from that remote location. We’ve actually tested that with the lower end system they have that’s called Nano beam and Nano beam is kind of the same but it’s only about 450mb/Sec so realistically I might be able to get 2 maybe 3 NDI streams across that. In the shop with the receivers 10feet apart? No problem but I’m waiting for the weather to get better here in central Pennsylvania to go out and set it up, try it at half a mile away and see what kind of result we get because I’m sure that the distance will have an effect on the bandwidth and what not you’d be able to do but the idea, the prospect of this is really exciting because the ability to deal with, even like they do in a baseball game and you want to do those center field and back camera’s and whatnot? Running NDI cable 500, 600 feet becomes a problem at 1080i, I think RT59 at 1080i is limited to about 364ft if I remember the chart right, so we can go fiber, I mean black magic makes those fiber boxes you can do it that way there’s different ways of doing it but this will be a less expensive way to do it and there is some IP base intercom systems out there now that you can also run over the same IP network, so just the idea that thinking out of the box now has become almost common place for me, my brain starts exploding every time I start thinking about this things – And by the way in the comment section, if anybody knows and I would be interested in this, if anybody knows of an IP based intercom system I’d be interested, if you want to send me an e-mail or something. There is one from clear-com like I said the Go-green digital has one it’s kind of expensive but what I was looking for was an IP based intercom that would just use the sound cards and computers to do an intercom system point to point, something like that but if anybody out there in your audiences that knows of anything like that I’d be really interested in hearing about it. We can go on for hours my friend, I mean there is so many things we can do with this stuff now that…

Paul Richards:  I totally agree and that’s kind of why we do a 20 min show and a 20 min post-show because it’s like, we got to recap, you know what I mean? We got to digest some of this information and come back I just wanted to thank you for coming on the show Jim, I would love to have you again when that bird-dog comes out, let’s have you on this show again, maybe we can get bird-dog to give one of this away to one of our viewers. The live giveaways made me so happy. So many great people have been able to win great stuff and I hope that Jonathan loves his NewTek connect pro app and Michael I hope you like the Virtual sets if you’re into that, I think that our real-set over here is way cooler than any virtual set, what do you think about that Jim, our last question for you. Are you a virtual set guy or a real set kind of guy?

Jim Davis:  Depends on what I’m doing. Now when you talk about virtual sets there’s different level of virtual set, so my idea of a virtual set is a little bit different and maybe we’ll do a show on that sometime but the virtual sets that we do in the tri-caster advanced edition are unique, there are somethings you can do in those like parallax effect and perspective that are unique to what NewTek does compared to everybody else’s virtual set that gets me really excited. There was one other thing that …it’s slipping my mind now that I wanted to mention. Oh and by the way, our winner the NDI connect pro, they have my information right? So if they have any questions.

Paul Richards:  What’s your information Jim? Let everyone know how to get in touch with you.

Jim Davis:  Well the website is www.DVSdirect.com and my email is [email protected] real easy to remember and he’s more than welcome if he has question, pop me an email or something if he’s trying to figure out how to make it work. The key about NDI connect is do not under-power the machine you run it on. The machines that I’m running NDI connect on are the same hardware spec as a tri-caster so I think it’s an i74790 processor with 8GB RAM in it. Do not under-power you are running NDI connect on

Paul Richards:  Words of wisdom from Jim Davis. Well thank you so much Jim, we got to rap this show up. It’s been a really fun show thank you so much for being here.

And that’s all folks we appreciate your participation in the chatroom and can’t wait to host our next informative Q and A section. Your question drive the conversation forward for Live streaming professionals around the world. Until next time. Happy streaming.