PC required to run 4 BMD Intensity Pro

[Jeffrey Morrison]

Hiya Randy,

Having a little bit of experiance with Black Magic capture and ultrascope, I would suggest you not expect to have 8 ever working in a single machine. cant see the benifit to having them all crash at the same time….

considering that these units are available in 3 interface types it is possible to spread the magic out across your PC buss.

USB 3.0 , Thunderbolt ( firewire ) and PCI.e

question is whats coming in, whats going out and what software your going to use.

currently a few third parties have some Quad capture software working, so says the rumer mill…..

Media Express is sapose to allow 4 ittirations of the software but you cant resize the screens to get them all to fit on a desktop unless you have some serious monitor realestate.

HD 60 frames is going to directly relate to buss traffic so if your using HDMI on all these units as an input you have a big list of goodies to buy. you would need several Raid drives spanned on one channel for each unit to capture too as depending on your software it could be uncompressed AVI

if your just doing composite cams to a web stream things are more simple. but at that point you have many other options besides BMD as well.

so for anyone to really help you with a valid answer and a direction to go for you to persue, you would need to give more detail as to the application, your formats and your output.. and weither you expect to record this or not.

[Randy Ovaskainen]

HI Jeffrey,

Thanks for the feeback. To give you a glimpse right now we’re running 2 camcorders off HDMI into the BDM intensity pro cards. From there we’re using Wirecast to stream to Veetle.com in 720p.

And no, we do not record.

In a perfect world, I would be able to run 4 cards in one box.

Thanks,

Randy

[Andreas Wojtaschek]

Buy a Atem TV-Studio for less money with more options.

Regards

Andreas

—

Entertainment Producer IHK
mindandvision

[Kymo Biddulph]

The ATEM tv studio requires a separate computer, the usb 3 port does not work yet and it does not render the audio from the cameras ( if using DV cams HDMI ) – so the money you save you spend.

ATEM Studio is not the answer for live streaming !!!!!

They write this on their site ( very misleading ! )

“Broadcast H.264 files live with ATEM Television Studio!
Introducing the world’s first live production switcher that combines a professional switcher with a broadcast quality H.264 encoder! That means you get live multi-camera production and broadcast encoding for the Internet all in one unit! ”

what a load of rubbish ?

What they actually mean is once you have recorded the production live, then you can upload it ( not live )

boooooooo !

[Randy Ovaskainen]

Here’s a quick update on our solution. We did proceed with the purchase of an Atem TVS to enable us to go up to 6 cameras. (I ran into problems with a bad port but that’s a separate thread I posted). What we are doing for the live streaming portion is we’re taking the HDMI out from the switcher and going into another box that has a BMD Intensity Pro card in it. With the use of Wirecast we are then live streaming to the internet.

All in all, the switcher has been good but having to buy additional audio hardware was a bummer but money well spent in the scope of setting up a professional rig.

Randy
WSOP.com

[Kymo Biddulph]

Hey Randy – thanx for update
Could I impose upon you to expand a little on the setup ?
I am reading that you did this.

Atem TS + 6 cameras + hdmi multiview monitior + laptop running ATEM software to change camera views

Then HDMI out from Atem TS

This feeds a separate PC with a BMD IPRO card that is read and streamed by Wirecast which also takes in an Audio mixer for whatever the cameras would normally pick up but cannot on the Atem TS

I even did a diagram. . . .

Could you expand upon this at all ?
cheers
kymo

[Randy Ovaskainen]

Kymo,

That’s pretty much it. If you’re looking at hardware we have a Mac mini running the Atem software so we actually have another monitor but you could use a laptop.

We also have 2 BMD HDMI to SDI converters since the Atem TVS only has 4 HDMI slots and 4 SDI slots (but you can only use 6 total).

The PC actually has 2 Intensity Pro card so we’re considering buying another Atem TVS switcher to bring our operation to 12 cameras total.

Randy