Wirecast / Blackmagic / HD

[Craig Seeman]

I’d thought I’d mention that Wirecast 4 supports the following Blackmagic cards.
Intensity Pro, Decklink SDI, Decklink Duo, Decklink Studio, Decklink HD Extreme 3D and Intensity Shuttle
That should give you plenty of options and Wirecast supports the use of multiple cards as long as your computer has the horsepower to support them.
Please note that Blackmagic cards have specific requirements regarding motherboards
https://www.blackmagic-design.com/support/detail.asp?techID=47

Personally I’d consider a Dual Core Pentium very underpowered these days. I’d strongly recommend on i7 Quad or greater. You might get by with a Core2Duo but that would be bottom of the barrel marginal in my opinion.

[Seth Wereska]

Yeah,
These are commodity boxes, but when you are fielding 6 of them you pick your battles. In SD mode we are only kicking over at about 30-40% utilization. In hd we’re over 80%, so I thought I might be crushing something in the box. I guess I was. The next round of motherboard / processors will have to be faster.

You seem to be tied into Black Magic (or at least I’ve seen you post about them before)

Do you have any knowledge on what exactly they are using GPU acceleration for? Is it strictly for chroma key / image transforms, or does it also contribute to compression acceleration as well? (I know it does on the mac side)

Any insight is welcome, even if it’s just a shrug.

Thanks!

[Craig Seeman]

Wirecast officially supports Blackmagic cards.
Personally I use Matrox MXO2 because it works with both laptop and desktop on Mac.

Wirecast uses GPU compressor for encoding. On many computers you can enable/disable it Wirecast preferences and you’ll see the impact. When disable CPU% goes up. In some rare cases disabling improves quality.

[Seth Wereska]

Thanks for the insight!

–Seth

[Chuck Pullen]

Can you double check that link Craig, I keep getting a very neat bars/tone error page when I click on it.

I do have another question for you, can you give your opinion on the different options for bringing in two or more SD sources into a computer?

I am going to be building a new system from scratch with it’s sole purpose being a Wirecast streaming “flypack” system. I was specifically trying to decide if I should get a card like the Decklink Duo to start, or the other option of getting 2 Intensity Cards/breakouts? Do you know if there are any issues sending two SD/HD sources from the DUO to Wirecast? Which would you recommend and why?

Thanks for your help,

Chuck Pullen

[Craig Seeman]

[Chuck Pullen] “Can you double check that link Craig, I keep getting a very neat bars/tone error page when I click on it. “

Old link. They redesigned a good portion of their site around NAB.
You’d have to go here and there’s two more pages to look at
https://www.blackmagic-design.com/support/detail/supportnotes/?sid=3947&pid=3989&os=win

[Chuck Pullen] “can you give your opinion on the different options for bringing in two or more SD sources into a computer? “

It depends on the sources. If they’re professional I’d recommend SDI which would be Duo. Can either be HD or SD.
Intensity Pro would be either HDMI or Component, S-Video, Composite consumer connections and you’d need two cards.
It really depends on the sources you’re going to use.
Officially supported cards (meaning work done with SDK)
Intensity Pro, Decklink SDI, Decklink Duo, Decklink Studio, Decklink HD Extreme 3D and Intensity Shuttle
Wirecast 4.1 will add Matrox Multi (4 SDI input) and several Osprey cards (240e, 450e & 700e) as well.

Telestream announced support at NAB.
https://www.telestream.net/company/press/2011-04-11b.htm

[Chuck Pullen]

Hey Craig thanks for the quick reply & the new link.

I am trying to “multi-purpose” this machine so it can work with our HD flypack (streaming in SD via SDI) and also as a rental to clients who have their own equipment but need a system to stream. That being the case I may have to invest in one of each to cover all of the bases.

I think you and I had a chat at the Wirecast display at NAB? If that was you, thanks for taking the time to show me all of the new Wirecast features, and solve a recording issue I was having.

Chuck

[Craig Seeman]

My guess is you were talking to Eric Norrell. I’ll be at Streaming Media East though.

I’m not sure if there’s one card that does it all yet so you may need to swap out cards based on the need.

The Matrox Multi would give you four SDI in on one card for example and give you room for others such as Blackmagic Intensity Pro. I’m not sure if the combination has been tested though and you may have to make sure all the PCIe slots can handle what’s being thrown at the system.

[Chuck Pullen]

Eric, you’re right, that’s who that was, he was super helpful at the booth.

I’m guessing my best option will be to upgrade my board to handle USB 3.0 and get one of each type of intensity, as well as use my existing Decklink card for HD/SDI stuff.

The Matrox sounds promising, but I’m a PC guy, and that’s not changing anytime soon!

A new question popped up last night I wanted to ask you about. In order to use Wirecast with Silverlight, all that needs to be done is to have the stream go out as H.264 correct? I won’t need to purchase any of the Silverlight Encoding software?

Thanks so much Craig, and sorry for hi-jacking the thread!

Chuck Pullen

[Craig Seeman]

By next year Thunderbolt will be available on Windows but that would require a new computer since PCIe cards won’t work. It must be built into the motherboard from what I understand.

[Chuck Pullen] “In order to use Wirecast with Silverlight, all that needs to be done is to have the stream go out as H.264 correct?”

Of course the server is the key component. H.264 RTMP as if one were going to Flash.
Here’s an example of Wirecast to Wowza to Silverlight on their site.
https://www.wowzamedia.com/forums/content.php?104-Using-Telestream-Wirecast-live-encoder-with-Wowza-Server
It should work with WMS for Silverlight as well but nearly all examples I see are with Wowza.