[Jeff Mack]

Craig, one of the things I have come to rely on is the output statistics with WIrecast. I am on a MBP 2.16 with 2 gigs of ram. It’s about 5 years old so maybe it is my MBP. I am on snow leopard and when I have my Z1 connected via firewire, I see the out put stats go from 60# to 90% simply by opening safari to do a UStream broadcast. Once I am connected to Ustream, I minimize Safari and I drop back down to 60%. If I try and connect a firewire ISight camera for my second camera, I lose control of that camera – can’t change the audio layer to the Z-1/ Basically if I want the z-1 audio live all the time, when I select the ISight, it uses it’s own audio, regardless of my settings choices. If I use my IOHD and select it as a source, I forever get locked up and get kernal panics. My personal experience with my laptop is I can only use the Z-1 in HDV mode and output 320 x 180 without dropping frames and forget about recording H264 to my drive at the same time. I look forward to the upgrade in June. I have heard better reviews of Boinx but can’t afford another investment.

Jeff

[Jeff Mack]

Try the demo version (watermarked audio and video) before you buy. Wirecast is cool but a lot of issues when you get to the pro side of things involving camera control, ESPECIALLY from a laptop. If you are on a tower with a lot of beef, maybe not a problem.

Jeff

[Jeff Mack]

Hey Joe,

I have been working on a seamless workflow to stream for almost a year now and finally am getting the results that I like. First off, I wanted to use the IOHD as well so I could hook my camera up to a 25 foot sdi cable. I use Wirecast to encode and stream to ustream. I would downconvert to sd and Wirecast would see that just fine. I work with a MBPro. I had a lot of crashes though just like you described. When I really settled down, I bought a 15 firewire cable and now go directly into wirecast. I bypassed the IOHD all together. WHat Wirecast has is an output statistic toolbar that lets you see the output frame rate. Without something like this, you are just pissing in the wind when it comes to setting your encode up. Here’s what I found with my MBP ( 2 GB ram, 2.16mhz processor) Even though Wirecast has an HDV plugin and boasts the ability to stream HD, the only way I can get smooth video is to encode to 320 x 180. I also found that I need to close ALL windows to keep my GPU to 50 – 60%. The MBP, at least mine, bogs down when Wirecast is open, the chat room is open and the Ustream broadcast windo is open.

My viewers seem very satisfied that the video is clear and audio is clean. I have A/V in sync 100% and only like a second delay with the broadcast. Wirecast really is a pretty good program however, Telestream bought this program and now have to support it. There are a lot of peculiarities with it and they are the first to admit th technical issues. They have unveiled a major upgrade available in June. They also support BM capture cards but whe I asked them how bout AJA, they said it was too expensive.

So in a nutshell, go firewire if you can and see if you can monitorthe output statistics.

Jeff

[Jeff Mack]

Yeah, I know how to troubleshoot. I guess I was hoping to hear “check this” I only have Wirecast and Safari open during my stream. I use the HDV stream because I want to record to tape in HDV during the broadcast. When I set my camera to downconvert only (giving me the ability to stay with HDV on tape) wirecast won’t recognize my camera. I have to fully downconvert to DV and then it works. I love my HDV to tape though. My thought on uploading bit rate was that you should use a bit rate as high as possible as to not have stuttering occur. For the most part, I get that with my settings described. I’ll try some tests today and see if I cant get the DV downconvert to occor with still getting HDV to tape. I have another conert this evening. It’s hard to practice while the show is going on.

Jeff

[Jeff Mack]

Man Craig, There is no way to know what could have changed. I am a video producer and use my MBP with 10.6.3. I realize there is some sort of incompatibility but I just can’t find it. I may try a new cable.

By the way, I have found that my max encode size is 320 x 180 when using true HDV source. Using output statistics, if I go higher than 320 x 180, I get stuttering to occur. Any settings tips you might have would be appreciated. Here’s my normal setup.

Plug in camera via firewire. Preferences are set with HDV source aspect ratio. Performance settings have drop shadow and high quality icons unchecked, display rate set at 30 and desktop presenter options set to auto. Advanced preferences are set to reduced and blend with high quality and GPU compression checked.

Then I go to show asset manager. I pick my camera and select the HDV setting. Then I go to broadcast setting and shoose flash medium bandwidth 16 x 9. The I open those prefs and select 320 x 180, 29.97, 800 Kbs for video and 128K for audio. Limit peak bit rate is unchecked, profile is Main and keyframe every 150. I hit save. Then I enter my Ustream credentials and save. Then I click the broadcast logo (there is only one stream set) then log into Ustream and hit start.

When I watch the output statistics, it is consistently between 55 and 80%. Usually I rock along ok but last night, I was having issues where Wirecast preview and live looked perfect but my Ustream monitor screen would “strobe” for like a second or two then good for like 20 secs. This kept happening and I had to reboot. It finally stopped. My bit rate avg’d 8-900kbps and my upload speed was 1.4Mbps.

Any comments would be appreciated.

Jeff

[Jeff Mack]

IF YOU COOSE TO DOWNCONVERT IN YOUR CAMERA WHILE YOU ARE CONNECTED VIA FIREWIRE, YOUR SYSTEM WON’T RECOGNIZE THE CAMERA. TURN OFF THE CAMERA, UNPLUG THE FIREWIRE, PLUG THE FIREWIRE BACK IN AND TURN THE CAMERA ON. SHOULD WORK THEN.

JEFF

[Jeff Mack]

Fred, Gary and Michael,

Thanks for the comments. I know this forum wasn’t the place for this but I respect you all and was in a bind. Strange how I never even considered anyone on a pc. Anyway, I went to the apple store to get macdrive and they didn’t sell it, I had to go online. They told me about a free trial on a similar product called Tuxera NTFS. I did the free trial and it worked perfectly. It was only $35 so I got it.

Anyway, I gave the client the drive and after all of that, they can’t use my .mov files. They asked me to convert my HDV to mpg 2. I looked at compressor and it was going to take like 26 hours for one 2 hour file! Any comments on that? They are working with premier.

Thanks for the help guys.

Jeff

[Jeff Mack]

Yes everyone saw it the same way. I did stop the broadcast like I said for 2 seconds then restarted it and since UStream was still in the buffer, it never disconnected and again, like I said, the UStream just “Snapped” back to real time. I think my overall broadcast was within a half of a second to real time.

Craig, do you work for Telestream or are you just a moderator? It would be really nice to have their user manual completely rewritten. The support staff answer questions by phone but not always timely. I was told that this product was purchased by telestream and they did not write it. It is a shame that an updated version addressing all of it’s shortcomings can’t be delivered immediately. Seems like they say they are working on it but it never gets fixed.

Jeff

[Jeff Mack]

it was with a mac book pro. It had no problem playing the file at all. Matter of fact, I had the preview and the broadcast windows both open and they were identical. I only had safari open (Ustream) and wirecast. I leave my desktop configured with Wirecast open in top left, Ustream broadcast console in top right with Chat room on bottom. It was the UStream feed that was dropping frames. Wirecast settinds lot showed pushing 29.97 with 70% cpu activity but UStream broadcast went to slo mo, however the chat was still dead on.

Jeff

P.S. And not having a countdown to the movies bites!

[Jeff Mack]

Of course. I only had one issue last night. I was broadcasting live then switched to a .m4v. About ten seconds in, the UStream broadcast started choking. I had to stop record, stop broadcast, restart broadcast and then record and amazingly, everything snapped back to real time for the rest of the movie. Two different occasions with .m4v’s and identical issues. Also, after the first hour, it seemed to be like storing up cache and this is when those problems occurred. Is there a cache issue of some kind on extended broadcasts?

Jeff