[William Clarke]

Have you considered using consumer grade cameras with HDMI out and converting to SDI for the cable runs ?

I’m using three refurbished (US$330) Canon HF M400 cameras with 1080i HDMI out, BMD HDMI to SDI converters with coax cable runs of 50, 100 and 150 feet into BMD ATEM Television with Wirecast for Live Streaming (1 Mbps 360×640 & 2 Mbps 720×1280).

Subject matter is indoor sports with a fair amount of rapid movement

The cameras have batteries in them (avoids flash card problems) but run off mains power – longest sports event we have done is two days – all our stuff happens in doors ( good ) in a low light and very dusty environment ( bad ).

We use volunteers for camera operations so the limitations of point and shoot technology which may be frustrating for a professional actually help a lot.

Have not had any problems so far with the cameras mis-behaving after being powered up for durations of up to 9 hours per day.

We record locally during the live stream and post the video on YouTube as it provides higher quality than archiving the web stream files.

Still experimenting with best local recording solution – here’s a sample recorded on BMD Hyperdeck shuttle DNxHD compressed files then down converted to a 17Mbps mp4 stream for upload to youtube.
sample https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45gI7cn_zVs&hd=1

Have also recorded directly from ATEM TV to USB2 attached i3 Laptop at 720P, but due to the lack of CPU capacity there have been issues – specially when I forget to change defaults record mode from 1080 to 720 ( agh ! ) Have yet to test with latest version of BMD s/w.

HDMI out on consumer cameras is very poorly documented – all I can tell you is:

1) Pay attention to where the HDMI interface is on the camera – depending on whether the camera is to be tripod mounted or hand held the location of the output can be a challenge.

2) Making HDMI work over long HDMI cable distances or with consumer grade HDMI to RJ45 may work in the “lab” but under the typical conditions in a sports arena using volunteer labor to set things up HDMI to SDI works every time and allows one to focus on where best to locate the cameras rather than then being limited by the tech.

3) Canon HF M400 cameras work with BMD HDMI to SDI converters and BMD ATEM studio tested in 1080i mode

4) Canon HF G10 cameras work with BMD HDMI to SDI converters and BMD Studio tested in 1080i mode but have poor HDMI interface placement.

William Clarke

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