HDMI vs SDI vs Fiber vs NDI -- Which connection should I use for professional video production?

hey everyone welcome back to the channel today's video we're going to be talking about the different types of video interconnects that we use in video production world so the different types that are there the pros and cons of each one and why we might use one in a given situation versus another so hopefully this will help you to understand why we have different types of video connects connections that we use and in a given situation you'll be able to make a proper decision educated decision for what your particular needs are so hey everyone my name is Doug I run a video production company in Orem Utah called Doug Johnson productions and we do live event production of all sorts and also within the last few months I have released a website crew acts as you can see it there on my shirt the site is there to help people in the video production business manage their business know all aspects of it so managing your crew managing your events managing your equipment managing your clientele your expenses it's it's kind of full-featured managing every aspect of running the business and there are accounts ranging from free all the way up to enterprise level so able to handle pretty much any size of business and be sure and go and check it out so if you want to use the link that's up here or in the description down below that will take you directly to whatever the current promotion is at the time you're watching this video so over time that's going to change but I'll always try and run some sort of promotion here on the channel so so let's talk about some of the different video connections that are out there so I have here some of the four most common that we will typically use so HDMI Network and that's going to be for IP and for NDI and then there's a BNC cable for SDI video and then we have a single-mode fiber connections for optical fiber and so so the purpose of all these is to basically get video from one point to another from one piece of equipment to another right so but they have some other things in common as well so in addition to main purpose being the video from A to B all of these are capable of carrying uncompressed high-quality digital video they also run over inexpensive cables none of these cables are terribly expensive and even though a fiber in particular is typically considered be very expensive it's actually talk about that a little bit later but unfortunately none of these is kind of a one-size-fits-all that's going to work for every possible situation that you're gonna run into so there are pros and cons for each one so let's first talk about HDMI this is probably the one that most people were familiar with especially before becoming involved in a professional video it's the one that we're gonna encounter on more devices in the consumer space then than any other so what are some of the benefits of HDMI well first of all it is universal so you're gonna find HDMI on basically every laptop out there you're gonna find it on DVD players blu-ray players televisions you know computer monitors it's it's a universal standard you're gonna find it pretty much everywhere because it's so easy to use you know it's insert the cable and it works right so and because it's so common actually is quite inexpensive HDMI cables are pretty inexpensive until you get into the really long ones more about that in a second and there some other benefits that are there as well so of the different video connection types that I'm going to talk about today this is the only one that is actually capable normally of delivering what is called 4 for 4 video which is basically fully uncompressed every pixel has full brightness and color information the other 4 other formats have some limitations there which I'll get into a little bit now HDMI also has some challenges associated with it so the first one worth mentioning is that HDMI is inherently designed to do a negotiation between devices that are connected so if you connect a computer to a monitor there's a negotiation that takes place between those so the TV says I'm capable of displaying these resolutions that these frame rates at these color bit depths and the laptop says okay based on the information that you've just sent me I'm gonna send you this video format and so there's there's there is that to two-way communication going on there and the devices have to choose but between themselves what video format is actually going to be sent over the cable now the downside to that is maybe the format that it chooses isn't necessarily the format that you want so maybe you're shooting your videos at 30 frames per second and the laptop chooses to send your video switcher 60 frames-per-second there it's not an automatic process in order to make sure that the format coming out of a device is the the format that you need and sometimes it overrides your your own wishes your own wishes your own desires so that can be a little bit of a problem and I've seen a lot of situations where people say you know I've got this laptop i hook it into my switcher and I don't get any video well probably because it's not sending the right format and that usually means going into some advanced settings in the computer or maybe even using an external convertor in order to force a specific video format into your into your equipment so another challenge with HDMI is because it was designed for the consumer space it was really meant to handle short cable runs so it's going to be difficult to find a situation I find HDMI cables that are going to run video consistently over 25 meters or say 25 feet or 8 meters and then you get in pretty much any situation if you want to run longer than that you usually have to convert to something else so there's ways of converting HDMI to fiber to any cat a signal runs over cat 5 cable but generally speaking you're not going to have a lot of success trying to run HDMI any farther than about 25 feet so if you want reliability HDMI is really not the way to go and if you have a long game or runs and another one of the downsides that we get into with HDMI is sometimes we have to deal with copy protection so you know if we any time we want to play a movie that comes out of Hollywood there's going to be copy protection involved and usually that means basically shutting down the connection so you have a laptop connected to your video system someone decides to play video HDMI output is going to basically going to go blank when it's connected to a device that doesn't support copy protection and in the professional video world they basically don't they basically don't support copper protection of any sort some can you got to keep that in line so if you've got a video it's gonna have copy protection on it you need to find another way in order to get that video into your system so and because of all these different limitations that are out there HDMI HDMI is not really not considered a reliable means of dealing with video in the professional world there's also one other than I've failed to mention that and that's the interconnect because there's just inserts smoothly and there's no walking tabs or anything like that these can come out quite easily and you find that even a mild bump on a cable or even the natural tendency of a cable to just want to return to its desired shape it may decide it may decide to pull out or even you know in transit when your equipment is in is in your vehicle just the bumping around there can cause us to come loose and so again HDMI it's generally not what I would call a reliable interconnect for doing professional video all right okay moving on so we'll go to the next one SDI this is a BNC connection and we send SDI or serial digital interface a video over these coaxial cables it's a 75 ohm cable I've got another video on the channel you'll see a link to that there in the description talking about different types of s of SDI different flavors that are out there what cables to buy and use for that so because SDI was actually purpose-built specifically for professional video it works well in that environment so it was designed with the needs of professional online so long cable runs a nice solid connection these are walkin connector so once you connect it it's not going to come loose so I'm gonna work loose on you just a lot of considerations were taken in a lot of issues were taking into consideration when SDI was designed so it's kind of the de facto standard when you're talking about professional video there's a lot of years of improvement behind the technology so you know these connectors in these cables actually have been in use for decades of prior des di for analog video and a lot of the challenges that are associated with making those sort of things work have been solved and so SDI is generally speaking going to be a great way of connecting equipment and the professional video world the other advantage that has is just it's simple you know it really is a single cable with a single conductor and cheap coax cable so nothing fancy about it it's just meant to be simple and ultra reliable another advantage that you have with these is you can actually do your own custom cables so you look at this is actually a cable that I made so cut the cable to length and then used a crimper to put the end on there so you can make cables of any length that you want whereas some of these other ones you're never going to be able to put your own you've never gonna be able make your own hdmi cables so that allows you to make 2 size cables exactly to your needs so if you're doing permanent install you can make sure the cables are exactly the length that you need you don't have extra cable running or laying around and getting in the way alright so with the challenges you might run into with SDI first of all because it's a professional format you're not gonna walk into your local Best Buy or whatever store and find SDI equipment they just don't carry that kind of stuff it's a professional professional interconnect and it's only gonna be available in professional shops so it's not something you're just gonna be able to pick up just anywhere now the other thing about a bight SDI it was designed from the beginning to be good for runs up to about 100 meters that's going to vary a lot based on the signal format that you're using so the resolution frame rate and also the quality of the cable and the connectors so if you're using high quality cable with high quality connectors and low relatively low res low resolution you're probably gonna be able to go 100 meters without too much difficulty but if any one of those things changes think that things may get become a little more difficult in order to make it work so in this type of cable that I use here it's built in 1505 a it's it's good for 6 gig SDI which is ultra HD at 30 frames per second over a hundred feet but it won't do a hundred meters so you know I think again it varies very much based on your application so if you need to do longer runs that's we're gonna have to get into another cable type in and I'll cover one of those here in just a moment the other issue is that when you're connecting up equipment that's not designed for professional use you know you go to do an event and somebody's got a laptop that you need to do and you can need to connect into your system well you're gonna have to do converters and again it's not something you're just gonna pick up at your local electronics store so yeah convert you can pretty easily convert between HDMI and SDI they're inexpensive converters out there starting at around 30 or 40 dollars you're not going to find commercial televisions that have SDI cables are connections on them so you're going to need some sort of converter on there if you want to be able to use SDI on equipment it wasn't designed for the professional video world and there's another limitation here so I mentioned with HDMI that you can do for for for video so the SDI is normally limited to 42 essentially what that means in real world terms is that the bright brightness portion of your video image has four times the resolution as the color portion of your video image so the color information in the in the video is really only making up one-fourth the resolution of the black and white so our eyes don't actually pick up on that very well we don't really notice that but it could become an issue when you really need high resolution color detail so for example if you're doing a chroma key or a green screen and it may be of real benefit to be able to do that on 444 if you can and there are some ways of doing SDI with 444 but it's not part of the official normal standard that we normally use and so normally with SDI you're getting just 42 video another issue that's worth mentioning and it's covered more in my SDI video that I referenced earlier is that there is some compatibility issues with what's called 3 gig SDI the video formats for doing 1080p at either 50 or 60 frames per second so there's a level a and level B they're not compatible most manufacturers have selected one or the other although in this day and age it is becoming more common for equipment to be able to support both so less of an issue today as it was before but there is that potential compatibility issue there if you're running happy if you happen to be running those specific resolutions and frame rates okay so the next one we talk about is optical fiber so this is an optical fiber connection I use these instantly I use these a lot in fact as my primary means of connecting connecting my equipment one of its main benefits or yeah its main benefit is really that you can do super long run to this thing so the distance that you can run optical fiber is not measured in meters its measured in kilometers or miles so it's when you're talking about any sort of long cable run anywhere it's pretty pretty much guarantee that that's being run over fiber so the optical fiber system that I happen to use from Blackmagic most of that is rated for I think it's a cheese it's like seven to seven to eight miles without any sort of additional amplification or boosting or anything like that I've never had to run a signal that far but I have had to run signals longer than 100 meters that SDI is rated I have to do that fairly regularly when you get into outdoor venues it's pretty common to have cable runs that are gonna exceed 100 meters and in that case you really do have to go with optical fiber you're not gonna find another one of these signal types that's able to run that far one things to know about how these optical fibers is electric the signal inside the optical fiber is basically the same as SDI so it's instead of being electrical signal going over copper it's an optical signal that's being transmitted by a light and usually infrared light it means that optical fiber can have some of the same benefits in the same limitations of SDI so keep that in mind one of the unexpected benefits of optical fiber the cable itself is actually quite inexpensive so these days it you can actually get out these optical fiber cables for less than you can a good quality SDI BNC cable so that's one of the reasons that I've kind of standardized on this so a little bit shopping around it's fairly easy to find these cables for about a dollar per meter when you're talking about some of your longer runs whereas these can run quite a bit more than that especially if you're getting the good quality stuff so but it's nice because you can you can do long runs and not have it be super expensive so it's actually quite affordable another advantage of the optical fiber is that these are essentially future-proof these don't have a lot the bandwidth limitations that you get trying to cram an electrical signal down down a wire whereas cable like this might not be able to do much more than about 10 gigabits these are easily able to do much much much higher than that able to carry a lot more data and so they're gonna be relevant far into the future as we get into 4k and a 60 Hertz or 60 frames per second 120 frames per second maybe even higher depending on where things go and there's even talk of 8k now those signals are probably gonna be run over optical fiber so if you're making an investment now consider that as well so you know if if you plan on using stuff long into the future you may find that optical fiber is gonna be one of the best ways to go for doing your long cable runs just because it is so future proof computer networking world they're moving more - more and more towards fiber and we're gonna see the same thing happening with video as well another benefit these cables actually are bi-directional so the typical optical fiber cable that you go and buy it's gonna be bi-directional so this is going to be the video coming out a device out of a device and this is going to be the video going into a device so you're getting both directions over one single cable assembly you're not able to see that very well in this video but this actually is one cable assembly it just happens to be split out at the end so you're getting video in two directions at once and that happens to be very handy for for doing video production because you're able to get a feed from a camera and then be able to get a return feed going back to the camera so the camera operator can see the program feed or you can do intercom over that connection or tally or whatever so getting your sending signals in both directions over one cable whereas if you were to go with SDI or HDMI you have to run two separate cables in order the sense that goes in both directions so not only is a cable assembly cheaper you're also getting twice the amount of information that you can send back and forth both directions some there are some challenges associated with optical fiber as well first of all it can be a little bit delicate so then this is actually this is actually glass inside the cable there so it is a little bit delicate you have to be you have to be a little bit careful that it's gotten they've gotten more rugged over the year but it can do a little bit a little bit delicate so normally when I'm actually doing production with optical fiber I use armored cables you've seen those in some of my other videos those the ones I use have a blue or a black sheath on the outside and what they're doing there is they're wrapping the inner glass fiber and it's insulator with some sort of protective layer it's usually metal or Kevlar or something along those lines in order to really give the cable a lot more durability so so that that even though that is a challenge is one that's reasonably easy to overcome in the two and a half years I've been using these optical fiber cables I've had to throw away three or four of them so they've gotten damaged then whatever reason and it's usually not because they're stepped on it's actually cuz they they get yanked and pulled and sup at the end get separated and it's not easy the equipment to repair an optical fiber cable was rather expensive and so most people are not gonna make that investment another issue is that these are not going to be found in retail again you're not going to walk walk into a Best Buy and pick up an optical cable so it's gonna be something you're gonna have to plan in advance from that plan your purchase those in advance buy extra is in case you have a problem with one and so forth so you may be able to find some in some if you're in a bigger city and you have a retailer that sells computer networking equipment because these are essentially just computer network cables so single mode cables with LC connectors look for the blue connector when you're buying and that will tell you to you're but you're getting the right thing but generally speaking you're not gonna find those in most electronic shops so plan your purchases in advance make sure you you get what you need out of the game probably the biggest disadvantage to optical fiber is that you need some expensive converters in order to use it so most of the equipment that you're going to be using doesn't necessarily have optical fiber connections built right in so you're nice to do conversion in this day and age we can get bi-directional fiber converters for about two hundred dollars depending on what resolution you need you need to support which is less expensive than some other form it's but it's still it can be a significant investment so if you're running four or six eight cameras and you need to connect two converters for each end that adds that adds up real fast so you may find that shorter runs are better over SDI than they are with fiber so now also because the optical fiber connections that we used today are based on SDI two signals are based on SDI it's going to have the same limitations so generally speaking you're only gonna get your four to two video over optical fiber just like you would with SDI now it means that you have the potential three gig compatibility triggy SDI compatibility that you can have with where the copper cables as well the last one I'm going to talk about is one it's a little bit of a bright airy it's kind of coming around the last couple years it's called NDI it's basically video over a network interface so you need to use your traditional cat5 cat6 cable your computer networking equipment so your switch and whatnot in order to get video from say a camera into your switcher now I'm not personally a real big fan of NDI I don't use it in my production workflow everybody does have some benefits and some challenges that are probably worth noting so the main benefit for it is that it's easy hooking up a pan tilt zoom robotic camera or somewhere you can very often do video and control and even power over one single cables you're not having to run as many as three separate cables into that camera there is that benefit there it can be a little bit easier because the cable can carry both video and control signals and because it's using computer networking cables the cabling itself is very very cheap there's hardly a cable under the Sun that's any cheaper than then cat5 cat6 so if cheap cable is what you're going for the NDI is maybe something to consider also since it's a computer network cable it can be bi-directional I'm not sure that I've seen any bidirectional equipment for NDI but theoretically it is actually possible now some of the challenges associated with NDI it does have limited support there's only a handful of manufacturers that are actually doing anything with it it was something that was developed by new tech it's the company that makes the TriCaster and the video switchers the all the TriCaster support it all the modern TriCaster support but you're not going to find the support for it from a lot of other companies you know for example beginning a be able to pick up a Sony camera that supports it so it is still kind of one of these proprietary not very widely used types of interconnects that's out there another downside is it is a compressed compressed signal computer networks have less bandwidth generally speaking than some of these other signals so a typical computer network today is one gigabit per second eight for each connection whereas SDI you know if you're doing 1080p that's three gigabit so it's three times the amount of information so in order to get those video signals to run over a computer network especially if you need more than one of them they compress the signal and the compression is typically about 15 to 1 so they're throwing away 14 15 of the information in order to send it down send it down that signal that compression means that there is some loss of quality they've done a pretty good job about minimizing that but also means there is some inherent delay there as well because signal compression takes time you have to read a certain amount of the picture before you can start looking for aspects that you can remove where that adding is to get significant visual artifacts in DI typically has a delay of about one frame theoretically it's just 16 as little as 16 lines of video but in practical terms it's about one frame the way that that's your signal and depending on your production workflow that may or may not be an issue for you but that's something to be certainly something to be aware of the main reason I don't get involved in the eye is because conversion to and from other formats is expensive so there are converters out there that convert nd I to and from SDI or HDMI they start at 500 bucks for each each end so you're talking a thousand dollars just in converters in order to send one video signal from a local remote location to another in my in my particular situation where I work out of this video production trailer that's basically a non-starter my switcher doesn't support it I use a switcher from Blackmagic Design bmd does not support nd I at this point and don't expect them to if your switcher doesn't support it it's basically not going to be an option most of the time just because of the cost of conversion there's also some other issues too because of the compression there's no such thing as genlock if you and working in an environment where you need absolutely the minimum amount of delay from camera to projector or monitor or whatever you you'd want to be using genlock cameras I'll have to do a video about what that means but basically the signors synchronization signals that tell the cameras when to start at the top of the frame and move to the bottom of the frame it's generated in one central location and everything is synchronised together you're not gonna get that in an NDA situation where as you can with all the rest alright another thing about in the eye is it can be difficult to scale because the video does require a fair amount of bandwidth you're not really going to be able to get very many video signals on a typical computer network so 1080p at 50 or 60 frames per second usually occupies about about 125 megabit per second which is about 1/8 the total capacity of a network connection and the truth be told though like with ethernet once you start getting above about 25 30 40 % of total bandwidth things slow to slow down a lot more than you'd expect them to so reality I don't think I would ever try and run more than about 4 maybe 5 NDI signals on a single computer network and so in that one case it doesn't scale very well for a lot of productions that I do 6 cameras is kind of a minimum and at that point nd I would not really work and not be considered a viable option because it just it would saturate the network too much and cause other issues anyway so that's kind of the for sort of major that are in the lower end video a professional professional video production market moving forward we're gonna be seeing some transition to IP based video so it uses network connections but we're talking about much higher bandwidth where the signal is still compressed but not compressed near as much and that it's starting to creep into the higher end of the the real professional space in the broadcast space and over the over the next five ten years we may see more of that coming down into the the budget video production space as well but for right now the cost is extremely prohibitive so it's probably not something that people in our segment of the market are gonna be trying to do at this point so anyway if you guys have any questions be sure and leave those down in the comment section down below I'll try and respond quickly as best I can and also you can go to my website and contact me there so you can go to DJ P dot li slash contact and that's a URL shortener to take you directly to the contact page my website is actually DJ prod PR OD biz and I've also got the crew access website again if you use the link there in the description you'll be able to sign up for a a current promotion whatever that happens to be on Crewe axis so anyway give that give that site a shot it's it's changed my business and adding lots of customers all the time and they seem to be very happy with it so anyway thanks guys for watching and have a fantastic day

Channel: Doug Johnson Productions

Views: 48,997

Rating: 4.9281945 out of 5

Keywords: Doug Johnson Productions, DJP, Live Video Production, Event Video Production, Orem, Utah, Live Streaming, Internet Streaming, hdmi, sdi, ndi, fiber optic, optical fiber, video, cables, connections, which, best, video converter, micro converter, mini converter, sdi to hdmi, hdmi to sdi, pros and cons, digital video, professional video, interconnect, video connection, video cable

Id: U7p7OboXZRQ

Length: 27min 48sec (1668 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 23 2019