NDI 5 BRIDGE: A First Look at Remote NDI Connections

hello everyone welcome back to streaming alchemy i'm john mahoney and on today's show we're going to be taking our first look at the remote components of nutex ndi bridge and we're really excited about this this has been a long time coming and i know this is actually something that a lot of you as well have been waiting for so we're going to do a fairly deep dive into it today but before we get there i please like to invite everyone to participate if you'd like if you have any questions any comments please just put them in the comment section below to whichever mechanism you're viewing the show from if you'd like to actually join us here on the show we have a connection link that you can use to get to us and somebody from the studio when you're on air with us so we'd really encourage any type of questions or comments that you may have so and so just so i think we we're all set to dive in so let's get started let's first start by taking a look at the diagram of what we're going to be using to do all the interconnections to demonstrate ndi bridge so over here we're going to be connecting with two remote sites the first one is going to be hosted at aws uh and so that we have set up and running the second is coming from the studio of a friend of mine and he's going to be just sending us a feed of his green screen so nothing particularly dialed in but just to demonstrate the fact that as a protocol as a mechanism inside of ndi you now have the ability not just to connect peer-to-peer with ndi but to actually create really a cluster where everybody that's within this cluster can share their ndi feeds with everyone else so it's really a very powerful mechanism for what we're going to be demonstrating here so before i actually get into how this would be configured let me just check the comments because i want to want to turn around and make sure we we say hello to everyone so we have rudy here rudy uh yes yes the the hour changes are going to be hitting all of us here so that's uh that's something i know we're we're all in the midst of trying to figure out who's on what time zone uh but welcome great to have you here so we have uh american newscape america newscape thank you for joining us again it's great to see you here each week we also have uh tim bryan from louisville kentucky so tim thank you for joining us here great to see you and we also have uh samuel nordvik so samuel thank you for joining us definitely appreciate it all right so let's get into it the great thing about ndi bridge is that it is incredibly simple to set up and there are really just the two pieces to it that we have to take a look at so the first one is what you set up for the host so in that diagram i showed the host system is running here so that's my system right here in front of me on the desk and what you need to do for that is you need to turn around and decide what you want to share as the host with everybody that will connect with you what ndi sources and you do that through ndi access manager and setting up groups and assigning feeds to groups and then telling uh ndi bridge which groups you want to share out with the rest of the people that will be joining you across bridge then you specify a bridge name and it should probably be something that gives you some clue as to where that remote site is and you know what their role is in your overall production so it's easy to find and know where source is coming from uh you then have your public ip address which is how everybody that's remote is going to connect to you and you also have a port and so ports are always a tricky thing when it comes to working sort of with firewalls and with with other routers that have uh a separate boundary between the internet and your internal network so what the port is going to do is it's going to let you advertise to the outside world not just your general i p address which is somebody connected to your router wouldn't really know what to do but when you connect with an ip address and a port you can instruct the router to route that message any message connecting to that ip and port number to a specific ip and port number within your infrastructure and so what you are doing here is you are picking the port number that you're going to be using to have somebody connect with you it doesn't necessarily have to be the same as the one advertised externally but that will make your life a lot simpler and you know save the engineering head scratching that will go on when you're trying to to figure out how to get everything working but so this is the only tricky piece to using ndi bridge you need on the host site to do a port forward so that anybody that connects will be able to route to the correct box hosting bridge and then the last piece is a security piece where it will generate a key i believe you can just type your own in as well but you generate a key that is used almost like a password it's an encryption key so anything that's sent to you will for somebody to make that connection it will need to leverage that encryption key when they join that's it you you spill out that information and click start and then the host is running so it's a very very straightforward mechanism for doing that the other piece though that we've talked about when we is that you're sharing as well so what i'd like to do very quickly is jump over to my second screen and just show you one of the things you need to be aware of with the feeds that you are going to share so here on the other screen there is something called encoder settings and this is our running version of ndi bridge here and when you set up encoder settings you have to come back and say what encoding mechanisms do i want to use so do i want to use full ndi do i want to use ndi hx do i want to use uh what codec for the encoding do i want to use h.264 do i want to use hevc and then you also have a quality setting and this is really going to show just specify how much bandwidth you want to leverage for those feeds that you're sharing so per feed what would you be sending so we have this set really low because we're doing a live stream right now so we didn't want to be sending out camera feeds competing with our path to the internet for our live stream but this would let you set it up for any type of uh bandwidth that you wanted to here and you can actually dial it in to specific numbers as well so that's the other piece so everybody that shares feeds they're definitely going to need to set the bandwidth appropriate for the amount of bandwidth they will be uploading to you and the other piece to keep in mind unless you have massive pipes you're going to want to force everything to ndi hx and do a transcode because at 1080 ndi feed is going to be over 100 meg so unless you have that type of multi 100 meg uplink that's consistent and reliable you're definitely going to want to transcode everything into ndihx so something else to keep in mind here so let me switch back to the uh the remote piece of the settings which we were talking about before on the other screen so for the remote guests they will join this hosted session that you've started so we have two at aws and at my friends remote studio so for each of them they'll do the same thing use access manager to define which sources they want to share with us and then they'll they'll name their computer so when i see any sources i'll know it comes from them and they'll type in my ip address and the port that they should be coming across two very very basic things here that uh you know again we've already set this up so you're just sharing that information and they'll have to paste in the same encryption key that uh was set up when you started the host and then you'll just click join so very simple the other thing is when you want to share the information for what a remote guest will need to do if you notice on the hosting page to the left here there's a little clipboard icon next to the port so that clipboard icon basically will grab all the information that the remote guest will need the the ip the port and the encryption key and give you that as a little block of text that you can just route as a text feed or email or however you want to share that so it's very easy to pass that information around so that's everything that's involved in the setup so let's actually start uh start to dig in a bit more and look at quality of what we get so if you let's just switch over to my vmix screen here and we can take a look so here if you are looking across this is a local camera that i have coming in so this camera right over there then i have a feed that's coming from aws and as you can see i mean the quality here is fine and this is coming from just a remotely hosted computer and we'll we'll dig into how that looks uh i also have this is the feed from my friend's studio it's just pointed at a green screen so the real goal here this isn't set up specifically for that but the real goal here is just to show that you can have multiple remote locations connected with your host and all in this case three of these sites are sharing ndi feeds so as you can see you know from a quality point of view this really looks great so let me actually show you what we have running on aws so over here i have on my other system i have an rdp into our aws hosted site so let's just switch over to this second screen so what we're running here is we are running ndi bridge in this aws instance and we're running obs and we're feeding ndi out over obs and this really is the exciting piece here is that everything that we're doing here uh with ndi works as if it's local so what i can do and this is great if i open up studio my let me see if i can just open a studio monitor over here and i'm going to connect to my remote site using ndi studio monitor so just give me a second here so what i am doing here if you see is this is that same screen we were looking at before but now you notice i have kvm sitting here so i can go in and click on this and now everything that i'm doing here is controlling that remote system in aws so ndi isn't just streaming the audio and video feeds it is a full ndi connection and this is really really important because as you think about all the things you take for granted with ndi locally you have all of that but now extend it across the internet so uh let me actually just show one more thing here that i'd like to touch on for this and that is everything that uh we set up over here this is just running uh the screen share so basically scan convert they they they've changed the name a few times so i can never remember what but i think it's just the their scan converter app and that's all you need to do and set it to allow that but the other thing you can do and let me see if i have a yes so i'll go over here to the ndi launcher and launch studio monitor and now when i launch studio monitor here let's switch over to the other screen here so when i launch studio monitor i can now see uh let's see we got bridge over here so i just want to make sure i've got everything here so what i'm gonna do is i'm going to connect to one of the cameras that i have here sorry so i have a bird door camera here so now i'm here on at a remote location uh and i have all my ptz controls so you can see that there's the latency here between you know the feed that's coming back but i can now go to any sort of presets that i have here and and move around and this gives me now not just the feed again but all of the camera controls that go with this so again a second point here to keep in mind that you know with the full ndi you get these types of capabilities which is exactly what we need to do remote productions okay so we actually have a caller so i believe it's uh kane peterson from new tech so so kane i'm i'm not hearing you right now so oh can you hear me oh yep okay there you are got it how you doing very good kane how are you i'm good i was watching over your thing and uh i just happened to have a chance to to join in and try out in fact the first time i've ever used your call-in uh stuff so uh the call-in software you have the live to air so trying that as well so very cool so uh yeah i mean we we were really excited you know that uh that this came out we you know got sort of that that early look a couple of days and we're we're really excited about the uh showing this off on the show so uh yeah no it was very cool to to see that i i've actually had my hands on this for uh about a month uh you know a working version you know running through some betas and stuff and i i still remember when i got uh one of the first connections i i've done some ones with one of my co-workers down in florida uh down in mexico city and in fact uh you know one of our some of our guys in europe and stuff and just trying these things out and i mean we were just like astounded it's like i'm controlling your camera i'm you know i'm controlling your system hey look at here's your tricaster i'm mdi kvming the interface and driving it remotely and uh the more we played with it they're more like this is this is everything you could want it to be and more so yeah i mean this is a real game changer you know on a lot of fronts and it's the thing that excites us as we we start to look at this is the completeness of the ndi implementation it's not a deprecated ndi for you know remote connections it is a a full ndi experience and like even sending native ndi signals across the internet right we're not converting them to something else and then flipping them back into another format you are sending ndi across the internet yeah and you know and that means you get all things like color space because one of the other things that we're going to show is that you can chroma key you can take a signal from a remote location and do a a key on it and you know that's great because that gives you the ability to sort of co-locate people in a virtual space that you know you even know if everybody's coming in from potentially different remote spaces so doing that type of setup we think is oh yeah it's pretty exciting i i've got a few clients i'm very excited to help them get this set up and working and i think one of the areas that a lot of people don't even haven't even thought of right we've talked about heights and video and audio and keyboard and mouse and ptz control and tally and those are all fantastic things but you can also send commands through it too now obviously it has to be a program supports it but like i've shown a few of my co-workers and stuff and they were just kind of like you know what how are you doing that where you know his tricaster i'm pulling his tricaster to one of my inputs and i'm sending commands to my input which is making his tricaster you know switch to a different camera source or figure an auto and they're like how are you doing that i'm just sending a command to your tricaster and just right over the thing and it just propagates through it's it's very very cool so i mean we're we're really big into automation so that's something that we uh we definitely want to to dive into it if if there's documentation with that i'd love to uh i'd love to you know take a take a look at that because i can think a lot about it yeah it's i mean all you got to know is just how to format the command and then it's just macro commands that go in there so anything you can do as a macro you could send through as a system command so i mean that actually i mean that's actually the the trifecta there you now have everything you could want to do remotely available to you and uh so that's that is pretty impressive so uh i know it's i because it's funny i i've talked to some of the folks at new tech and now that ndi is sort of a separate group there's there's you don't necessarily get to see everything during the sort of birthing of a new technology which is which is exciting in its own way when you see something that comes in from something that barely works as a prototype to something that's out there running for production so i know that that's different here but i think it's exciting that ndi now has a full organization focused just on that because you know this oh yeah so i i think that's a good thing and i i talk to those guys quite a bit so it's uh you know they might be separate but they're still together too so so uh no so uh i really appreciate you calling in uh is there uh anything else specific you wanted to to talk about because uh no i i just saw your thing i thought hey let me just pop in there and uh you know the what i saw were you doing a really good job and it's uh i i know i've seen a lot of people on facebook playing with it and asking questions and stuff and it's exciting and it's uh it's i've been uh i've been waiting for it to be out so you know i could say more about it because i know people have been asking and i i knew it was coming soon but yeah i didn't have an exact date i just knew okay we're getting close we're getting close everything's working the way it's supposed to so it's it's nice to actually see it out there and um you know starting to use it i mean for everybody that was impatient it is much better to get something that's really working oh and believe me you didn't want the version because i had i i mean so i had a version that had it working right before you know when ndi5 came out and it was not working very well at that point and uh i didn't know what they were going to do exactly when that happened but you know obviously they they just kind of posted out the button so you couldn't click start like okay that makes sense um yeah i mean the transcoding piece is incredibly useful i mean we talked about that in another show where just if you want to do ndi over wi-fi transcoding is a nice mechanism to let you it's it's funny because i have a lot of people who just kind of like what would the local be for and then we start talking about it and also there all these reasons to use it come out right because it's it the local mode itself has a lot of valid very useful uh use cases but i understand everybody is looking forward to the host join mode and uh that is very cool and i i think uh i mean maybe you mentioned this i didn't catch your stuff from the beginning but another thing just in case people aren't aware is multiple multiple joins can conjoin a host and everybody can share between everyone which is very cool as well so i've done tests where you know i was connected to somebody and they were connected to somebody and all three of us are sharing signals between each other which is uh i think not something everybody's expecting to have happen but yeah it's really working that's the way we we started with that and we actually have two remote studios in our studio here all connected and we talk about it's more it's not like a peer-to-peer now it's like a cluster you basically sit there and go everybody that joins the host can define what they want to share out into the community and then everybody just picks them like regular ndi feeds because as you said that's what they are so that's what it is exactly so for everybody that doesn't know kane is one of the gurus at new tech uh uh no seriously i mean kane kane does all the cool automation that nobody else thinks you can make a tricaster do kane's the guy who actually makes those things happen and uh you know that it's he shares a lot with the community uh you i mean you have your own website uh that you host yeah i i've actually written it's kind of funny for a lot of those there are apps where you know i would talk to people and after like two or three people asked for the same thing i'm like i can make an app that does that you know and then i find out a bunch of people need it right like that uh my little data link uh timer right does the countdown clocks oh my gosh i get emails all the time from people saying you know i use this in every show or all the time so it's great to hear uh helping make people's productions even better yeah so that's cain's world right kanesworld.com so yes because i actually live in aurora right wayne's world yep and uh i used to have a friend who had said every time he'd see me he'd always go kane's world kids so it just kind of stuck so well well it may not it is still party time excellent as well so yes you do get the whole thing there so so kane i really appreciate you calling us here thank you very much for popping in on the show oh great to be on thanks okay take care kane thanks bye all right so that was that was a happy surprise i'm really glad kane took the time to uh to pop in so let me actually let me actually jump back to all the comments because we've had a a lot of things going on here since uh so let me see so we have uh bruce richardson hello from canada hey bruce how are you so uh i i've been following everything uh you've been doing with your new castle-like venue uh so definitely excited to see where that all turns out definitely uh an interesting project you have going on there so we have uh jp no day from cape town jp thank you for joining us again we have david from costa rica david thank you good to have you here so let's see uh so david actually has a question he says i need to connect two cameras to a vmix system and send that signal to my studio from four different countries i use srt can i do that by ndi so the quick answer is yes this will let you do exactly what you're looking to do you can set up your main studio if that's where you you want to do the switching with vmix you can set up ndi bridge there and then use host do the hosting there and then take the feeds in from your remote locations via native ndi so you don't have to do any type of srt configuration i mean srt is still a possibility but the real benefit you get with doing it with ndi bridge is that signal now on your network is native ndi and you can use it anywhere that you would use ndi and you could do ptz control of those cameras everything else that we sort of been talking about in the big space so definitely uh i would give this a a really strong look to see if this is something that would make sense workflow wise but it definitely could could fill that role you know with what's released today here so let's see so we have lee love what is the latency for running remote audio i i haven't measured this exactly uh i would believe from what i'm seeing in the the overall latency that we are probably uh you know probably you know 150 milliseconds somewhere in that space uh you know five frames or or maybe a little more so it isn't something that is you know that real time type of connection but it's certainly in the conversational space so if you needed to do signals bi-directionally and and use that as a way to to route audio to and from a location that would probably be something that would be sufficiently low latency uh to to have a conversation across that link so so george kenny george ah this is great george uh i i was down in uh virginia uh last week and unfortunately george and i just missed each other we were we're trying to get together but george was uh busy on a project so uh i i am still looking forward to getting to meet you in person george so uh thank you for uh you know we we are really looking forward to ways people will be using ndi bridge we think it's it's an exciting technology on you know as a whole package so even though newtek calls it a tool it's got a lot of uses that i think people are going to integrate very quickly into their productions so and say so we also have stephen from uh birmingham in the uk so steven thank you for taking the time to drop in here definitely appreciate it all right so let's get back so one of the things i mentioned when i was talking with kane is that we want to show you the quality of what comes in and how you could actually do something like a chroma key with this so let me just swing over here and i'll shut off this connection so now if you look over here on the screen i have this coming from aws i'm going to switch my sources and now i actually have a chroma keys just a chroma key video that we're playing up on aws through obs and the switching time is really fast so this is something where when you think about the types of productions you could run you could switch in one location and it would be natively fluid to somebody they wouldn't necessarily feel like they were dragging behind the actual production so that's just a sort of inemotive thing i haven't done any real latency testing for official benchmarks but as a operator it feels very natural to do these types of switches so with this uh being set up here as a a green screen video one of the other points i wanted to make was that chroma information is preserved in this like like kane mentioned this is full ndi so you can i believe in ndi hx here you get a 10 bit 422 i believe is is what's coming in so if you if you have this set up which which we have here i can go in and just do a chroma key uh and so we'll go into key and let me see get this set so here with the chroma key set i actually have this layered on top of a background here and you can see i mean maybe we can take this full screen you can see that the the quality of the key is is really is really solid and it is something that you know from a let me see if i can switch this over to pull this out here so this would give us a you know a a quality key that we could use to integrate different people remotely into our whether it's virtual sets or have somebody you know just sort of inject as part of a studio with the background that has a consistent look and feel for everybody however you'd want to do that but this gives you now the full capability to do these types of integrated remote productions so very exciting for that so i think you know everything that we're running here is either you know it's coming from a tricaster at the the remote studio from my friend on aws we're running on a sort of a medium to larger size in uh instance there so you know this is just a it's a g4 dn you know 2xl so it's it's a you know a reasonably priced instance so some of the things you may want to do you can do on lower end hardware and be very successful with it so that's something else just to keep in mind that you know no matter where you want to use this you will have to scale if you want to take in 10 cameras into all the encodes but if you want to take in one or two or three cameras from a remote location you can probably do that on very economical hardware and make this thing integrate very nicely into your productions so that really covers everything i wanted to talk about directly i'm sure there are lots of other questions around this so what i'd like to do is we'll wrap up the main show here and we'll jump to the post show and then we can be a little less formal on going over something and i'll just try to answer whatever questions i can about everything we talked about here so uh we will be back next week thank you for uh granting us a a week off to let us get some travel and work done that we needed to do on out in the field so we appreciate everybody's understanding there and we'll see everybody next week if you can't hang around for the po show otherwise we'll be back in a couple of seconds to follow on from here take care everyone all right welcome back everyone so uh so let's start off david uh asked a question he said what about latency if i connect my system at 1080p uh 2997 with the 8 to 12 megabits so i don't think uh you you you'd notice a a real shift in latency i think what based on the resolution i don't think it adjusts latency so i think it has a fixed latency that will cover all of this uh and i think that has to do with you know when people set up the encodes for what they want to do to send it probably makes a a fixed latency on that uh but the i think the key in all this stuff is it isn't it isn't real time it isn't something where you'd you know you wouldn't notice it if you had two camera feeds side by side but as i said here i'm noticing somewhere something that looks like a uh you know a five six seven something in there so like between 150 and 200 millisecond that kind of space we do want to do more testing so probably the best way would be to point the camera at a timer and just have it loop up and loop back and that will give you sort of double the latency that you're you'll normally be looking at and you can use that as a benchmark because that's how we set up to do that type of test and uh you know this is uh this is definitely something that as i spend more time with it i'll i'll get into more solid metrics uh and i'm sorry i don't don't have that for everyone today but uh this is something that uh i thought it was more important to come out with this and demonstrate the range of possibilities and we can dig into some of the technical details sort of underlying that uh you know on a future show this is definitely a lot more uh with ndi that we should look forward to covering here so let me see so uh so we have bob cordell uh just thank kane and i again i i am any grateful any time uh kane can can make the time to jump in and then join us here so uh uh thanks bob i appreciate uh that uh you recognize that so we also have utl events from india uh utl thank you for joining us here uh i know this is uh probably uh getting close to uh the end of your day so definitely appreciate you making the time on uh on a friday or early saturday morning to uh to tune in here so all right so when we when we first got this uh we probably got this like like tuesday i think so it wasn't really it was just a couple of days before this uh went out to everyone else but we were we were really excited to see what we could sort of pull together and what would actually work and we were expecting them to be to be completely honest we were expecting that this was going to be you know sort of the first pass a first release but once we started using it we found it was incredibly stable for sort of that this is just fresh off the uh off the developer system kind of kind of release and uh that's uh you know that's that bodes really well for this the other thing that we found that was great is the way everything reconnects if you shut so if i reboot my system start it up and then just click host again everybody that was joined to me before i did that reboot automatically reconnects so as long as any one of these partners is up like if you're hosting uh as long as the other partners in that cluster are all active if somebody reboots and just starts again those connections happen seamlessly uh and the other thing that i i didn't really call out here is that if you are looking at let me see if i just call up a studio monitor here so so if uh we can hop in here when i come in so this is like i said this is the connection up to our aws system but if you look here this is exactly what you see now you see this is bridge that we're connected to then we're connected to the aws bridge which is one of the remote guests that joined us and then we have three feeds one is the video feed of the capture of the desktop the other is obs and then that's just the remote connection which is sort of sitting inside of uh the system we the ndi piece so this gives us the ability now to connect to a system and then connect to any of the ndi feeds that are available and shared in that system so to everything we're doing here that aws system could be local i mean all we know is that we have these ndi feeds and so anything i want to use that for here it's native and that's probably the biggest difference between some of the solutions that bring in sort of srt natively they have to do that second translation where you're coming from an encode srt is a wrapper a d encode and then some type of translate into ndi this in the entire pathway is standard ndi which means all these other capabilities like kane was mentioning things like like tally things like command flow things around the collar space all of these things remain consistent end-to-end so there's going to be no surprises no translation issues that may come in as you you do these so let's see so jp is asking can you touch on if any port forwarding is needed what about firewalls so what is needed uh is the you need the ability to uh port forward on the host environment so that's the only site and that's usually the one you have the most control over so you need to do a port forward there so that's that's the one piece so that's the only port forwarding that you should need to do none of the other sides will need to do that and you only need to forward one port no matter how many connections which is the other thing that's something you know you typically have to do uh multiple ports if you were connecting with multiple remote locations using srt uh even though there is a way to tunnel multiple srt feeds from a single location i'm not sure whether that would apply across multiple locations but you know that's that's a definite plus for how this is set up in terms of protocols i know this uses uh reliable udp so whatever firewall would be involved would need to allow that type of udp traffic to pass and i don't have specific port details if there are any that you know on the remote side that may be needed but as far as i know it is fairly straightforward to do this and definitely something i think most environments would feel comfortable because in joining those people are initiating the connection and most firewalls i'm not going to say this absolutely but most firewalls are more lenient with the flow of traffic from connections that were initiated with behind them so there's sort of a somebody's asking for this so i don't necessarily have to uh block everything that that may be going on whereas they'd be much stricter with connections that could be established from outside the firewalls where they want to do more protection but again this is something that we've been in places where you think what we wanted to do was simple but firewalls locked us down so it is it is something that would be location by location but i think it's something that's definitely a uh optimized with an understanding that these will have to pass through some network infrastructure that is out of people's control uh you know the production cruise control so this this seems right now to uh to be fairly lightweight and demands on firewalls but we'll have to say uh you know this is there's there's still a lot to be uh be learned here as this makes it out okay uh i think if we don't have any more questions uh it probably uh would make sense to to wrap this up i want to thank everybody for taking the time to to join today this is one of those we get excited about some shows and this is one of them we we definitely like uh like everything that uh is coming out with ndi as and the direction that new tech and visitor are taking it so pretty excited to see what what will be next but uh so i have twitter so he said thanks for the info the tour thank you very much i appreciate you joining us here today and uh for everyone uh thank you and we'll see you all next week take care be safe

Channel: The Streaming Alchemy Show

Views: 1,622

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Id: l-efmh7s9bU

Length: 44min 38sec (2678 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 05 2021