NDI EXPLAINED! Add network inputs to ATEM MINI & OBS with BirdDog

you've heard of hdmi you've probably heard of sdi and in today's video we're going to be delving into the world of ndi i've got a few of bird dogs ndi encoders and decoders here which we're going to take a look at and i'm going to show and explain to you some of the benefits that you can get from an mdi workflow for those of you that have never heard of ndi before it stands for network device interface and it's a way of transporting broadcast quality audio and video over a network at ultra low latency and i'm not talking about any sort of special network i'm talking about your standard one gigabit network that you find in offices and homes that you plug your a10 mini pro into your computers into even stuff like your playstations with ndi you can plug let's say your camera into an ethernet port at one end of the building and then on the complete opposite end of the building or even on a different floor you can plug in your vision mixer into an ethernet port and because they're both on the same network they both see each other they're both able to talk to each other and it means your vision mixer can receive a high quality and low latency feed from the camera over the network it's also a bi-directional connection so that means that not only is the camera sending audio and video to the vision mixer but the vision mixer can send things back like comms so talk back tally information so the red and green lights on the camera it can also send ptz information so if you have a pan tilt zoom camera you can control the camera remotely and as to where it's pointing it can also do return audio and video and a lot more all down that one ethernet connection that is plugged into the camera and over the last few years ndi has become incredibly popular which is great for us because it means there's more devices out there than an ndi enabled so from cameras and vision mixers to encoders and decoders like i'm going to be showing you today that allow you to convert your existing cameras that might have hdmi or sdi out into ndi enabled devices to even software like on mac obs and i know obs is on windows as well but vmix as well which is windows only that accepts ndi devices and can even output ndi signals as well and so when you plug all of your ndi devices up to your network they can all automatically see each other and they can work together and you can have as many ndi devices as you like on a network you're only limited by your network's bandwidth at this point some of you may be thinking well how do i get the feed from my existing camera which might only be an hdmi output as an ndi device and that's where these bird dog encoders come in i've got three here to test and what they will do is in the case if we look at the bird dog mini first there are an hdmi in an hdmi out on the back of this device and also an ethernet port and a standard rj45 port on the back and this will allow you to plug in your camera via hdmi into the hdmi import it will then convert that hdmi to ndi and spit that back out over the network port and put it on your network and it's the same for all three of these now the bird dog mini also will do the same in the reverse so it's a ndi encoder and an ndi decoder and will allow you to basically bring in an ndi source and spit out an hdmi source which is perfect for things like monitors i'm also going to use this in just a second we're going to hook it up to the a10 mini pro so that i can feed an ndi source into my a10 mini pro it does all that up to 1080p these two devices are 4k capable so the first one i've got here which by the way is absolutely tiny like i've got my phone here this is a standard iphone x look how small this unit is anyway this is the bird dog flex 4k in and what this will do is exactly the same but up to 4k 30 frames per second and it will allow you to bring in an hdmi feed and then it will export an ndi feed to the network it isn't a decoder it's just the encoder if you want the encode and decode at 4k then you're looking at this the birddog 4k hdmi and on the back of here just to show you what ports we've got we've got an hdmi input an hdmi output a 12g sdi output and then on the side here you've got your standard rj45 network connector and also if you're lucky enough to be rocking a 10 gigabit network there's an sfp plus port on the side as well there's also a headphone foam port because one of the great things about bird dog bird dogs integration into ndi is they actually allow you to run talkback and comms through it as well and there's a power port too so we'll talk about some of those features i want to get it set up because i've done a lot of talking already so this first setup that i'm gonna do let me explain how it works i've taken an hdmi feed out from my sony camera and i'm putting that into an hdmi splitter to get two identical feeds and one of those outputs i'm sending directly to the a10 mini pro into input number one so it's basically a direct feed from the camera to the atemi pro the second output i'm putting into the bird dog flex unit and i'm using that as an encoder to encode the signal from hdmi to ndi and then i've obviously connected that to my home network so you can see it connected to my network switch there and also connected to my network switch is the bird dog mini which i'm using as a decoder to decode the signal back from ndi to hdmi and then i've connected that up via an hdmi cable to the 8m mini into input number two so we've got two identical signals one of them going directly into the a10 mini the other one being encoded into ndi going over my network and then being decoded back to hdmi and going into the a10 mini let's fire them up and see how they look there it is so now the image you're seeing in the picture in picture here is the feed coming from my camera into the bird dog flex being encoded into ndi then going over my home network to the bird dog mini where it's being decoded from ndi and coming into input number three on my a10 mini and so it's doing quite a lot of stuff and you will instantly be able to notice if i just move over here that there is very little latency whatsoever in fact if i get my phone you can see the difference between the two there is about milliseconds or around about three frames so latency wise very little latency quality wise if i cut to it full frame here you'll see quality is exactly the same one thing that i have noticed and i haven't been able to work it out i think it might be the color settings that i've set in in the bird dog is there is a bit of a color difference if i flick between the two sources you'll see my original input is darker and then the ndi input actually i prefer that shot um but i don't know what's causing that if anyone in the comments knows what could be causing that please do let me know so we've got our camera feed going into the a10 mini pro iso via the flex and the mini the flex is the one that's doing the encoding the mini is the one that's doing the decoding so what if i want to also access that camera feed over the network on my mac here using obs so i've opened up obs here first of all you do need the obs ndi plug-in installed for these to show up i've created a new scene called ndi in and what i can do is click the plus button and if you've got the plugin installed you'll see ndi source appears and then i can give that a name so i can say camera one and then it will show me all of the ndi sources on my network now currently that's the bird dog source that we have there for the camera and i'm actually outputting a source from obs as well so that's why that one shows up so i can just select that keep all the settings the same with the highest bandwidth and lowest latency and then click ok and there we go i now appear in my obs on my mac the feed is still going to the a10 mini pro and the eagle eyes of you may have noticed that a red ring now appears around the flex and that is because ndi also carries within it tally information and because i have the this particular ndi input selected in my obs obs tells the flex that it's on air and puts a red tally light on so if i was to create a completely blank scene here in obs and switch to it you'll see the tally light goes off if i cut back to the ndi in the red light comes on so there's tally information as well in ndi that's why it's another reason why it's such a pop popular way of transporting the video because particularly in bird dog situation you get tally you get comms you get the audio the video it also does dante on the audio ptz control all down that one ethernet cable so we've got the the camera coming in to the a10 pro iso and obs but what happens if we want to switch it what happens if actually we don't want to send the camera to obs we want to send something from obs and in this case to my a10 mini pro iso so let's say i want to use obs as more as a video play out system well we can do that as well because as part of the ndi plug-in here in obs if i go up to the top and click on tools and then ndi output settings we have the option to output via mdi ndi both the main output the one that you're seeing here and if i was in studio mode we could also output as a separate feed the preview output as well i don't tend to use street studio mode so i'm just outputting the main output so what i'm going to do is i've selected a video here it's an old video hence the hair i've got it on loop and because this is now in the program of obs obs will actually be um encoding it into ndi both the audio and the video and it will be discoverable on the network so what i'm going to do here is go into the settings for the bird dog mini because we're using that as a decoder to feed into one of our a10 mini pro inputs and if i go into the ndi decode it's still on the settings for the taking the feed from the flex which is the camera feed what we're going to do is click refresh and you can see now alex's macbook pro appears there so i'm going to select that instead and i'm going to hit apply and when i do that if i bring on the picture in picture we'll see the video playing and i can cut to it full screen here and there we go you can see the quality i can turn on the audio channel yeah i really enjoyed i'm just going live with a bunch of other creators right now and so you can see we're able to get both the audio and the video into my a10 mini pro through ndi with super low latency and very high quality now finally i want to show you how easy it is working with 4k through ndi as well so i've hooked up the birddog 4k hdmi unit this does support 4k up to 60 frames per second the flex unit that we had connected to before is maxed out at 4k 30 frames per second now what i'm going to do is i'm going to connect this sony camera and put it in 4k 25 frames per second connect it to the bird dog 4k hdmi and then open up obs and show you it being a 4k live 4k feed being fed into obs on my mac so i've logged into the bird dog dashboard here you can see we're receiving a 25 frames per second ultra hd feed into the device if i go into the av settings it's encoding it hdmi um i should actually i'm going to bring up this video bandwidth to support it to around about 200 as it is 4k and the rest is fine i'll leave it all on the defaults and just hit apply now i'm going to go into obs and with obs open i'm going to go to the plus button choose ndi source and we're working here with a canvas a 1080p canvas and we'll say bird dog there is the hdmi and the first thing you'll notice straight away and how we know it's a 4k feed is because you can see it's uh dominating that 1080p canvas so one of the things that we can do with a 4k feed is you know i can do this digital zoom because we're working with a 1080p canvas but we've got a 4k feed coming in so we've got this digital zoom if we want to see the full size i can just right hand click and then go to transform and then i can click to fit to screen and that's the full image there but it does mean that we can we can do these digital zoom effects like so there's absolutely even though it's a 4k file 200 megabits per second we're doing it over a gigabit ethernet there's no dropouts the latency is extremely low it just works so i hope you like this little intro into ndi and taking a look at some of bird dogs ndi products if you did like it please do give it a like here on youtube that really helped me to create more of this stuff and also if you want to see more of this stuff and you're new here and not yet subscribed which by the way 50 percent of you who watch my videos aren't hit that subscribe button now and come and join and be ready for the next video when it's uploaded and finally if you have any questions or any comments about today's video put them down in the comments section below i do read those i do go through them and reply to as many as possible once you've done all that i'll see you on the next one

Channel: Alex Pettitt

Views: 39,815

Rating: 4.9707079 out of 5

Keywords: NDI, Newtek NDI, What is NDI, Birddog NDI, BirdDog, birddog flex, birddog mini, birddog 4k, atem mini ndi, ndi camera, obs, obs ndi, ndi gaming, ndi streaming, how to setup ndi, ndi obs, how to get ndi into obs, ndi converter, ndi encoder, ndi decover, atem mini, atem mini pro, atem mini pro iso, blackmagic atem mini, atem mini setup, live streaming, how to atem mini, zoom ndi, how to obs, how to use ndi, ndi setup

Id: 5c-BK48zLDY

Length: 14min 7sec (847 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 26 2021