Remote Productions, BirdDog Cloud, and SRT

hello everyone welcome back to streaming alchemy i'm john mahoney and on today's show we're going to be taking a look at bird door cloud and srt a very popular set of solutions and technologies that are used for remote productions and other remote connectivity between video locations so before we get to that though i just like to remind everybody we always welcome your feedback your questions your input so please uh feel free to drop anything in the comments below and uh we'll you know definitely discuss it right here on air uh also if you'd like to call into the show we left a call and link in the show notes and it's here on the screen so if you'd like to join us on air we'd always love to have you alright so let's get started uh one of the things that we've been seeing a lot of is and i think this has been through the past year has been different styles of remote based productions and by a remote production what i really mean is that there are video sources that are being sent from uh a different location than they're being processed so this can be everything from productions that is run out of aws to productions that are run across multiple locations and we've spoken to a lot of folks about and one of our clients actually asked us to take a look at bird door cloud which we were familiar with but really hadn't dived into and we saw that we thought it was really an excellent model for how to combine one of our favorite technologies ndi with srt which is secure reliable transport a way to move data across unreliable networks in a reliable way so what i'd like to do is jump in and take a look at bird door cloud as an architecture uh and then dig a bit into srt and we'll sort of go from there into how you could set this up on your own so bird door cloud is a general model that we have here that will work across multiple locations so it doesn't have to just be from one location to a second location you can have multiple locations that are all interconnected and the general terminology that is used is each of these remote locations here are called endpoints and when they talk about an endpoint it really means it's a single location that can both send and receive video and audio and the model it's using is that you will take ndi sources that are found at any of these locations and you'll be able to say i want to make this ndi source available and at another location they can come and say i actually want to pick up that ndi source and start to bring it into my location and what's great about the way this works is that the sources become transparently transported across the internet so if i had a camera over here in what they call machine room if i had a camera sitting over there and the camera was named machine room one and i subscribed to that camera in another location say studio two down here i would just see that as an ndi source on my network called machine room one and that really creates a wonderful transparency so if i were to move to different uh you know to different locations i can still use the same nomenclature you don't have to rename everything just to make it work uh across the internet and the transport protocol is what we call srt so we're connecting cameras via ndi and transporting them across the internet to other locations using srt so let's talk oh actually let me before we get into srt let me just welcome everyone so we have richard uh thank you from sacramento uh rudy great to see you as always uh mr j s gilbert good day thank you for joining us here so uh srt srt is a [Music] a transport protocol and i want to be very clear because there's there can be a lot of confusion all the transport protocol does is takes data packets from one location and delivers them to a second location so it doesn't really care what's in those data packets and what makes srt a special transport is some of the parameters that they've baked into how it operates so it is very fast relatively speaking for a wide area transport it is also reliable so it uses an underlying protocol called udp but a variant of it that is called reliable udp and that means that if i'm sending packets of data from location a to location b and some of those packets get dropped it has the ability to go back re-request those specific packets and sort of fill in the gaps but it does that all within a time window so if it can't replace those packets in the time window it allows usually something very very short uh then it will just go ahead and you'll get skips or other things so as a protocol for transporting data it has a lot of tunability i can turn around and say i'm willing to accept more latency basically create a bigger window that i can recover data in but things will be more delayed on the remote end that's receiving it so if i say i have a 500 millisecond window that's my latency that means that for half a second after the first packet goes out it won't be played back on the other side that half second is basically everything's held to try and make sure you can do recovery and that's what makes it uh very powerful for this use case here but unlike something like ndi bridge which we talked about a few weeks ago that's designed around moving ndi across the internet srt and the way it's used in in this case is all around letting you create whatever encoding scheme you want and like i said it doesn't care what the data packets are so whereas ndi bridge is going to take ndi encoded either hx2 or full ndi bandwidth for bandwidth ndi it's going to transport that across inside srt i have the ability to put my own video encoder in play and so this means that i could take and do something like h.264 or h.265 to do higher end compression it could be mpeg-ts it also means that i can be open to different types of protocols in the future so there may be different things you want to use for encoding images encoding slides all of those things it's adaptable because srt is fundamentally encoder agnostic and so the way this works then is you take a video feed an audio feed you encode it you then use a computer to talk to bird door cloud or any other transport mechanism they're using and so if we're doing srt that srt system will talk to a system at a second location which will you know do all that handshaking packet recovery anything else that all happens between these two computers and then once it releases that video packet it gets decoded and then displayed and what bird door cloud is doing is it's wrapping the video encoder up as part of its software but you can also use external encoders like envy inc and other types of things you can get on graphics cards and it's taking the input via ndi so this whole part gets really streamlined into a single application that's run on a computer and based on the capabilities within that computer you have different options for encoding uh the data that you have and that same thing unpacks on the other side so it's it's really a very efficient way to move data with relatively low latency but tunable both in terms of the codec and in terms of the the overall latency you accept in the production so hopefully that gives some clarity sort of the underlying architecture and technology so let's talk a bit about how you'd actually go about setting birddog cloud up because i think this is going to be interesting they have a free trial so this would be something that everyone could uh download and install and play with as much as you want it's just watermark so in the free trial that's the only the only indicator that it's free but otherwise you get to experiment fully with this the solution so before i go there james redmond uh so james thank you for joining us as always i appreciate it so to install bird door cloud uh you go to bird dash dog dot tv i don't have that uh i don't have that set up here uh right now to do but that's that's just the location you go into cloud and say i want a free trial and they give you a form to fill out so you just fill in the the general details who you are what country you live in etc and they will send you back an email and in the email it'll have a download link to the software the bird door cloud software that needs to run on your local system basically your endpoint and it'll give you keys you need because it sends your keys for two locations because each key each location is its own endpoint and needs its own unique key so when you get that you can take download the software and do the install and when that install is finished what you're going to get is a special code and what this code is going to do is it's going to identify sort of physically identify the system that you're running on and register that system as an end point with the bird door cloud back in so they know anytime this is routed i'm trying to route packets to here i know this is the system that i need to send them to and so that gives that unique code and then when you run bird door cloud for the first time it's going to come up and say okay enter your uh enter your sharing token you know or enter enter the the code that you just sent and you claim that as an endpoint so now it says that this machine owns this endpoint in the cloud and you then go and you configure this endpoint you'll sit there and go what's the name i want to use it gives you a directory for recording you can put all other types of notes and then what it has at the bottom is a license key and that license key is one of those two keys that you will be sent from bird dog when you sign up for the free trial so what's the difference between this code that they send you and the license key so the license key basically just says this is me and i've paid for an endpoint and i am associating this paid for endpoint with this location and so the key the code up here is the location and the license key is the paid for endpoint so it knows it should respect that as an end point and the thing is you could take one license key apply it to multiple endpoints and as long as you're only using one of those endpoints at a time so say you talk to three or four different clients you could go and install them each has different endpoints but using the same license key and you could talk to any one of them at a time and that would be fine so that should give you the distinction between the license key and the endpoint so probably the the next thing to do would be to jump in and look at how this actually would be uh operated so let me go here and see okay so here is the main input you're going to have when you are in bird dog cloud and what this is showing you is these are all my transmitting destinations and these are all my receiving destinations up here so i have the ability now to sort of work in a matrix and if i want to take something that's transmitting from location a here so this is our company office if i click here and say i actually now want to create a connection between my company office and here in our studio so if i click that plus key you now see a something that lets me say what do i want to connect so what is going on to make this connection and we can sort of go from the top and i'll i'll walk through it but you have the ability to set up different sort of encoding configurations and i'll i'll jump into that in more detail so we'll just for now just set this as default but you can set up multiple different types of configurations for how you want to do encoding and you can say i want to send just a single source or potentially you might want to create what's called a multi-view which could be multiple sources bundled together on a single screen and this will give you the ability to sort of send a reference that a director or producer may be using to see what's going on across multiple cameras even multiple sites and so you can send that up set that up that way the uh the next thing is you say how do i want this srt connection to take place and there are three different ways we can talk about them uh as we go through this but there's something called rendezvous uh caller to listener and listener to caller so rendezvous as a connection protocol basically lets the two sides that are going to form this srt bridge let them figure out how they want to talk to each other what ports they want to use that can be dicey sometimes and it won't necessarily work every time but it is definitely useful especially if there are firewalls on both ends and you can't do any port forwarding the next is called colorless listener or listener caller these are really just symmetrical examples and i i should be really clear here for what these mean this is nothing to do with the direction that video or audio is going to flow in this connection it is all about how the connection is initiated so when i have a caller and a listener the listener basically comes back and says i'm here on this port at this ip address and the caller then just goes and connects to that and the opposite way when you have listener to to caller i if i set myself up as the listener then the caller needs to know my ip address and my port that i'm going to be listening on so it's it's really just uh you know symmetrical uh ways of looking at the same type of connection type what makes this very very useful as a as a model is that only one side needs to display and connect with a a known public port and this is important because lots of times in your studio you have control of your firewall you can come back and say anything coming to this port i want to route it into this system uh which is sort of the normal port forwarding model uh but you can't do that at a venue you may be at you may have cameras at a at a conference center or sports arena and you don't have that option you don't need it with this model all you need to do is say this is the port and ip address and when those cameras or whatever other device you have come back your studio is the only one that has to make any changes networking wise to make sure those connections can happen and that's usually pretty easy for most people so the next thing is now we're into the sort of the basics here which source do i actually want to connect with so if i come here and say okay i want to take this ptz camera i want to give it a name so i'm just going to call it zcam one and the other thing they give you is the ability to set up an ndi failover source so if for some reason one camera fails uh or i have a multiple connections from a single location i can actually have a failover source that i'm going to use so if the one camera goes away it'll automatically in the cloud switch to the second camera very useful especially if you know some of the connections you have may be marginal for this so when i have this set then i can say what is it that i want to let this do i would like you know ptz control would be great i want to pass tally you could also pass alpha channel so if you were sending something from uh another computer that embedded sort of pre-multiplied alpha channel into the video signal you could accept that as well i can tell whether i want audio or not or if i want just audio and i don't want to take the video feed and then you get into sort of the mechanics so what port am i going to do this connection across uh things like cue sizes you know the total number of frames so that is tied in sort of to latency so when i queue up uh 10 frames that's 300 milliseconds i'm setting my base latency to 120 milliseconds which says i'd like everything to get to the other side within that 120 milliseconds and then the srt overhead that you can set here is all around how much overhead and bandwidth do i need to do all of the [Music] traffic uh management all of the signaling and all of the error recovery with my srt feed so if you have a poor line you may need to use more that line for error recovery which kind of makes sense uh and you can say whether you allow packet drop or not so package up means if something fails do i want to keep going uh or do i want to you know go to my failover camera the other thing is you have encryption so srt allows you to have uh either just raw bits going or you can tell it use different levels of encryption and the encryption is just going to be uh slight additional overhead and slight additional bandwidth because it's the encryption process adds a bit to the size but but generally you know if you're not worried you can leave it off but if you are it's not a it's not a big penalty for adding encryption to to get that extra security and for some people that may be important you know corporates that are talking internally that may have confidential information that may be something that is significant for getting that done then the next thing you get to say is what video decoder do i want and you can tell work automatically or you can tell it gee i'd actually like to use my nvidia graphics card to do the decoding uh quicksync is an intel uh based solution that's based into a lot of their cpus called quick sync or can just be done in software so the more you do in hardware the more uh cpu cycles you have on your system to do other things so that can be uh helpful so normally you know if we were doing something we'd use envy deck because that's pretty much unlimited decodes on any of the nvidia gpus and you know at that point when you're all set there's other things for different timestamps and other types of logging you can just go and say i want to connect to that site and so you can see now in the interface it's showing that the site i've connected to it uh and it is showing me the throughput we have coming uh to and from the camera so if now i want to let me see if i can let me jump out of here for a second shrink this down let me actually just go and open up a ndi studio monitor here so just give me a second okay so now if i go to ndi studio monitor here so this is my camera here but you'll now see in ndi studio monitor i have zcam one if you remember that's what i named it when i sent it over here so now by going to zcam 1 i'm now going through bird door cloud and delivering that video feed over here and this is this is really great because it i can give them logical names uh and i can see them just as if they were local ndi sources i don't need to do anything special and that means my vmix systems my tricasters my obs any of those systems to them this is just a local ndi source so no special awareness there it works seamlessly so the other thing you can do because if you remember i said ptz control now this is just a z cam so it's a box camera i can't do the pan tilt but i do have zoom control so i have the ability to take and sort of zoom in and out with that and now there is a bit of latency in here so we found that uh in certain circumstances about half a second so it's not the sort of thing where you'd want to be able to well you'll probably be able to do sort of granular control to follow somebody you know using a ptz but it's certainly [Music] easy enough to set up presets and other types of things you may want to do one time and then just punch in the presets to grab different parts and have actually have those transitions happen uh for yourself so if you want to move a camera across the stage you could set up a slow preset and that would work fine remotely the latency once you trigger it doesn't become an issue so let me close this out and get back over here so this now is going in one direction i have things coming from our office location back into the studio here but i can do it the other way as well so i can come here and say i would like to share sources from the studio and now we have a lot of sources in the studio so we have multiple bird door cameras so let's just we'll select this camera here and i can do so you see that was the last one we did so i can do uh bird dog one and i don't have an ndi failover but i can select tally and ptz and again all the things we did before and i can set up the connection there and so now we with the license on each end we now have signals moving back and forth camera one camera here from the studio to the office and one camera from the office to the studio but you're not limited to that so let me come back in here again this is the camera that we have the ptz optics zcam and we have that coming in but i have the ability now to add more connections so if i wanted to add a second source i could just step in and say okay we have a uh let's see vlc so i think this is this is just a video we have playing so we'll just go video and so now i've added two sources from the remote studio and you can see this is all adding up below and as long as i have bandwidth i can keep adding sources but bandwidth in this remember is multiple levels so since i am encoding at the remote location every camera feed that comes in needs to be encoded and if i'm then moving to uh decode those at this remote location i need to go and make sure that my computer has enough bandwidth or enough horsepower to decode all of these and then you're also limited by your aggregate bandwidth that you have for up and down with with all of these cases but with this set now you'll notice that here it's telling me i have two sources that i'm taking in as well so very very simple framework and very easy to monitor everything that's going on when you set this up the other thing that is really great is you can do it all from one location so if you have a remote system once you turn that system on and you know make it part of that remote network you now can do any additional configuration right here in the studio so it has kind of the advantage that uh dante has where in an av environment you can manage all the routes from one location the same thing here with bird door cloud and that can be that can be really really useful as you set all this up but some of the other things because i i definitely want to talk about a few things so we did talk a little bit i mentioned about port forwarding so just to explain what port forwarding is when you are dealing with a your typical network connected to the internet you have one public ip address that's the address that traffic is routed to to get to your location but then internally every computer you add has what are called private i p addresses addresses that can't be routed over the internet but allow you to identify individual systems inside your office or facility generally and so what when you make a request like if box a goes and tries to load a web page what happens in your router is that that request to get a web page goes to the router and it will take translate that into a here's my public ip address and i'm going to create a special port on that which is basically a number you know up to 64 000 ports uh that i append to that that when i send that back and get a return response i can look at that extra port number and say okay that port number actually goes to this computer and it does that automatically and those ports are called ephemeral ports because they it happens for that transaction i'm making a request and it creates the port wait watches it and then when the response comes back it gets rid of the port it doesn't exist what port forwarding lets you do though is it lets you create permanent ports on your router that when you talk to a remote location you can tell it if you want to talk back to me talk to me at this public i p address the one common one you have for your facility but at this specific port now and by putting those two things together when that router receives any packet for that port using port forwarding it says okay this has to go to this machine at this private ip address and that's how that port forwarding works so when you set this up you can have srt in these connections all you need to say is if you're the caller call me at this ip address and this port and i'll let you through and that will get that signal back to the computer so that's the that's what port forwarding does here in the in the context of the broader network connection so uh the fact you can do that all locally you don't have to do that remotely is great so the other thing talked about a bit was the ability to set up different types of encoding so let me jump in here and we when we went into this initially we said well we're just going to use the default because we want to get back to that so what you get with encoding is the ability to describe exactly how i want to create how compact a uh signal i want to create to send over the internet so the more that you compact a signal typically the more you lose quality and you can't recover that the other end so you really want to strike a balance between the signal uh is small enough data wise to easily get to the other side without losing information but it's big enough so that the information that i make a conscious choice to lose doesn't impact the image quality that much and so there are lots of things here so you can give it a name so this is just your way of remembering these encoding settings that you're setting up as a custom encoding and i can say well what bit rate so right now i have this set at five the default is for 10. i could set this up if i have great internet and can work i could set this up for much larger which you probably would if you were doing things like 4k video uh i can then say what type of bit rate do i want to use and the bit rate mode is two types variable bit rate and constant bit rate so variable bit rate can shrink or expand the number of bits used to describe any uh you know used to describe video inside any given packet but it can vary from packet to packet and that can be based on how complex a scene is so if i have lots of sharp edges i may need more bits to adequately describe those transitions inside a video image and so it can make better use of bandwidth constant bandwidth is more generally used and so if you select constant bandwidth it's going to say this is going to use the same amount of pixels to describe any image no matter how simple or complex that image is so that's you know you have the ability to change that and then we get to the video encoding and so baked in to uh burdock cloud are nv inc for h.264 and h.265 so if you have a more powerful gpu you can certainly use h.265 because that will that will give you better compression without as much loss and quality and so you have that or h264 and you can do the same for quick sync so if you only have an intel chip and you don't have an nvidia gpu it will work with that and it also uses vp8 which is sort of the google open standard for it's what webrtc would use at its most basic it's out of every system if you're going to say your webrtc compliant you have to have vp8 so it gives you different types of uh options for how you want to do the encoding uh and it also gives you different profiles so i'm not really going to go in this isn't going to dive too deeply into the encoding specifics but there are all different types of profiles you can use that give you you know trade-off size for for quality and so you can pick you know whatever types of profiles you want if there are different you know types of presets so i can go compress you know encode this using higher performance uh which means that you're going to you know you you may be trading quality but it encodes quickly so if your system is slow you may need to turn around and say okay don't compress it as much and we'll just live with poorer quality these are the types of traders it lets you make it in gop size and other things here and then you can just save this so you could set up to one site which has great internet connectivity you could set up high bandwidth you know more demanding in codes but to cameras you connect to at another location with poorer quality internet you could jump and say okay i'm going to set this up as a different type of profile and that's exactly what we did here so you know if i come back let me just jump over here actually when i set these up i had the choice let me sorry so let me just go and edit this uh i had the choice to select which profile so in the default that could be you know the 10 megabit but if this were a poorer connection i need to go to i could set this up and go we're only going to use 5 megabits and fit everything into that so this makes it very easy with these pre-configured compression profiles how to set how to set everything up when you want to connect cameras and everything else so let's talk a bit about use cases here because we've we've really gone through the general framework of how all of this works so in one of the terms that has come into vogue with remote productions is something called remy and it's remote integration model so the you know it basically a a general kind of nomenclature anything where video sources are a different location from where you process them so uh but there are different ways that people may actually want to use this actually there were a few questions here so let me let me jump in uh before we get to this next piece uh so mattias asked what's the big difference compared to live view so both live view and bird door cloud are doing the same basic kinds of things but how that transport takes place is very different so uh live view will do you know the same you know ink compression through encoding so i believe they have h664 h.265 baked in uh to the live view units however the transport protocol is where the real difference happens what live view does is it will take uh multiple at that one video stream and split it across multiple individual cellular connections so those cellular connections are what's called bonded so what that means is that i can have two three four i believe there are even live views with even more that will have those multiple connections operate as one large bonded internet link and the data that goes through that then if one goes bad one drops out one has congestion that information just gets routed across the other so you don't need to sort of when you have a one to one link if that connection goes bad you're in trouble uh with live view because it's using multiple cellular connections bonded together uh it gives you that flexibility and that's why you pay more for the more for the greater number of uh cellular connections you associate with a live view unit and the other thing is this all has to go through live views back end because effectively what has to happen is live view has to take those multiple cellular connections and repackage them into a single hardwired connection which will come back to studio so that piece is also different live view is using a proprietary back end loop and bird dog is using the internet though they're you know you could certainly use it across any general connection that's the the baseline difference between the two and that's why live view is great in these mobile situations because it's making the use it's making use of cellular bandwidth across multiple cellular connections so you get sort of the best possible signal you can untethered from a wire so so let's see here uh so so dennis from the netherlands dennis thank you uh i appreciate you joining us we have uh andrew from johannesburg andrew thank you appreciate you being here so uh j.s gilbert uh are there additional use fees or some sort of use limit in addition to the annual fee that bird door charges so the bird dog model uh from a commercial side has a few dimensions to it so the first one is that you pay for each endpoint that you set up and that typically is a thousand dollars a year is the the license fee for each endpoint so if you have two locations talking those are two endpoints so two thousand dollars a year is the commercial model there you can have as many connections between those two endpoints as you want so if you set up an endpoint as a monster computer and you were pumping eight camera feeds into that no difference that is fine so there's no additional charge bird door cloud because unlike live view we were just talking about it where that connection is going through live u's back end and they have a direct cost associated with that bird door cloud is covering is going through the internet so there really isn't a charge on berta there's no cost scaling if you send more feeds or fewer fees through that uh licensed connection so the business model makes sense where you can have as many connections across those two endpoints as you'd like bird door cloud also has other elements in here that we really didn't talk about they have something called cloud connect which i believe runs using webrtc and there are additional charges for that and bird door connect is is cloud connect is really around more for monitoring so if you wanted to send a reference video to somebody in a studio at another location it was just looking to make sure everything was going well uh you know you could do those types of things uh and that requires a separate license and you you have to have some provider in the back end for making that webrtc connection happen so there are other charges associated with that but you actually can do a lot you know when you have each one of those connections within the framework like they have something for presenter mode which i think is really cool where you have the ability to tell it take these two ndi feeds and bundle them up where there's a little window which will be my presenter and the big window which could be my slides or a screen capture or something and you can have it send that to a remote location so you know there are different ways that you can make some of these things work that are uh you know clearly beneficial given the circumstances that are are bundled in here and of course the ability to monitor and control everything from that single location is great but uh okay so let's just talk uh sort of to wrap this up let's talk about a few of the use cases that you would normally have so one of them is what a lot of people come to associated with remote productions which is deploying my studio up on aws uh so when you do that type of deployment all of the systems so i could have like vmix and i could have live to air and i could have another graphics system for doing lower thirds or other things i could have control systems up there for signaling to do control when i have all those set up they will normally if they're moving audio or video use ndi so that would all have to be configured there but anything that's coming in if they have remote cameras coming in video feeds coming back to a location uh that they want to stream to that they want to uh you know present on a wall whatever else they want to do that would all be based on srt and so bird dog cloud would be an excellent fit for that because you you can basically set all your gear up and then just use bird door cloud as there would be one end point up there and you use birdocloud to route everything in and out of that aws instance that you'd want so definitely a great use case there another one would be where you actually want to have your production studio in a central location so the traditional production studio style but i want to send somebody out with all my cameras and then i'm going to use this you know do all the switching remotely well this could be a conference it could be a sports event this also became popular for people that really weren't ready to go full cloud deployment but because of the restrictions people had with different types of live gatherings they would send out a very small crew and just set up cameras for individual guests and that's how they'd switch everything then back at their studio similar to aws just with a sort of a physical presence in a traditional studio and the other which has actually been around a long time is a distributed production and where this came in is a lot around sports where you would have people that would do like the cg stuff all the graphics scoreboards lower thirds all the other stuff you could have those people working from a home location you could have somebody else switching in a studio location and then somebody on site with the you know play-by-play announcers with the camera operators and they would all come in from these different locations into the single studio location so similar to the second model but just with potentially more individual component uh pieces involved so this would require more endpoints under bird door cloud uh which could ramp up the cost you know overall for some of these things but given the cost of travel and you know having people at locations that could end up being something that's uh definitely valuable so okay so let's see here uh yeah and and the other thing you know which we really haven't touched on isn't really live stream is people who may be doing different types of editorials say um if you know that uh new tech has supported things like adobe premiere with ndi in and out so you could for instance be using this to stream proofs of videos to uh an editor and you know from an editor to a client at another location where they could go over it sort of frame by frame and say what they like and what they don't so so hopefully this gives you some things to think about as i said the trial is free and i definitely encourage you to download it start to play with it and see if there's you know something uh you know something there for the types of productions that you're working on oh we have a so let's see so js so placing a director or producer downstream then makes them an endpoint so yes in as far as i understand it in the bird door cloud model anywhere where you would want to route video and audio to or take video and audio from would make them a different endpoint in the mix and you know this is going to be something where that would probably be two-way if you had directors or producers so you know different ways to do this uh and it really depends on the quality so if uh if you were doing something like this uh you could you could have like directors come in with using live to air or vmix call or something like that uh where you know you don't need to have a high bandwidth video signal for them and you can deal with things like dropouts or other things that could happen across a you know a non-optimal connection that you could have so this is something that you know definitely you should you know you should bake into the economics but there really is a lot of trade-offs with deploying people getting paying for gas getting shipping the gear setup time teardown time so all those things have an incremental cost and if you if you look at an endpoint as being something that's less than a hundred dollars a month uh the the economics could very easily work for that so okay so i think okay so i think we're we're just about ready to wrap up the show so why don't i invite everybody please if you have any other questions uh you know i definitely you know happy to answer them in the post show here uh if you can stay around that would be great if you can't please no i'll see everyone next week for that uh but uh why don't we jump to the po show and we'll dig in a bit more and uh take any other questions that everybody has all right so uh welcome back to the post show here i'm told we have a caller so let me see if we can get them on here welcome back so okay so sorry just take a second hi how are you doing hi how are you well great i'm just actually um one of the viewers that are from guatemala and just wanted to say hi how are you i'm great thank you i'm just actually um one of the viewers [Music] what are you looking back here so let's yeah okay okay okay you may you may need to turn it down just a little bit on your side and then here we go here we go yeah i just wanted to say to uh we appreciate all your knowledge that you shared with us i learned a lot from the show actually and we have many questions um in our spanish community but for now i just wanted to say thank you and appreciate all the effort that you guys and your team put on this every week every week show you know thank you i i appreciate everything that makes this worthwhile is is is people that are taking it and doing something with it so we love the fact that uh you're finding things that are useful here and yes you can make this into something that actually benefits your productions and that's really the goal and everything we do it's just we believe that the more people understand how to use the tools they already have uh the better off they are and then every decision you make to buy something new is not based on i didn't know i could do it or do it this way based on now this really fits into the overall workflow and you sort of build a sustainable business that way and i think that's for everybody in this space that's key and uh that's great so i appreciate it very much and thank you for showing me right out your screens well well thank you very much for for calling and we definitely appreciate that so thank you thank you take care bye all right so that was that was hakiteki i've i've seen uh hakiteki around in the uh facebook forums and other places so that that's that's that's always great to see somebody call in so this was this was interesting because when we we had a client that came to us last week and said they were looking to uh set something up with with bird dog cloud and uh so we we actually dug down and started to do some work with it and uh actually you know we were we knew about it and we had seen some things on it but once we got you know sort of under the hood and started to play with it we were really impressed and so this is something you know we said this would be great to to share because i think for a lot of people uh while there may be other ways that people can do it for less money sometimes the time factor and the flexibility factor can override the expense of a single component so we want to make sure that we at least covered this and and sort of put it out there as as as an option for you to play with and explore but uh there there are a lot of great use cases when you start to think through how these types of technologies you know srt in general uh can be used and i mean so we've been i mean one of the things that we we've been looking at is using the encoders and decoders the ndi encoders and decoders as endpoints and seeing how much we could do that would actually uh not involve having to have computers at different locations and you know so you know there are cameras that have srt built in uh there are others that you do need some type of encoder around this and so that's uh you know definitely a uh you know a set of options that you have available but i think when you put everything together this can be there can be some pretty cool infrastructure in enhancements you can do where you minimize the number of computers maximize the number of connection points and find great ways to make all the stuff work and you know clearly the big question everybody's going to have is going to be well what ab what's srt versus ndi bridge and we we know that this is this is definitely something that uh is is going to be playing out and i have to say this is this is a good thing on a lot of fronts because it makes each one of these camps really push themselves further and that as consumers of these technologies that's great so uh so let me see uh let me see j.s gilbert so yeah pretty skill but says pretty soon the world would be one big data center i i believe we're there i think everybody is walking around with a cell phone which is just a uh an untethered endpoint in our lives and uh so we're we're all connected to each other uh so uh let's see uh so uh matey uh matey thank you for joining us uh it's uh great to have you here so everybody's everybody's doing very well here so uh here stateside it's uh it's we're going into the long weekend uh it's the fourth of july so for everybody in the states or from the states that celebrates fourth of july uh we wish everyone a a very relaxing time uh uh it's it's a great time for for friends and family so hopefully you have something something good planned for this weekend uh but uh just to wrap up you know if there are any other questions anybody has please post them up there but as i was mentioned we're really keen on a lot of what's going on with encoders and decoders around ndi bird dog actually announced a new encoder called the bird dog i think it's player and we have a couple on order they're not they're not available yet but we definitely want to dig in because some of the things that may be available there is uh you may be able to connect to the cloud directly through that so i don't really know we don't have one on hand but uh so i've got another thing from js keyword uh how do you handle back channel communications with the whole team okay there are lots of different ways to do that so one of them could be using something like uh discord uh where you could have multiple people connect to channels and they they could all hear and talk with each other uh some of these could be things you can do with dante where you know you can can actually have multiple receivers from a single transmitter so that would be more one-way communication uh and then you'd have to set up a second channel back so you know outside of using solutions like you know ip solutions from clearcom and other things which uh definitely have a a role in in the production space but could certainly be pretty expensive uh those would be different ways you could do things around that the other believe it or not is people use things like zoom where you have everybody just sort of jump onto a zoom call and it's just audio when you just talk to each other like a big conference call uh so different ways to do that and with zoom you get things like zoom rooms and other stuff where you can sort of break people up potentially so you could have different groups with different conversations and somebody who could drop in sort of across them so different ways on on all of these things to do back channel communications some of them very old school some of them a little janky but yeah you know they're like like you know uh jazz said they they use zoom now so but there are lots of different ways to do this uh and you know again it's i'm very much in favor of putting money behind what shows up on camera so if you can save some money with some of the crew communications but put that money into something which is going to give you a better video image or you know better audio or more flexibility for some of the things you want to do that's the stuff that that that actually impacts what people see and ultimately is what we're all judged by so uh definitely uh something to uh something to think about as you you allocate budgets around the different things you're doing so uh so uh i i'm gonna say again there's there's uh i toicha if i'm saying your name it's in cyrillic's arm i apologize if i cannot uh say it right uh this is uh this is uh definitely great to have you here so thank you for joining us so yeah so uh you know js gilbert said you know based on what it used to take to deploy uh teams a thousand dollars an endpoint a year actually isn't a lot i think that's the point i mean in gas alone to a to a distant location you know 80 or 90 bucks in a month uh uh is could be uh could could actually be a a steal so definitely something as you you think about it because when you say a number like a thousand dollars people like ooh okay i'd rather look at something free but when you start to think of how this can impact the overall production and ways you can save money well without sacrificing that on-screen quality that's great so oh so the the headset uh matey's asking about the headset we're using uh it it is a uh it is a dpd headset i'm not sure the the model number uh so i i actually uh i actually like the headset as uh you know it it really it's not as good as a an onset mic but it gives me a little more flexibility when i move or lean over or do any type of demo thing so i i think the the trade-off is good with that but uh you know this is uh we're we're open to we're open to going to different things but uh we were we were actually happy when uh you know we we heard this one compared to some of the other options out there but i know other people use countrymen and other you know similar style models and and are happy with that so uh i think there there's there's a set of options out there so so uh let's see so i have uh so tom sinclair oh tom sinclair just dropped in and said hi so tom thank you very much for uh for joining us here i definitely appreciate uh you uh tuning in here so and uh i know probably everybody in this space knows tom but if you if you have not yet tuned into streaming idiots uh it is it is quite the treat so definitely if you get the chance uh uh look over in the streaming idiots group on facebook incredible value there as well because a lot of smart people sharing a lot of very clever solutions for things so uh definitely definitely drop in there as well so so let's see yeah james gilbert said that you know there's a price for quality and and that's true it it's it's making sure that whatever you whatever you get does you know does match up to the pressure pain but there is a there everything that has some level of quality has an associated cost and uh again i think that's the difference between when you move from something as a hobby to doing it where people are you know paying for specific results you know that's something you have to factor in and it it does make a difference people the quality you deliver on screen matters and people will see will see that and recognize you for a level of quality and sort of associate value with that so these things do come around and it may not be immediate but as people see the value not just in the quality of the signal but the quality of the production the quality of the content so quality sort of comes in a lot of dimensions and so that's something you know definitely as you produce uh you'll you'll get to appreciate you know where it matters and where it doesn't and you can you know focus on the the places that have results so let's see matey has uh uh so asking about uh okay so this one is uh the army ufx was not happy with the sound any suggestions uh for making tutorials so uh so i i am not i'm not exactly familiar uh i mean rme typically is a you know a high-end brand so i i not familiar specifically uh we use i mean there's multiple things in our sort of stages audio stages uh that we're using so we use the the dbx 286s so that allows us to sort of play with compression you know gain staging and and get a hopefully a better signal we're still dialing that in that's uh the audio is an ongoing an ongoing exercise for us so we're always working on that side to it but yeah i mean i i probably should think about doing some more tutorials on uh this end as well around audio processing because there is a lot and we learn a lot as well uh when we do these things so it probably would be good for us as well sorry i don't have a more uh specific answer to the the ufx plus but uh definitely something i can i can look into as well so if it's something you want just reach out to me so uh so maybe has he said one more question uh what picture profile are you using the skin tones are great so it this is not s senotone it is uh basically it's it's it's it's a rec 702 uh with some tweaks that we're using we are using a uh blackmagic uh pocket cinema 4k and so we've sort of dialed it in and tweaked it a bit with uh to get the tones a little bit better but that's what we're using here but uh now the the s cinetone uh i've heard nothing but great things about that and uh we we've actually thought about uh you know bringing in uh like an fx3 as a camera here as well uh because uh we you know we just think it's uh the you know the full-frame sony lineup is is really incredible for a lot of the stuff so uh you know the images that you can get from some of those cameras is awesome so definitely something uh we are thinking about as well for you know different ways to sort of improve quality and and color matching cameras you know which is always a uh a it's a heartbreaking heartbreaking endeavor because you always think you're close and then when you you look at it with slightly different lighting everything is everything is off again so uh not not something that uh i could uh i i could specifically uh say i'm an expert at but we do try so uh yeah so i i think the you know everybody so i have mady uh saying the a7s threes and and and jsq would also are saying the a7s are amazing and i mean we we agreed we we love the the sony lineup uh and it's something that uh i think once you once you are invested in the ecosystem it it just pays dividends uh you know you can start to use the you know the glass is great around that typically from sony and uh you know the the the sensors the low light performance like lots of things to like about that autofocus i mean autofocus is almost seamless uh with with most of those for videos so great stuff on that uh so let's see js you also mentioned the the road tester pros are nice for for running audio for live streaming the i mean road caster you know definitely makes a a lot of nice audio gear um we have some mics that we use for for mobile things uh we use uh we love the they're they're wireless uh so the you know the wireless go to we have two uh two transmitters to one receiver uh great and uh you know the very strong signal great distance you know all of these of course break apart when you're at nab and there are a million people broadcasting from a show floor and stuff like that but in most normal environments uh they are fantastic so all right so uh just gonna wrap things up then for today uh we actually are gonna have a really interesting show next week just sort of a sneak peek we have lee love will be joining us lea is a photographer uh and videographer who has his own uh show called photomentor.tv that uh he has a great organic artistic view to the technology and the way people use it and uh this is this is definitely gonna be uh be a fun show and and and he's he's got so much knowledge on so many different fronts so uh we'd love to have everybody join us here and js gilbert absolutely looking forward to to seeing everybody at nab this uh this october that uh that's after missing last year that it's gonna be a lot of fun to reconnect with people and uh i know there are a few events out there as well so you know there's gonna be streaming idiots i know ptz optics uh is going to have a stream geeks booth uh i believe so that would be really cool so a lot of fun stuff that that goes on out there and you know a lot of great people that are you know doing doing a lot of good in this community so a lot of fun so so oh made you just say through and it says uh uh the fx6 if you need the built-in nd filters yeah that that is the one thing with the so the sony fx3 is sort of their small cinema line it's basically a re-engineered uh a7s3 uh more you know button designed around video production versus stills but that yeah it doesn't have built-in nd filters so you have to do that that externally somehow so uh you know definitely uh you know it it gets more expensive for the fx6 so you sort of go from from 4 000 to 6 000 not counting the glass so you uh you know i in for a penny in for a pound maybe but i'd have to see if i could justify that type of budget but uh all right everyone thank you very much for joining me today hope you found this useful i'll see you all next week take care bye

Channel: The Streaming Alchemy Show

Views: 714

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Id: SpZSUkd9yNg

Length: 71min 7sec (4267 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 03 2021