All In On NDI
By Adam Noyes
Streamingmedia.com recently posted a great look at NDI, and where it belongs in your production workflow. Check out some highlights from that article below.
Many people have gone all in on NDI. But how they use it can be very different from how you might want to use it.
Networked video is the next wave in production. IP video is part of the ATSC 3.0 specification for broadcast delivery, so there will be no escaping the migration away from video signals to data packets anywhere in the broadcast chain.
Network Device Interface (NDI), developed by NewTek, is a standard that enables the use of high-quality, low-latency video on existing and standard IP networks. With NDI, video becomes data that can be shared over a network using off-the-shelf computer networking hardware. In the short run, this doesn’t change much, because you can run an Ethernet cable to each camera or converter box just as you’d run an SDI cable. But NDI enables much more.
It could be as simple as running just one cable to the front of a conference room where a switch connects it to six different devices, as opposed to having to run six SDI cables. It could be as complex as leveraging your existing network and deploying dozens of cameras across multiple campuses, all of which feed back to a central production center. This means no one needs to cart all of that gear around anymore. It also means you can call up any camera, any audio source, or any mixing device to produce any number of programs at the same time.
Moreover, this capability extends to the internet itself. A producer could leverage a graphics artist in another city and cameras from around the world in a live show that would otherwise require a dozen outside broadcasting trucks, expensive satellite time, and a wide range of experts in each aspect of the production chain to help make it come together.