Review: Realtime Workflow Options Via NewTek’s NDI
By Adam Noyes
NDI is a technology from NewTek that allows video to travel over your IP network, meaning sources can be sent anywhere on a network wirelessly or with a single ethernet cable. Postperspective.com recently posted a great article covering the ability to share post production workflows in real time with the power of NDI. We’re taking a look at some highlights from this article, below.
NDI for Adobe Creative Cloud — Plugin that allows application output from Adobe’s Premiere Pro, After Effects or Character Animator to be transmitted as an NDI stream. Also allows import and editing of files from captured NDI streams.
Working Remotely
This software toolset offers a number of interesting workflow possibilities for remote groups or individuals working between multiple systems, or even on a single system. Basically, NDI sources take video data from an application, compress it into the NDI protocol and make it available to other resources on the network. NDI receivers, or viewers, take that data stream from the network or another application on the local system and display it or make it available in another program. NDI Virtual Input is a receiver tool that allows nearly any application that supports web camera input to use a live NDI feed. NDI Screen Capture turns your GPU output into an NDI feed that is available to any NDI receiver. The Creative Cloud plugin turns your Adobe application into an NDI source. The Studio Monitor can be both processing and displaying NDI feeds that are coming in and becoming an NDI source of the resulting data.
This makes it much easier to generate high-end tutorials and other screen capture content, combined in real time for streaming instead of editing them together in post. You can easily switch between the application UI and the program output when demonstrating a software function when using Character Animator to generate an avatar of your webcam input for gaming streamers.
There are also applications that allow you to use NDI on other devices, like HX Capture and HX Camera for iPhone. This allows streaming a screen or camera feed as an NDI source over the Wi-Fi connection and NDI Monitor TV, allowing you to view NDI streams via an Apple TV 4K. One of the key benefits of NDI is the widespread support, allowing otherwise incompatible products to pass images between each other.
NewTek sells a variety of products that enable and leverage NDI workflows, from its Spark SDI interfaces to its Tricaster production switching solutions. There are also other vendors, like BirdDog and Magewell, that make their own NDI-based hardware products, and companies like Sienna and vMix have integrated NDI into their software. It is also supported in applications like OBS, which I have been using it with. OBS supports bringing in any NDI feed as a source for your program and can also output its own NDI feed of the mixed stream.
Realtime Recording
While I do very little work in real time, I use SDI to capture NLE output for quick encodes and could use NDI for realtime encodes of my Character Animator projects. Setting NDI as the output in Mercury Transit and recording that stream in NDI Studio Monitor allows realtime recording of anything you can play back in real time in Premiere, After Effects or Character Animator, with alpha channel support. It can even overlay the output from one program over another. This allowed me to composite a Lego puppet I made over a screen capture or Premiere playback output in real time.
The Virtual Input function is especially interesting to me since so many people are working remotely now, which is something I’ve been doing for a while. Usually my boss and I, who are thousands of miles apart, just pass projects back and forth that link to duplicate media. I use VNC over a VPN to operate his system when needed, which offers limited collaboration, but the ability to combine NDI output from Premiere with the Virtual Input allows me to stream the output from my timeline to my boss over Skype for instant feedback of changes I make to a clip or sequence. He is seeing a compressed version of the output, but I have easier access to the software UI and better responsiveness than when using VNC.
