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NDI allows multiple video systems to identify and communicate with one another over IP, and to encode, transmit, and receive many streams of high quality, low latency, frame-accurate video and audio in real time. This new technology can benefit any network-connected video device, including video mixers, graphics systems, capture cards, and many other production devices.

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The gaming world has been growing and growing in the past few years and one revelation that has become a snowball effect is gaming entertainment, not necessarily playing the games yourself, but watching other users playing via live streaming.  With this new entertainment outlet and more than most others, wires and cabling have been a huge factor.  Fixing an issue where tracking down cables is part of the solution is time consuming and can possibly effect the broadcast.  Implementing something like NewTek‘s NDI technology could remedy that, and actually has been implemented already.  Still in it’s early stages there are some platforms like Twitch are currently using NDI technology.  With this endorsement NewTek is looking to be the lead network provider integrating their NDI technology for all gaming broadcasts.

NDI is something that Twitch already uses for its own in-house productions. It enables that company’s on-screen personalities to play games in one room while the producers edit the live feed in another room without having to run any extra cables beyond the existing Cat6 Ethernet in the walls.

“Before we got the Newtek hardware, we were running SDI cables through the ceilings and over the walls in order to just get video feeds from the computer gaming room we had down the hall,” Twitch video production manager Adam Contini told GamesBeat. “Now that we no longer need all that stuff, we’re just plugging those computers into the network using the Ethernet jacks in the wall. Our control room is on that same network. We get the signal feeds without running additional cabling anymore.”

For people like Contini, NewTek has established itself as the go-to vendor for television-quality broadcasting equipment. It hasn’t, however, made the same inroads with consumers or prosumers who are using tools like XSplit or OBS Studio to send their live feeds to Twitch, YouTube, or Mixer. But the company sees an opportunity to do exactly that.

“With NDI, it still remains just an Ethernet cable,” said Contini. “If they’re both on the network, the conversion to your stream resolution and framerate just happens in XSplit or OBS. It’s all you need. You don’t have to start worrying about, ‘is my HDMI input card capable of accepting this 1440p 144 signal that I’m sending out from my 3D card?’”

This setup gives broadcasters the benefits of a two-PC setup without sharing the same room or a complicated cable rigging. I’ve tried it, and I’m surprised at how well it works. I even tried it with one of my PCs on Wi-Fi. NewTek doesn’t explicitly recommend this, but it seemed like my wireless-AC connection was robust enough to handle the signal. But I would have to do more testing before I’d recommend that.

But I do want to incorporate NDI into my livestreaming workflow, and I think this is something a lot of people will want ot take advantage of. That’s exactly what NewTek is going for.

“The real opportunity is in how people use that and how the disruption,” said Waters. “And that really comes in the way that people adopt and can take advantage and evolve their particular space, as opposed to being locked into particular silos of technology for the sake of being in a particular ecosystem.”

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The idea was that festival-goers could drop into the stand and play Minecraft with other players in a competitive, team-based environment, while esports commentators would provide running play-by-play and analysis. Influential YouTubers would also show up for meet-and-greets, and be hustled into the studio for on-camera interviews.

All this on-screen and on-camera activities then had to be mixed into a centralized program and streamed live; sending the programme to large displays throughout the stand and, via the Twitch social gaming video platform, to Digital Tree’s CubeCraft community. All in all that encompassed a 44-player video production, 4 PTZ camera sources, four backup gaming systems, and audio for the event that was due to last four days.

Digital Tree decided to use the NewTek IP-Series production system partly because it meant that producers could access any enabled source located on the LAN without requiring a direct hardware input. Switching itself was centralized on the IP-Series’ two VMC1 Video Mix Engines. Using both Video Mix Engines, the entire show could be controlled by one operator per 45-minute segment. Digital Tree also added a VMC1 4S control surface, NewTek’s four-stripe control panel connected over-the-network as the operator interface, capable of mixing sources from both.

However, since Newtek’s NDI protocol efficiently optimizes video bandwidth on standard Ethernet networks, in the end they managed to used two 1Gb connections to link into the IP Series, and one 1Gb connection for each of the desktop systems.

The last thing that had to be sorted out, and sorted out quite urgently, was a way to grab the full-screen output of the Minecraft desktops, showing each player’s POV during gameplay. This was achieved using the Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) utility, which is used in the gaming industry by thousands of players to capture their games for streaming. Its community members wrote a plugin for OBS to be able to send video game output over the network via NDI, making it available like any other source to the IP Series.

This was invaluable. “Because of the support of NDI within the development community, our potentially show-stopping hurdle took only 20 minutes to fix,” comments Digital Tree CEO, John Coles….[continue reading]

The holographic display is, according to Jim Jannard, “incredible. It is multi-view (4-view) as compared to stereo 3D (2-view). Watching shocked faces light up when people see it is really motivating. There is no good way to describe it until you see it. Hopefully we will get some skeptics eyes on it soon… then they can tell you.”

Right now, still following the information provided by RED and Jim Jannard, we know the smartphone “also comes with internal storage and an external micro SD card slot. And a headphone jack. A selfie camera and a back camera. These cameras will not produce cinema quality images. No cell phone does. What we will have is a modular system that adds image quality well beyond any other camera short of our professional cameras.”

Is HYDROGEN ONE a viable product? I do not have many doubts about it. On one side, we’ve the fact that this modular product will be part of RED’s cinema cameras system, used for everything from controlling cameras to image monitor, as many smartphones already do. So, there is no reason to doubt that RED has covered those aspects already, even if only in conceptual form, and only needs to put them together to introduce a new tool within its own ecosystem, which will, like a Transformer, able to shape shift into different things, from a DSLR-like camera to a not yet imagined cinema camera.

What many doubt is the ability of the smartphone to be a holographic display. In fact, the industry has been after the holographic dream for some time now, and although you can create a simple holographic-like display with a plastic prism placed over your smartphone, we’re not there yet in terms of the holographic concept as we dream it. But we’re getting closer, have no doubt.

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