Telestream Talks Wirecast Gear, NDI Support, and PTZ Camera Control
Marc Franklin: This is Marc Franklin. I'm at Streaming Media West and I'm at the Telestream booth with Sales Application Specialist Shane Scrimager. Shane is gonna tell us a little bit about what they've got going on at their booth and any announcements that they have for the show.
Shane Scrimager: We're featuring our Wirecast Gear and Wirecast. Our Wirecast Gear is a turnkey streaming solution with warranty and support running Wirecast 15. We're promoting 4K workflows and flexible hybrid environments. So we have a lot of moving pieces going on with cameras or existing workflows. What we're trying to do is offer a turnkey solution to either utilize the hybrid workflows--USB cams, SDI, HTMI, NDI, whatever you're bringing to the table--we can bring it into Wirecast, easily compose those shots, and give it that broadcast quality out to whatever social networks or embed it to a personal site. We also have our own CDN now called Sherpa, so whoever you're looking to deliver now, we can handle that.
Marc Franklin: Now does this have a built-in switcher, or would you need an additional switcher?
Shane Scrimager: It's actually using Wirecast to compose your shots, and it's the same platform that you'll be using to switch your shots. So everything's within Wirecast. It's how you assign your sources or choose your cameras or audio as well as compose your shots. It's not just for streaming anymore. We can, of course, stream any RTMP or SRT as well as up to 33 of our preset destinations. We can record Program to disc. We can ISO record individual sources in Wirecast. We can also virtual camera out, which means create a virtual camera for any webinar platform or all of those at once.
Marc Franklin: So once you have everything ISO, then you can just take those files and if you wanna edit it later, just pop it into Premiere Pro or Final Cut or Avid?
Shane Scrimager: Yes. And speaking of Premiere Pro, you can run that on the Gear as well. It's a Windows 10 enterprise computer. So once you load on your own software or your own webinars, essentially this is your full production studio.
Marc Franklin: It can switch, it can stream, it can record. And all under one roof.
Shane Scrimager: All under one roof. And those hybrid of connections as well. USB, HDMI, SDI, NDI, IP, cell phone.
Marc Franklin: Now is there a limit to how many inputs you could have?
Shane Scrimager: That would be based on the system you're running it on. It is cross-platform. You can run it on Mac and Windows. Our Gear 620 4K can handle six 4K inputs in it. It would be a matter of, of what's coming in and how many, and then at what resolution. So if you have 1080p, easily eight.
Marc Franklin: How many physical inputs does does it have?
Shane Scrimager: On each of our units? If we go to the 600 series, there's four 4K HDMI or four 4K SDI. But there's also a fifth 1080P SDI and afifth individual SDI out as well. If you were to run an NDI network with its own switcher, like the Netgear M2450, then it holds up to eight. So we could have eight NDI cameras, or you could have a mix of SDI and NDI. It doesn't have to be one simple workflow.
Marc Franklin: Okay. So it gives you lots of flexibility.
Shane Scrimager: Benefits are, the customers that I've seen moving to NDI is because it's one cord, right? It's video and audio, but it's also pushing back control and power. So it's really cleaning up all the cable mess.
Marc Franklin: Okay. What about PTZ cameras? Does it also control PTZ?
Shane Scrimager: Actually there's a built in controller here. And it's not just pan-tilt-zoom with the built-in PTZ controller. You're in control of pan tilt, zoom focus, exposure, white balance, and most importantly presets. So with one camera you could have that pre-set to a short and long and just toggle presets. Or a pan and a pan and toggle presets. So you're not having to do those camera movements every time. You could just be logging in limitless presets, as many as you can remember.
Marc Franklin: Wow. Very interesting. And will it work with any PTZ camera, or does it have to be a specific brand?
Shane Scrimager: If you're running the PTZ camera over NDI, it can be any PTZ camera. If it's over IP, it has to be TCP or UDP. It will also have those APIs as well. And we have a list of camera manufacturers that we play well with.
Marc Franklin: Very interesting hardware/software solution. And for more, telestream.com
Shane Scrimager: Having a great show. Thank you.
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