NAB 2019: BirdDog Talks 4K Over NDI

Transcript

Shawn Lam: It's Shawn Lam here for Streaming Media Producer at NAB 2019. I'm here at the BirdDog booth with Eamon and we're going to be talking about NDI. Specifically, you have a new product here.

Eamon Drew: Yeah, so we've entered the 4K world. We've been shipping HD products for a long time now. But this is our first 4K product. Yeah, we're really excited.

Shawn Lam: All right, so now, not only is this a 4K product, it has 12G-SDI input. But there's four 12G-SDI inputs on it.

Eamon Drew:  Yeah, so in our 4K range, we have three models. This is our 4K Quad and this has four independent channels of 12G-SDI. So we'll do four channels with 4Kp60 to NDI.

Shawn Lam: And then I see that there's an HDMI output on here, so what is that used for?

Eamon Drew:  So the 2.0 output can be used for a variety of things. One of the useful functions is if you're mounting on a camera top, you can go HDMI out to a monitor. We give you Tally borders on the loop out as well. It can also be used for that return feed from the switcher. Also, you can use it as a multiviewer, so we've got four inputs and you do a quad-split multiview.

Shawn Lam: Then on the business end here, you have the standard 1G Ethernet, but there's also a slot here. So this can take in fiber, 10G Ethernet?

Eamon Drew:  Yeah, so we have an SFP+ port so we can do short range, medium range, or long range SFP to fiber or we can do SFP to Ethernet as well. And that's 10G of course, yeah.

Shawn Lam: There are two different protocols for NDI, so which one have you chosen to adopt as a company for BirdDog?

Eamon Drew: All of our products are the high-bandwidth NDI. There's sort of two flavors of NDI. There's NDI and there's NDIIHX. The difference between the two is NDIIHX is sort of made for lower-bandwidth applications. Maybe sending video over WiFi. It's a longGOP codec and it's sort of based on, loosely based on H.264. And then you've got full NDI which sort of is a variable-bitrate codec. It kind of caps out around 140 megabits for 1080p60 and about 340 for 4K60. That's a iFrame codec. We've done some testing in-house, the signal-to-noise ratio is really good. It's similar to ProRes, so it's visually beautiful. 

Shawn Lam: Fantastic. All right, pricing and availability?

Eamon Drew: This is $1,995. We have a single-channel, HDMI-only version for $895. Shipping September.

Shawn Lam:  Fantastic, all right, Eamon. This has been Shawn Lam for Streaming Media Producer at NAB 2019.