Hello and welcome to Up to Speed.
Last night Blackmagic announced some interesting new live production products, we have a new
Atem television studio HD, a Hyperdeck studio mini and a fascinating new product called
the web presenter.
The general theme of the announcement seemed to be that they were targeting the online
content producers, particularly people who are interested in live streaming, whether
thats on youtube, Facebook, twitch or anything similar.
The new web presenter is very much aimed at that market, but the others could have a lot
of appeal to.
So lets go through each of them in a bit more detail.
First up is the new Hyperdeck Studio Mini.
This is a 4K capable recording and playback deck which is very compact considering the
amount that it can do.
It uses SD cards and can either record a prores file in a similar way to their video assists
do if your familiar with those.
Or it can play back and output 4K HDMI, meaning this could be very powerful for digital signage.
In fact they would work a treat in our showroom here to send content to our 4K tv’s.
They can also be looped together and synced, so you can use them to power several displays
together as an array, where the first player in the line controls all of them at once,
each playing a different quarter of the content, which is very nice.
Then they announced an update to their popular but aging atem television studio, called the
Atem television studio HD.
This is a complete redesign of the product to fit within the current Blackmagic ecosystem.
The biggest change really is the design, its smaller and more portable and is now just
as much at home on a desktop, as it is on a rack mounted system.
Its also cheaper than the older version because they have taken out the H.264 steaming features
as they decided they should be an optional product that runs alongside this rather than
you having to pay for it whether you are interested in it or not.
So that brings us on to the new Web Presenter.
I think this is the most interesting product of the group personally.
It essentially gives you a way of getting a HDMI or SDI signal from a professional camera
into a computer.
But tricks the computer into thinking that its a webcam, so that it works seamlessly
in live streaming software or even skype.
It can accept up to a 4K signal and downsamples it to 720p, which may seem low but realistically
its the resolution that most live streams are using at the moment as its much more stable
and needs less bandwidth than 1080p.
You can of course get a HDMI or SDI video feed into a computer without this, and send
that signal into live streaming software, thats nothing new.
But without this box you are letting the software do the down converting and compressing on
the fly as well as the uploading and transmitting, and thats a big ask.
With this new web presenter, all the processing is done in the box, meaning that the live
streaming software is getting exactly the signal it needs at the quality it needs.
But that isn't all, because the software essentially thinks the signal is coming from a webcam.
If the your internet connection dips it will send a signal to the web presenter that it
cant cope and the web presenter will lower the frame rate of the transmission, just like
what would happen on a webcam.
This means you should notice less massive quality dips, when the connection gets bad
the video will just show at a lower frame rate which should end up looking much smoother
to the end user.
The last little announcement Blackmagic had up their sleeves was about the studio camera.
They have had feedback from users saying that they were having difficulty shipping the cameras
around by air because of the internal batteries.
Airlines have quite strict restrictions on batteries and so that was causing people some
issues.
So, in response to this, Blackmagic are now offering a lower cost studio camera which
simply doesn't have an internal battery.
I think this is a great idea, especially as realistically, most users will have these
cameras plugged into mains power, if your tethered anyway by a SDI cable to a switcher
and talkback system, which presumably you are otherwise the studio camera would be a
strange camera to choose, theres more than likely no reason you cant have an extra cable
as well for power.
So thats whats new from blackmagic.
We think if your interested in small portable live production, and definitely if you are
interested in online content and livestreaming, these products should definitely be on your
radar.
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Thanks for watching and i’ll see you in the next one.