- A couple of months ago,
I did something that no parent should ever do.
I missed out on a huge milestone in my son's life.
He won his first ever gold medal
at a competition playing in a badminton tournament
and I wasn't able to be there to watch it.
Now in my defense,
this wasn't actually my fault.
It was because of the COVID-19 pandemic
that no spectators were allowed in the gym.
But that doesn't mean that I accept these limitations.
So, through the power of technology,
I have decided to equip the badminton center where he trains
with a 4K camera and microphone on every court
so that I will never miss another game
and neither will any of the other parents.
This is unlike anything that I've ever done before.
I mean, six different streams from six different 4K Cameras
all coming off one machine
and I've got to do it on a budget?
Oh boy!
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(upbeat music)
The first step in the journey was to find a camera
or, well, cameras, because while we could have done this
with the same kinds of cinema cameras
that we use here at the office,
like a Blackmagic Pocket or something like that,
it would have been prohibitively expensive
and the feature sets of those cameras
are designed around making short films or YouTube videos
and not around broadcast.
Fortunately, I came across this,
the CV420-CS from Marshall,
who I'd never heard of actually,
because these guys seem to do
pretty much no marketing whatsoever.
The idea appears to be, "if you know who we are,
"then you know it's good.
"And if you don't know who we are,
"you probably don't need it".
The feature set of this thing is perfect.
It does up to 4k, 60fps, HDMI and SDI outputs.
It's got a CS mount,
meaning I can use a very affordable lenses,
and how's this for a nice little East Drag.
And now to our cooling fan.
This guy's got good taste.
What's interesting is that some of the things
I would have considered to be a downside for a cinema camera
actually work in CV420-CS's favor.
Like for example, this small sensor.
A large sensor is great for an out of focus background
or cinematic effect,
but it's not necessarily as good
if you want an entire scene
to be all in focus like you would for a sporting event.
Also, you might've noticed,
it has no built-in screen whatsoever.
That saves on cost.
I picked these up secondhand on eBay.
They seem to be Marshall demo units
and I got them for just 750 bucks a pop,
for 4K cameras, pretty sweet.
Now let's have a look at this dongle.
This gives me 3 1/2 mm microphone in,
3 1/2 mm line in, a locking power connector,
and, oh yeah, remote control
if you're into that sort of thing.
But you don't have to, 'cause come look at this,
it's got a little built-in joystick on the dongle.
And you can go ahead and configure the camera that way
if it's just a set and forget application.
The final setup behind each court
is expected to look a little something like this,
and inexpensive wall plate and arm, a CS mount lens.
And then so that you can get some of the action,
like the sound of the racket hitting
and all that good stuff,
we'll put a small microphone, like a rode video micro.
I don't know that I'll go this upscale,
I might go for something cheaper,
but this is how it would hook up.
Now let's change gears and talk about our PC.
Obviously, if I'm taking in six 4K video streams,
I can't exactly just throw the cheapest core i3 in it
and call it a day.
But, I don't want to spend a fortune on this thing either.
So what I was looking for was a ton of multi-core muscle
but on a budget.
And 1st-Generation Threadripper,
ended up being a pretty good way to go.
These X399 boards can be found
for around 200 bucks these days on eBay
and the 1950X, which is a 16 core processor,
can be had for around 400 to 450 US dollars.
That's a really compelling combo
if you're not going to be doing any gaming, for example.
So you don't need really high single core performance.
As for the rest of the system,
I've gone pretty tried and true.
Noctua U12S Threadripper edition,
WD Blue MV SSD,
some Crucial Ballistix 3200 MHz that I had lying around,
although I don't know
if we're going to get those kinds of speeds
on First Gen Ryzen.
Two 8TB Enterprise hard drives
that are going to be running in RAID.
One last thing we want to do is lose that precious footage.
Of course, there are RM750 power supply.
And Oh, I guess this is kind of where
the tried and true business goes away.
This is fun.
This is a Blackmagic Decklink 8K Pro.
This is one of two of these that I will need
to take in my six 4K streams.
So each of these can do up to four.
These are around 700 US dollars,
but that is pretty much the only way to go about it.
Also, this is something I'm not sure if we're going to need.
We'll get into this more later.
But consumer GeForce graphics cards have a limit
to how many NVENC streams they can handle at a given time.
It's an artificial limit,
but it is one that I will have to work around.
So either, we're going to lean on our thread ripper
to use software and coding,
or we're going to use a Quadro to run NVENC encoding
on all six streams.
We'll just have to kind of see how it goes.
While the plan is obviously to build it
in a case eventually and I'm going to use a GT301 from ASUS,
for now, I think what I'll be doing is building it up
on the test bench here,
just in case we have to swap out some of these components.
For example, if I can get away
with a much less expensive consumer grade graphics card,
obviously I would rather do that.
Spoiler alert though, from my initial testing,
I may not be able to downgrade the GPU,
but rather I may end up upgrading it.
(chuckles)
Look, six 4K streams.
It's a lot, Okay?
Oh, confession time.
I've already tried this 3,200 MHz didn't work.
I'm running 2933.
To make sure that our camera feeds aren't cutting out,
We'll put this RGB on color cycle
So it will be immediately obvious the image freezes.
(upbeat music)
Okay. Neat.
After some trial and error figuring out what the numbering
of the SDI inputs are on this card,
turns out it goes,
one, three, two four, obviously.
And remembering that Blackmagic DeckLink cards
have a separate configuration utility
where you have to tell them,
"I want it to be an input".
It's not actually configured that way by default.
The capture card was all set up to the point where it says
simple as, yes. Huh, it worked.
But there are still some problems.
Problem number one,
even though these are first party Marshal lenses,
if I screw them in all the way,
they are completely unfocused at every possible distance.
And you see this, normally on a C mount and CS mount lens,
this is to actually lock the focus or zoom,
but there is nothing that it locks.
I can undo it as much as I,
there's nothing here that turns.
So I have something booked with tech support
to figure that out.
For now, though, I just have to unscrew it through the lens
in order to get it to focus.
That's not the end of the world.
And I got another problem.
I don't know who to blame for this,
but if I go into the menu, 1080p, 60, for whatever reason,
the Blackmagic card thinks I'm running in 3D.
So you look at this Andy 3D, it's not 3D.
To the factory reset.
There we go.
Because of course, we don't want to run 1080p, 60
anyway, do we?
We want 4K.
Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, how are we doing?
(plays around jovially)
It's a little fish eye.
But the reality of it is, we don't have that much distance
between the back of the court and the wall.
So I went with a 3 1/2 mm,
which on a sensor, this size is,
what did we say, that was about equivalent to like 22?
Depends on the crop factor.
There you go, whatever.
The point is. Yeah, it's a little distorted,
but that's what we're stuck with. Oh yeah.
Who needs cinema cameras anymore. Right, Andy?
Yeah. Just switch to this. No problem.
Oh, here's something I haven't tried yet.
I didn't have a microphone at home.
I have no idea what to do with audio here.
So what was it, Mike?
You wanted Mike in?
Oh my God. I think it's just working.
(snaps fingers)
Ha, I am so happy right now, sort of.
So the barrier I ran into when I was testing this,
is that each 4K stream that I brought into OBS,
whether it was within a single instance
or multiple instances of OBS would add
about 30% GPU usage on my Quadro P6000.
30% GPU usage.
That caps me at three 4K streams, unless I add a second GPU.
But what's crazy is watch this.
I bring in four 4K feeds, GPU usage.
Oh, this is actually very good news.
It's not as high as last night.
Well, whatever.
The GPU usage would go to 100%,
but the fan would barely spin.
So like a 100% of what?
But it seems to be just like working great now.
So that's good.
Oh man, we're 1% away from nice GPU usage
on our 420 AI cameras.
I made it this far with them without commenting about it.
I'm pretty proud of myself.
"Hey there it is. Nice.
"This is sick". And they're all like, "working right".
(plays jovially)
Sweet.
For encoding settings, in a perfect world,
I want to be using Nvidia NVENC on all six of the streams
so that the CPU is basically not touched.
But I want to have enough CPU grunt
so that I could use CPU encoding as a troubleshooting step,
if I really needed to.
I'm running at 5,500 kb/s,
which is pretty good for 1080p, 60 on Twitch.
And then as for where we're actually going to stream,
I messaged Twitch, because I'm a partner
so I can message them, to ask if I'm actually allowed
to create like, five or six Twitch channels
and like stream concurrently to them all.
I don't know if you're really allowed to do that.
So worst case scenario,
we'll try and get something set up with YouTube.
And then as a fallback, I'll be like,
"Hey Luke, do you want to put in some engineering time
And we can just do this on float plane?"
Let's start recording.
These are all just going to the local SSD for now.
I haven't actually hooked up the hard drives,
but we can do that in a little bit.
Encoding overloaded.
Oh boy, that happened pretty much immediately.
There goes the GPU usage.
Okay then.
Second Quadro time?
We all knew this was going to happen.
While we're at it,
I don't have my other quad SDI capture cards.
So I'm going to throw this DeckLink mini monitor 4K in here
and see if we can use that
to at least get a fifth one going here.
To attempt to solve this problem,
I'm following the steps EposVox suggested
for installing a portable version of OBS.
So basically you just throw a portable_mode.txt file
in some directory, other than program files
that you have unzipped the application to.
Then you go into the global config file
and add video adapter ID x=1.
So remember that one is two, because zero is one.
Let me go ahead and save that.
And my forth feed should be coming off my second GPU.
Why is the fan not spinning on this Quadro?
I don't see, it's not picked up at all.
What the crap!
Is this Quadro dead?
son of a (beep)
Start recording, start recording, start recording.
All three of those should survive running on the GP100.
So that's the higher performance one.
And then I had to throw a lesser Quadro in there
'cause my other one's broken.
Now let's see what happens
if we start recording on that one.
(claps)
I think we're good.
And there's more good news.
The video and code usage on the P2000 is only 29%.
So if I didn't have a P6000
or ,excuse me, GP100 lying around,
then I could definitely use lower end Quadros.
I wonder if I could get away with GeForce,
I'd have to put like GeForce cards in
and have each of them do two.
It seems like it's getting even kludger.
Adam also mentioned that one of the things
that helps with a configuration like this,
is actually taking those OBS instances
that you want running on a separate GPU,
plugging a monitor into that GPU
and like, moving the window over to that monitor,
just to make sure that they stay stuck,
where they're supposed to go.
So all that's left now is to plug in one more SDI,
'cause that's all the inputs that we have
and see if we can get five going.
Okay.
Oh, to fifth camera working,
we're going to have to acknowledge one other thing
that I banged up as part of this process.
I don't know a lot about C and CS mount cameras and lenses.
So I figured, Oh, well,
rather than just getting all these
sort of cheapo Marshall ones, no offense, Marshall,
I'll go on eBay and I'll see if there's
any better lenses available.
Oh Tokina Oh, they made good stuff.
I'll just get a Tokina lens.
So I picked up this puppy, it's a zoom.
Really affordable. Feels good.
Only one small problem.
It looks fine. Right?
It looks beautiful when I have it at maximum zoom
and then, watch this.
Oh no.
(laughs)
Wver seen a vignette that bad.
So it's designed for a sensor that's actually even smaller
than the one that I have.
So I'm just going to have to get
a couple more of the Marshall first party ones.
'cause I don't feel like digging through all
the compatibility documentation
of which there's basically none,
to find which third-party lens
is going to work on this thing.
Of course, needing to exchange a lens
doesn't prevent me from validating my solution here.
I've got five feeds,
four of which are still recording without dropping frames.
So all I've got to do is start recording on one more
and see what happens.
So the Quadro GP100 is at 80% usage
and the P2000 is that 40% usage or so
and we're looking good.
I can play around a little bit with my GPU configs,
but I think I have a streaming setup.
This is five different angles of my,
I have a streaming setup dance.
♪Oh yeah, oh yeah. ♪
♪I've got a streaming setup, got a streaming setup. ♪
Now all that remains is to set it up at the badminton center
and see how it works.
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I hope you guys enjoyed this video.
This was a little bit off the beaten path for us,
but thank you for sitting through it with me.
And of course thank you to EposVox for helping me
at least diagnose this issue,
even if he didn't, unfortunately, have a solution for it,
other than, "Throw more GPU's at the problem".
If you guys enjoy streaming content
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