Small Studio Setup Suggestions

[ocbroadband]

Hi All,

I'm not sure if this is the right forum or not, but here goes. Brand new to OBS and this has opened up a ton of possibilities for a project I'm doing for a relatives Karate Studio potentially. I have installed a few 'working' copies on various laptops to test & play around with and was successfully able to perform some very basic testing of capturing video from my webcam, desktop, Video from VLC, etc, nothing external from the laptop at this point and stream to YouTube. Great! I now have a end goal of wanting to provide feeds into this laptop from additional sources, but I'm not quite sure where to start so I don't spend a ton of time trying to figure out what would work best. So my 'studio' scenario is for a Karate studio that I'd like to have the following...

• 2-3 stationary video sources
  • I would very much like to utilize some type of IP based system(wired/wireless IP cameras) if this is possible so we can actually 'mount' the camera's in the studio and leave them vs. setting up tripods, etc.
• 1 wireless video source
  • The intent for this would be to have the instructor wear while teaching limited capacity classes and have remote students and also to record belt tests that people can also watch. Lots of possibilities.
• 30fps/HD resolution on the video sources.

Understand there are varying costs with the equipment, but just need to get an idea of where to start.

The networking configuration/hardware/etc and computing hardware is a non-issue as that's my primary field of work, hence why I'd like to keep it network(IP) based for all the gear if possible. Any thoughts or guides that may already be out there for this type of setup? I'm just not sure where to start.

Thank you for any feedback!

Lyle

 

[ocbroadband]

Anyone have any feedback on something like this? Thanks for any suggestions.

 

[mball2301]

As far as cameras there are lots of possibilities. Most cameras will support rtmp streams as well as some will support NDI and NDI/HX. I tried to go the cheap consumer grade IP cameras and they just do not have the processing power to support a clean stream of video. I even tried lower frame rates and was not happy with the output. If you are just recording or don't mind some delay in the stream, RTMP is the route to go because most IP connectable cameras support it. If you need the shortest delay I have found NDI/HX very good. There are also other ingest protocols. I found this article interesting: https://www.wowza.com/blog/rtmp-streaming-real-time-messaging-protocol

 

[ocbroadband]

As far as cameras there are lots of possibilities. Most cameras will support rtmp streams as well as some will support NDI and NDI/HX. I tried to go the cheap consumer grade IP cameras and they just do not have the processing power to support a clean stream of video. I even tried lower frame rates and was not happy with the output. If you are just recording or don't mind some delay in the stream, RTMP is the route to go because most IP connectable cameras support it. If you need the shortest delay I have found NDI/HX very good. There are also other ingest protocols. I found this article interesting: https://www.wowza.com/blog/rtmp-streaming-real-time-messaging-protocol

Thanks for the reply. I'm not too concerned about delay of capture -> player. I'm more concerned about before it gets out to the outside, all my video sources are in sync. Since I'm planning on having multiple sources, they all need to be in sync timing wise, so thats more the area where I'm looking to insure things work.

If there's a 10 second delay to the outside world, I don't care as long as 1 source isn't delayed more than another from within the same 'studio' or location.

 

[mball2301]

You can use some of the delay/sync filters for this. I am using one PTZOptics HDMI and two PTZOptics NDI cameras and there is about a 100 millisecond difference between them. The only issue I am having is the audio is all coming from a mixer board so it took some tweaking on the audio delays. The fades are set at 1200 milliseconds so they hide the video delays. I am pretty new to OBS (March 2020) also, but when Covid hit we were able to get a multi-camera live stream running in a week so that our church service could continue. Since then we have changed out cameras and upgraded the PC hardware, but in all of that I have not found anything that OBS could not handle. I have only had to write one OBS script to handle triggering the camera presets within a scene (i.e. pan to x position and zoom to y position). Everything else we use is out of the box.

As far as internal video delay, just stay away from the really cheap IP security cameras. They give a decent picture, but stutter on RTMP streams. Our first try was using Digital camcorders and this worked really well. I had ordered a couple of Security cameras from Amazon, but after a test run sent them back. We used external HDMI to USB capture adapters and TCP HDMI extenders. However; 720P was about the best resolution we could get from the cameras (even though they were all HD cameras). It looked good on phones and tablets, but not on laptops or TVs. It was just a combination of the camera output to the HDMI port and the adapter. Once we got it tweaked it was fine. Also we did not use camera operators. We just duplicated a camera scene and cropped it to create a zoom affect so that we ended up with nine different scenes only using three cameras.

Like I said I am new to OBS but I hope this helps.

 

[ocbroadband]

You can use some of the delay/sync filters for this. I am using one PTZOptics HDMI and two PTZOptics NDI cameras and there is about a 100 millisecond difference between them. The only issue I am having is the audio is all coming from a mixer board so it took some tweaking on the audio delays. The fades are set at 1200 milliseconds so they hide the video delays. I am pretty new to OBS (March 2020) also, but when Covid hit we were able to get a multi-camera live stream running in a week so that our church service could continue. Since then we have changed out cameras and upgraded the PC hardware, but in all of that I have not found anything that OBS could not handle. I have only had to write one OBS script to handle triggering the camera presets within a scene (i.e. pan to x position and zoom to y position). Everything else we use is out of the box.

As far as internal video delay, just stay away from the really cheap IP security cameras. They give a decent picture, but stutter on RTMP streams. Our first try was using Digital camcorders and this worked really well. I had ordered a couple of Security cameras from Amazon, but after a test run sent them back. We used external HDMI to USB capture adapters and TCP HDMI extenders. However; 720P was about the best resolution we could get from the cameras (even though they were all HD cameras). It looked good on phones and tablets, but not on laptops or TVs. It was just a combination of the camera output to the HDMI port and the adapter. Once we got it tweaked it was fine. Also we did not use camera operators. We just duplicated a camera scene and cropped it to create a zoom affect so that we ended up with nine different scenes only using three cameras.

Like I said I am new to OBS but I hope this helps.

Thanks for the information, that is useful. So you have actual camcorders vs. an IP camera(s) now, correct? Those PTZ optics camera's are pricey. I was looking for something more in the couple hundred dollar range, but if thats what you mean by cheap, we may have to rethink this a little. Not looking to spend zero, but trying not to break the bank either.

I've been looking around for basically 30fps HD IP camera's, but haven't had much success. Don't need to be PTZ either. I am looking to see if there's a compatibility list somewhere on here, but haven't found it yet. How far are your cable runs from the camera's to the PC btw?

Thank you!

 

[mball2301]

Thanks for the information, that is useful. So you have actual camcorders vs. an IP camera(s) now, correct? Those PTZ optics camera's are pricey. I was looking for something more in the couple hundred dollar range, but if thats what you mean by cheap, we may have to rethink this a little. Not looking to spend zero, but trying not to break the bank either.

I've been looking around for basically 30fps HD IP camera's, but haven't had much success. Don't need to be PTZ either. I am looking to see if there's a compatibility list somewhere on here, but haven't found it yet. How far are your cable runs from the camera's to the PC btw?

Thank you!

We still use HD cameras for some meetings. Don't know pricing on those because we were able to borrow those. I did find some re-manufactured on Amazon for about $160. The PTZoptics cameras are not cheep, It was the security IP cameras ($50) that I was saying were cheap.