Question / Help What Capture Cards Work with Titan Ridge Thunderbolt 3 on macOS?

[jfredson]

I’ve been trying to setup a multi camera YouTube stream using OBS and 2 DSLR cameras.

My first setup:

• Nikon D810
• Nikon D750
• 2x Blackmagic Ultra Studio Mini Recorder capture cards
• 2013 MacBook Pro

I plugged in the cameras to my MacBook Pro using the two capture cards, but found that the MacBook was too weak to handle the multi camera streaming and the footage came out choppy.

So next I built a hackintosh with a Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Pro, i9 9700K, Sapphire Radeon RX580, and a Gigabyte Titan Ridge thunderbolt card. Turns out the new Titan Ridge thunderbolt card is Thunderbolt 3 and the Blackmagic UltraStudio Mini Recorders are Thunderbolt 2 and don’t work with that card.

Does anybody know what kind of capture cards I would need to get my camera working on this new setup with my Titan Ridge thunderbolt 3 card?

 

[Narcogen]

Black Magic Ultra Studio HD Mini

AJA IO 4K Plus

What are you planning on using for encoding?

The combination of MacOS + AMD is pretty much the worst for using with OBS. You'll have access to NO hardware encoding-- you'll have to use CPU or the equivalent of QuickSync.

Not saying you can't do it, but unfortunately due to choices Apple is making right now, there's not a clear way forward to using Macs or even Hackintoshes for these kinds of workflows, compared to what you get out of a WinTel setup with a Turing card from Nvidia.

 

[jfredson]

Hmm so it looks like I would have to get one Ultra Studio Mini HD for each camera. And then I could add each camera as a source in OBS and live switch between them while streaming?

I hadn’t considered encoding yet. Would I be better off running all of this on Windows 10 on that same PC build?

 

[Narcogen]

On the same build... you'll be able to use the AMF encoder, but all other things being equal, it is not as efficient or as high quality as the NVENC encoder. If you end up being CPU constrained, at least having that option would be better than not having it.

 

[jfredson]

Do you mean in Windows? What would it take to get NVENC working?

Edit: never mind, just looked it up. It’s an NVIDIA thing. So basically I’m stuck with subpar encoding with my AMD GPU?

 

[Narcogen]

An Nvidia card.

 

[jfredson]

Gotcha. But given my existing setup I could at least get two cameras streaming live with OBS with two Blackmagic Ultra Studio HD Mini capture cards even if the quality isn’t as good as with NVIDIA GPU?

 

[Narcogen]

Yes. I'd say the difference is that the amount you are paying per comparable unit of encoding performance is much higher using the i9 than using the hardware encoder of a Turing Nvidia card, but you should be able to do it.

 

[jfredson]

Gotcha, thanks for your help.