Re: Recommendation for Video card / device / computer for High Quality Stream

Hi Matt,

the H264 recorder won't help you with that because it is the same device that already sits inside your Atem TVS. The TVS has the H264 recorder built in.

Interesting to hear that the procaster recognizes the TVS at all, because the encoding is done inside the TVS (it outputs a H264 stream over USB2). I think the Procaster software reencodes the H264 stream coming from the TVS with another bitrate / resolution. That should result in a degraded image because you add two steps of compression where you only need one.

The solution could be to get a supported SDI card for a PC or a Desktop Mac. If you take a look at the livestream.com site you will find several cards that are certified by livestream.com.

But you could also use a cheap BMD Decklink SDI card. Make sure to get a decent PC or Mac that can handle the HD encoding. That eats a lot of CPU power and you need a recent system for that. Then run SDI from TVS to SDI In of the card and do the compression inside the PC/Mac.

You could also try out some different settings of the H264 encoder inside the TVS. For a full HD stream you should use at least 3-5MBit to make it look OK. Set the TVS to that rate and use the same parameters inside the Procaster. Maybe the Procaster won't reencode if it is the same format.

Otherwise set the encoding rate on the TVS as high as you can (20MBit in TVS control software - 30MBit with MXLight) and reencode it with the desired settings inside Procaster. But there is a little "bug" in the H264 recorder: It discards every second line and does some weird deinterlacing with that. BMD knows about this fact but there has been no solution to this. So you will lose resolution if you use the USB2 output no matter what you do.

Cheers

Andreas
Regards

Andreas

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Entertainment Producer IHK
mindandvision