​Recomendations for live camera, do's and don'ts?

[DillTheKraut]

@bonemap

I'd like to add, that I have good experience with fiber hdmi. With a price tag of around 2€/m not much more expensive than sdi. Espacialy, if extra sdi converters would be needed. They extend easily up to 100m, while having more and higher resolution options. (SDI is limited to default broadcast resolutions, leaving out aspects like WUXGA, which is common for many 'bigger' projectors).

Best
Dill

[Woland]

@eva said:

did you try it off stage? With Isadora? 

 I haven't tried it, I've just been told about it by some folks in the Office Hours community.

Best wishes,

L Wilson-Spiro

[Gaspar]

Hi there,

When I started I had pretty much the same question. Budgetwise, CCTV cameras are very affordable, especially if you already own a video capture card. You can find them with different lenses, even some with zoom. If you want to be able to pan and tilt it gets more expensive.

I'm using them with the CVI protocol. Meaning that I can use cheap coax cable to get the signal wherever I want and do so over long distances (I'm using 25m cables, but have also used the sound patch of the theatre and adapters to get the signal to control without any issues... that's really cool if you plan to tour in different venues).

Things to be aware of:

- Not all cameras allow manual settings (most do, but most vendors have no idea).

- Camera control is generally slow and tedious, clicking through menues. So you won't probably use them in shows where you need to change camera configurations during the performance.

- The cameras are very reliable and robust. Image quality nowadays is no issue.

- Many of them are capable of infrared capture (which is cool for many applications, especially interaction).

- I'm using Dahua cameras with a simple 4 camera "recorder" (not recording anything, just using it to control the cameras and feed the signal into the capture card).

- I forgot one more advantage. With just one capture card I can feed 4 cameras into the computer (of course at a quarter of the resolution, but that's ok). I'm using FullHD and 1/4 resolution for each camera.

Cheers

[Fred]

@Eva 

From my experience - I prefer cables, wifi is great these days but if you use it take your own AP with you and get a good one and be prepared for disruption when a room fills up with a few hundred people with smart phones. 

Different connections have different overheads, decoding a compressed stream from USB (this includes USB capture boxes and cameras) or Wifi uses a lot more CPU than ingesting a signal via a capture box. SDI has been my go to for a long time, yes its limited to SMTPE resolutions but so are most cameras. 

I have used SDI box cameras a lot - they are cheap ($120) and have interchangeable lenses (meaning manual control so no autofocus) Here is an example https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/28... . I connect these to Blackmagic capture cards via SDI, they are not so good for roaming but work really well - they dont have a viewfinder but they do have an analogue output as well as SDI and you can mount a cheap $30 3" LCD on top.

Marshall make more professional mini SDI cameras like this https://marshall-usa.com/camer... They are great and designed for broadcast, they also have a serial port that lets you adjust, store and recall camera settings remotely (and software to do this, but its serial so you could do this from inisde Isadora) and they are not too expensive.

Ideally outside of Isadora I use Machine vision cameras like this https://www.flir.com/products/... the only interface you need is an ethernet port (it provides power via POE, gets the camera signal and controls the camera remotely), these are my favourite but there is no Izzy actor to work with them as yet.

From the description you made I would suggest Marshall camera (get a lens that matches your distance), an SDI cable, a Manfrotto magic arm and a Blackmagic capture box, it will give a high quality reliable image with fixed focus and settings and minimal overhead.

[Woland]

@fred said:

Ideally outside of Isadora I use Machine vision cameras like this https://www.flir.com/products/... the only interface you need is an ethernet port (it provides power via POE, gets the camera signal and controls the camera remotely), these are my favourite but there is no Izzy actor to work with them as yet.

These look very interesting. Maybe after IzzyCast and Python we can take look at this.

I created a feature request for this (which included a bit of SDK and licensing research) but also I couldn't resist screenshotting this and sharing it:

[thomas-parb]

I am planning an installation with 3 Blackmagic Micro Cinema cameras over NDI and control of the manual Laowa Cinema Zero-D lenses via servos based on OSC or PTZ over NDI. 

I think if I manage to do everything as I imagine it, then I will do a happy dance ;-) 

The baby is once conceived in my head, now it's time to implement it. 

NDI/OSC have the huge advantage that they are directly available from Izzy and you can do all the fun with it. 

Also, it's not depending on a special Camera brand, you can use every cam with HDMI/SDI and manual lenses.

The only pain ist the price for NDI transcoders - thinking about building them self with Newtek SDK like Dicaffeine do this on a Orange Pi 5...

But the way is still long... have a nice holiday, 

Tom

[CitizenJoe]

If you really need wireless, I highly recommend the TeraDek products: Teradek

You get what you pay for!

Cheers,

Hugh

[Eva]

@j-grima

Hi Jim, thank you for sharing. I am not personally a fan of the aestaetics of a DSLR camera, and also it seems to end up being more expensive than I would want. So I think it is worth a try. We will be working with hands in front of the camera drawing or making collages, so I am not sure if autofocus is actually a quality. I find at times that this is actually not the nices since it is not faces and I would like to see the whole board... How are the colors of NDI? It does look like the iPhone solution is also quite simple in terms of getting the image into Isadora?

[Eva]

@gaspar

Oh, this sounds nice - I was at first looking up the insta360 link - but I am wondering if the coloring and the autofocus is really doing what I need. So i imagine that I can do simple things like zooming etc... Ill have to look into how I make something like that happen...

[morfin_mafer]

Hi,

I get this at next week: https://www.canon.co.uk/video-...

But can't give any recommendation before I am tested it as web-cam.