Date: January 10, 2020
By: Jeroen Caeyers – Wavepart

I have been doing ProAV AV over IP training sessions for some time. They are not broadcast or video production related so NDI was never a topic. NDI is AV over IP for studio’s where there are lots of (pan-tilt-zoom) camera’s, tally lights, alpha channels and intercom systems. At least that’s what I thought.

But I seemed to be getting more and more questions about NDI during my training sessions. So I asked myself: is NDI applicable in ProAV, other than video production? How does NDI perform when it comes to HDMI switching, video quality and latency?

My knowledge of NDI was very limited. Not much more than that NDI had something to do with the NewTek’s Tricaster and that NDI is supposed to be the (compressed) successor of SDI. SDI being the standard, non IP based, digital video interface in broadcast for a long time.

So here’s what I did: I contacted Roger Creemers from CUE-Support in Holland. A company that has a lot of experience with NDI. They provided me with two NDI ptz camera’s and a NDI transcoder (see image above).
I connected everything and started discovering and measuring. In this review you can read my findings.

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Next page:
2. NDI Facts

Content:
1. Introduction
2. NDI Facts
3. Connecting and Testing
4. Video Quality
5. Switching
6. Latency
7. Multicast
8. Verdict