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GH2 with Livestream for live webcasting?
  • BlackoutBlackout
    Guys, has anyone tried using the blackmagic intensity card with Procaster from livestream?

    Procaster is free software on windows or mac and I use it for webcasting live events. I am thinking it could take the 1080 50i and deinterlace it and you could livestream at 25 progressive.

    I am going to buy the blackmagic intensity and test it out..... http://www.blackmagic-design.com/products/intensity/


    So do I need to hack the camera first or does it not matter?

    Do I need to hit the record button or does it not matter?

    Any help on this ASAP would be appreciated as I have the event Sunday. I have backups should the gh2 / blackmagic to laptop into procaster livetsream software not work.... but I would love for it to work.

    I want to set up the gh2 with the 1.7 pancake lens for a wide live stream and the jump around with my gh13 for actual coverage. I'm still very new to the GH2 and make some boo boos where as I know every crevice of the gh13 like my ex girlfriend.

    ps to give you an example of what is capable with livestream: this is a live broadcast in hd with webcams and the gh13 prerecorded footage cued and played live from a laptop:

    pretty f-ing impressive.. make sure you full screen it.

    http://www.livestream.com/blackoutsbox/video?clipId=pla_66eed6b7-7047-414c-b985-c98269389846&utm_source=lslibrary&utm_medium=ui-thumb

    - Blackout

  • 50 Replies sorted by
  • alcomposeralcomposer
    @Blackout: Wow you really are posting around the place today!

    >So do I need to hack the camera first or does it not matter?
    For HDMI now - no

    >Do I need to hit the record button or does it not matter?
    Yes- colour is F*(#KED up when not recording- just try out and see the difference! So get a nice big SD card so you can stream for a long time!

    Good luck!
    PS: @Blackout you can 'edit' your last post so that you are not having a discussion with yourself.
  • BlackoutBlackout
    PS: I don't quite get it working until about 5 mins into the livestream

    procaster sends out live and records to your local disk

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev
    Btw, you can just set low bitrate and hack camera and use recording mode.
  • BlackoutBlackout
    Yeah al I am having to come up to speed on what is possible with the GH2 hdmi out very very fast.
    I booked a live concert for sunday and have to buy whatever I need at b&h today.

  • BlackoutBlackout
    Vitaliy can you elaborate a little bit? When you mean set low bitrate exactly what you mean... and hack camera with which patch and settings for the best use of hdmi out to the blackmagic to procaster...

    I want to hack the GH2 to go about 70 mbit as that was the best results, but right now for this weekend I just want the hdmi out to blackmagic to livestream procaster to work and don't know if I need to hack the GH2 for that or not.


  • alcomposeralcomposer
    VK is saying that since you are not interested in using the GH2 for recording on the SD card- you can just set the bit rate settings to something REALLY REALLY REALLY low- so as to give you something like 50 hours on a slow 8gig card...

    This way you can use the HDMI recording mode (which give you good colours). If you didn't press record first the colours are completely wrong- and very dark.

    As for best HDMI hack settings I don't believe that they have surfaced yet... within PTool itself (hopefully soon!) :D
  • BlackoutBlackout
    Ahhh ok. Well this is not a big deal as the concert is only 45 mins to an hour and I have a 32 gb card.

    On my way now to b & h and dragging along my new unhacked gh2, msi quad core i7 laptop, and a 4G 2mbit up usb satellite from clear.

    After I buy the blackmagic I'll go sit in a bistro next to B & H on 34thy street and see if it works and post the stream link here or it will show up on my site http://blackout.com

    Wish me luck & good drivers!

  • Mark_the_HarpMark_the_Harp
    Hey - good luck!

    I used livestream last year with a 3-camera setup (but 3 x firewire cams, with local in-camera HD recording). Mainly because upstream rate was very low where I was. Great fun though, to see comments coming back in real-time during a concert, from all over the world, including comments responding to the players - which we then relayed to them so they could reply back during the gig. I'm not convinced the GH2 is a good camera for doing this, though (while it's the bees' knees / dog's bollocks in all other respects).

    Have fun!
  • itimjimitimjim
    Skylight Diner is just over the road from B&H. A guilty pleasure of mine :-)
  • BlackoutBlackout
    Well... oddly enough this super high end laptop does NOT have a firewire in... I have a crappy firewire camera lying around somewhere... but it's normal DV.

    Livestream has come a long way since it started. Procaster has greatly improved and if you have the bandwidth you can get amazing livestreaming as good / better than cable TV.


  • Mark_the_HarpMark_the_Harp
    Ah - anyway for multicamera you really need one for each camera. I pretty much cooked my PC doing it and it nearly killed me for other reasons (stress - and doing some stealth networking to get internet access inside an 800-year-old church, via a hostile neighbour's driveway that we dug up in the middle of the night) but it was all good! But doing streaming and vision mixing on the same PC more or less killed it. We just did the actual upload in SD but recorded in HD for mixing afterwards (which we never bothered to do).

    I was using Vidblaster to do the vision mixing - great package. I even recorded video interviews from all over the world, with me vision-mixing them in a different country to the interviewer / interviewees.
  • BlackoutBlackout
    Yeah I plan on having three cameras and three laptops using their procaster software for the feeds and livestream studio to control which cam to cut to live. Really hoping I can get the GH2 to work.

  • Mark_the_HarpMark_the_Harp
    Good idea - that would work really well. I haven't used procaster for a while, as its pretty basic. Vidblaster did great mixes and greenscreen stuff (and could play back videos and do titles etc, and deinterlace and whatnot).

    It's free (just a small embedded logo) at http://www.vidblaster.com and is amazing
  • BlackoutBlackout
    Well, as for the black magic intensity shuttle - what a piece of #*%*#^%^#

    I have spent 4 hours sitting here going on wild goose chases for drivers that didn't exist or were named wrong.. software said my laptop was up to spec and had the right usb 3.0 chip, but it needed a firmware upgrade, yet, that upgrade was nowhere to be found except on seedy sites.. finally got exactly what it wanted and ran it and it still said the card was not working correctl;y when running it's native capture software or procaster..... the GH2 blinked when plugging hdmi in and acted connected, but no software saw it.

    Lot of people had the same complaint. Seems procaster doesn't support this device but DOES support the pci-e blackmagic pro version.... which is about the same price.. so I am returning this and getting that and seeing if it will work on my big studio machine at home.

    if not it goes back again.... been taking many trips to b&h in the last few days..

    am i supposed to have hdmi set on auto 10801 720p.. or what? Not that I think that mattered I tried them all.





  • alcomposeralcomposer
    You will be happy with the Pci-e...
  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev
    You can also try
    http://www.ebay.com/itm/AVerMedia-AVerTV-USB-HD-DVR-Digital-Video-Capture-Device-MTVUHDDVR-HDMI-Int-/290634500829?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item43ab2a8add
  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev
    Other very interesting card
    http://www.ebay.com/itm/4CH-HDMI-Ports-1080p-High-Definition-CCTV-Video-Capture-Card-H-264-MPEG-4-/200670299121?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item2eb8e1c3f1

    image
    DVRCK0041B.jpg
    500 x 500 - 50K
  • MeierhansMeierhans
    "support four channels HDMI input, one channel record"
    Looks like its only switching between inputs, no way to monitor/mix all at once.
    If it could do so it would be a bargain³... question is if you can access the raw incoming stream precompression via WDM, or if you have to rely on some app they deliver with it that just writes into files.
    Thats a general problem with all the hardware encoders, they need to be supported by the streaming app.
  • BlackoutBlackout
    The first card is a no go as it ONLY records to the arcsoft software and won't pass the video or be used by any other program so no using it to stream online which is my main goal. The 2nd board looks interesting but who are these people and what driver support exists?

    From the DVX forums they are telling me the big issue is that the GH2 hdmi outputs exactly 60i not 59.94 and most things can't deal with that and you have to set it up specially in the blackmagic software but
    I was not even seeing the GH2 cam on the shuttle so I never thought of that.

    I will let you know my results with the blackmagic pro card, going to hook it up and play with it today.
    Kills my hopes of a high end portable remote HD broadcast station but if it works at home I am making a set here for my live show and getting 5mbit up nd livestreams HD is now better looking than cable networks HD.

  • Vitaliy_KiselevVitaliy_Kiselev
    @Blackout

    About 4in1 card.
    You can get is much cheaper at aliexpress.com (search "HDMI capture").
    I think, if you use multiple cameras it could be good option.
  • SuperRoachSuperRoach
    Blackout, I may be able to help you with my experience. I have a intensity shuttle, intensity pro.
    Read this about usb 3 I wrote:
    http://blog.brettjames.au.com/?p=63
    Where basically speeds can be a fraud for usb3, be careful. Some sandybridge machines will have support. It's the implementation that matters.

    Careful even for desktops - it needs to be a fast enough card.

    I have a laptop that does it fine though, here is a video showing it capturing an hdmi from a ipad2, at 720p 60 resolution:


    Lastly, I don't have a gh2 myself, I'm gradually working myself up to justify it. The agc still being active being the only real point at the moment.

    Hope that answers your questions :)
  • BlackoutBlackout
    I got it working with the intensity pro pci card,

    come check it out now I'll leave it live running for a while for stability:

    http://blackout.com

    http://livestream.com/BlackoutsBox

  • MarkVMarkV
    @Blackout Woha cool! Watching it live on my iPad in 720p and also streaming it live to Apple TV via Airplay in HD! Really cool! It's working!
  • pchristophpchristoph
    I'm watching it on my ipad2. Super crisp. Good work.
  • BlackoutBlackout
    yeah I am amazed
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