NDI support

[Joris]

The Syphon version is on the Spout forum, Gabonacorp.

Syphon on the Spout forum, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.

[gabonacorp]

yes, finally I recognized it Thanks Joris!

[Oaktown]

I've been doing some testing using the new Syphon2NDI Client and Server from TechLife with Arena 5 over a Thunderbolt network between two mac computers.

So far Syphon2NDIClient works great receiving NDI with no noticeable delay but I'm having some choppy output when I use the Syphon2NDIServer to send NDI over the network. I will do some further testing and report back!

[dirtyjohn_lv]

Working great. Playing around with the Adobe NDI tools and sending After Effects to Arena for some "live text" and text animations with live preview.

1 thing, could we get some kind of thumbnail for the NDIreceiver FFGL plugin? I loaded the receiver, walked away and came back having a hard time finding it because there is no thumbnail.

Using NDISender on the composition of Arena kills my framerate, from 60 to 25 as soon as its loaded.

[leadedge]

OK, good news and bad news then.

Freeframe plugin thumbnails are tricky and depend on a frame being available when the plugin loads. I will have to look at that and can't guarantee anything.

The frame rate drop is possibly an OpenGL issue where extracting pixel data from a texture can be a time consuming function. I have another method using PBOs but was talked out of it because it would result in latency which could be worse that frame rate reduction. But from what you say it could be the lesser of the evils.

I will revisit this. If I don't have time tomorrow, give me a few days.

[leadedge]

First thing to try : there is a setting in the NVIDIA control panel "Threaded Optimization". When this is checked ON, it can cause one CPU core to max out in some circumstances. See if there is any difference in your system when the NDI sender plugin is running.

Attached are versions of the plugins with some options to try. Don't forget to copy "Processing.NDI.Lib.x86.dll" to the folder where Arena.exe is in case the dll is an updated version.

The first option "Buffer mode", activates the PBO pixel transfer as mentioned above. The second "Async mode" activates a mode within the NDI SDK that sends pixel data asynchronously. Try these with the NDI sender plugin to see whether they make any difference. Keep an eye on latency.

On my system I do see an fps drop from 60fps to 48fps at 1920x1080 for the NDI sender plugin. Buffer mode immediately restores the fps to 60fps. I can't see any latency, although I have not measured it and it is likely only to be one frame.

If buffer mode is OFF, and Async mode is ON, it has the same effect, restoring fps from 48 to 60fps. It seems to be slightly more effective than Buffer mode.

I am keen to hear your results.

[dirtyjohn_lv]

amazing! i'll play with it some more this weekend.

[Oaktown]

Hey dirtyjohn_lv, are you using the Newtek NDI plug-in for the Adobe creative cloud?

[dirtyjohn_lv]

Yep. I haven't paid for it yet, just messing around with the trial. It doesn't allow you to change any output settings and has an ugly watermark on the bottom of output, but that's what the crop effect is for

It uses the Mercury Transmit which is great. So you could use capture devices with adobe stuff and send that live over NDI.

As long as you have a computer that can do live preview without any buffering issues, should work out good. I was using a Sager NP8678 laptop to send with. Using built in simulation effects .

I really want to upgrade my xd460 to the NDI version and see if I can just send my cameras to resolume over network instead of SDI

Syphon to NDI from Resolume to another Resolume with NDI to Spout should work right? Might try and convince a couple guys to test out this setup during a couple shows this weekend, if they are brave enough.

[dirtyjohn_lv]

Results from the weekend.

The buffer and async modes definitely helped. Instead of fps below 30 I can now get 50-60fps (with both turned on).
With just Async on, I can get 30fps. With just buffer mode, I can get about 40fps. Could be a combination of composition size + number/size of outputs + sender.

Even right now with a 1440p composition, 5 outputs and 5 static images fps is below 30 with async and buffer off

Saturday I ran visuals from my laptop using Arena 4 and NDI sender to my main machine running Arena 5 with NDI receiver. This worked great. Had about as much delay as you would expect running through a hardware scaler like a folsom. I had a DVI hooked up to same machine as backup, just in case plugins crashed, which they didn't