Blog

Imagine the flexibility of taking a video camera, connecting it to your local Wi-Fi network, and then instantly live stream high-quality, low latency video to desktops, laptops, and mobile devices worldwide with no additional gear needed. For many producers and video operators doing live events at their office, campus, sports facility, or house of worship, this is a dream come true.

In the last few years, the benefits of NDI workflows have started to make an impression on corporate production teams. By integrating NDI systems and a CAT-6 network topology, the transition to NDI has helped companies reduce the amount of HD-SDI cable runs between their control rooms and auditoriums as well as allow them to easily route video and audio signals to and from any studio and control room.

Bryan Nelson, Alpha Video’s resident NDI expert, was asked to present on remote production workflows as part of a recent “Work-from-Home: Media Consumption in the Age of Covid-19” national webcast hosted by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE). The SMPTE organization includes more than 7,000 members worldwide and includes motion-imaging executives, broadcast engineers, creatives, technologists, researchers, and students who volunteer their time.

NDI remote workflows allow live productions to be virtualized by hosting all of the routing and signal processing in the cloud. HD-SDI sources are converted to NDI and streamed through the public internet. Cloud services like AWS, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure host the NDI processing and routing software. Producers and directors can use local laptop software or IP-based hardware to monitor, switch, and insert graphics.