10 cameras IP+USB-cam production

[Johan Lundberg]

As a little extra special we did a behind the scenes production on this years finals of the STCC (Swedish Touring Car Championship). Of course our main focus was the big STCC production, so the behind the scenes stuff was more as a very appreciated bonus! Vidblaster was actually auto-cutting most parts of it by itself. :)

Vidblaster setup:
7 Axis IP-cameras
2 Microsoft Lifecam Cinemas
1 Decklink card (capturing the PGM from the main production via SDI)

Global resolution set to 640x360 at 25 fps


During setup and testing the IP-cams were running at 1280x720 with MJPEG compression. We wanted to test if the rather high network traffic would be a bottleneck. Peaking around 160-170 Mbps pure IP-cam traffic on the PC's network card with cameras still running fine was proof enough. CPU was around 25-30% on the i7 920.

The cameras were then lowered to 640x360, since that was the resolution used for recording.

All in all Vidblaster performed great and we now know that there's no problem throwing alot of IP-cameras on it.
The only problem was with Vidblaster deinterlacing the incoming PGM signal from the main production, which was produced in 1080i. A better deinterlacer (which I know Mike is working on) would really have helped!

Screen shots of Vidblaster attached.

[Johan Lundberg]

And here some Behind the Scenes of the Behind the Scenes! :)

[ssmyth]

Thank you ... do you have pic's of the camera locations? WOW

[weconverse]

Whow, cool, thanks for sharing!
Any video clips you can share, I'm particulary interested in what the IP cams gave, and which model(s).

[Mike]

Very nice Johan, thanks for sharing.

[m4tteo]

Great jobs.

Which model of IP Camera do you use?
How receive the audio from where IP camera is?

[Johan Lundberg]

Stephen:
If you look closely you can actually see one of the Lifecams in the first of the pictures above. It's sitting on top of the vision mixer just above the papers laying there. Everything took place in a OB-truck, so it might be a bit confusing. The attached layout image might help you with orientation. The blue screen with VB on it is the Vidblaster computer.

Richard:
I have alot of material recorded, some really nice stuff. I'm not sure yet if and what I can make public, but I could perhaps send you some samples if you like.

Matteo:
Audio was not recieved from the cameras. We instead took the audio directly from the production's intercom system straight into Vidblaster.

Richard & Matteo:
The IP-cams used were Axis M1054 (http://www.axis.com/products/cam_m1054/), a quite small fixed network camera with no PTZ. Since lighting was quite low in the productions they had to fight some low light, which lead to some noise. Overall I think they managed quite well though.

[weconverse]

Johan, if you could send a small sample just showing the video quality from any of the IP cams that would be great, even more so if one piece from one of the webcams as a comparison. I do understand the issue with poor light, which often is the case for us.
thx!