jochri
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Posts posted by jochri
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To get you started with win 10 tweaking there are essential tools I can recommend:
1. Ultimate Windows Tweaker:
http://www.thewindowsclub.com/ultimate-windows-tweaker-4-windows-10
While you can do all these Tweaks in der Registry and through different commands this software takes a lot of the work away from you.
2. http://winaero.com/download.php?view.1832
This removes Cortana from your PC. It will eventually also stop your search function from working but this should be deactivated anyway.
3. http://apps.codigobit.info/2015/08/win-x-privacy-helper.html
This will remove even more unwanted Win 10 applications.
We are currently testing Win 10 Pro for Workstation as this will be the system which gets delivered with workstations from the big vendors from now on and in the future and which might get the most attention from Microsoft for our field of applications. However this will cost you arround 200€ for an upgrade or 440€ if you just buy it alone... And there are 2 Versions of it. Max 4 Processors and more than 4 Processor Cores. Still waiting for the delivery of some parts for the next generation machines to be able to test the new win...
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Hey AVTermite!
Nice Nickname!
We run Watchout very successful on WIN 10 on more than 20 machines for around a year now.
We also builded machines for some clients based on our WIN 10 image.
About hardware:
Get the fastest single core performance processor you can get. Currently this is either the XEON 1650 V4 or the i7 version of it.
We are experimenting with the new generation but this is still under development and I can't tell you exactly what to buy if you want to be safe!
Also think about PCIe lanes. With additional SSD storage and maybe capture cards you need a lot of storage! Your choice just got 28 PCIE lanes.
If this is enough for you OK. But you will be at the limit of what is possible very soon with PCIe cards.
From the current Intel range I just see the i9 7900x as suitable for WATCHOUT.
Still I prefer the new Xeons. They are even faster than the i9. Dont think about Turbo Boost 3.0. The most important thing is a stable frequency as high as possible for as many cores as possible. The indicator is the ALL CORE TURBO. Means how much speed do you get if all cores are working on full power.
The WX7100 is a good choice. Get it together with a S400 sync card to sync outputs for LED walls.
Emulating EDIDs is a absolute must have! Worth spending the money for a professional card.
If you use ACTIVE adapters you get every signal you want out of the card. The only adapter i can recommend is the CLUB 3D DP to HDMI 2.0
Besides the system SSD stay away from m2 SSDs.
They are getting way to hot and drop in performance. There are some versions with active cooling but nothing I would put into a machine.
We prefer Intel or Micron PCIE SSDS. They are made for 24/7 usage and deliver up to 3250MB/sec.
Regardles of what people are saying, its fine to also run them in raid configurations.
Our current demonstrator goes up to 15.000 MB/s. Think about running uncompressed picture squences in 4K.
Every layer of 4K uncompressed video will need arround 1200-1600 MB per second. Of course this comes at a price. These disks are not cheap and they might fail like others do.
But a least you will have a red LED at the back of your machine reporting the problem. You also got long waranty periods on these disks so in case they fail you will get
a new one fast.
About RAIDs in general. I would trim the machines for absolute performance. A software raid 0 can give you more then 6500 MB/sec on your machine with 2 PCIE NVME disks. Backups should either be made through a content management workstation or on a second backup system. Usually on big productions we do both! Some Raids I got im my hands had caching functions activated. This is totaly dangerous because this function might work good for some small office files but not for delivering stable video streams. By the way - dont buy SATA SSDS go NVMW for the IOPS. These are relevant if you want to play uncompressed TIFF or TGA sequences. Also a lot of RAID 5 controllers are the bottleneck for this. A single Micron or Intel PCIE SSD should give you the storage and performance needed.
10G Network. Absolute standard if you build a machine now! And only with Win 10 you will be able to use the whole 10G. Of course depending on the content. We found that NVME on Production and Display Computer gives you the best performance. 10G cards are not expensive anymore. Intel X-550 is the card to buy.
Bios: Please deactivate all energy saving functions on the processor: C-States, Thermal Protection and most important Intel Speed Step technology. If you got these functions active the machines will run out of sync!!!
The real challenge besides the right hardware choice is of course Win 10. Its a beast to configure and we spent a LOT of time testing different configurations. Once its running its the best system you can run Watchout on. We are currently able to playback 4x4K TGA sequences out of one machine and I guess it will be even more with the next generation we are currently developing. Besides the regular Watchout tweaks we got a list of arround 100 more tweaks for WIN 10. In the end its really a lot to do and you need profund IT knowledge to get the best performance out of the machines. It really becomes an industrial PC and when looking at the taskmanager there should be 0% CPU load and the absolute minimum of processes running in the background. We customize systems for usage as media servers and if you need help you can write me a PN.
If you did all this you have to test your setup a lot to provide absolute stability and performance. The advantage of building your own PC can become a disadvantage if people build machines which crash and dont deliver performance. Thats why competitors of Dataton sell their machines for a lot of money. Because they provide everything from Software to hardware. Still if you do it the right way you will even be able to outperform systems which cost 50.000 $ or more! Of course high end Watchout Systems also cost a lot of money but its cool that you can build a machine which fits your purpose. The WATCHOUT advantage
The question in the end is: What do you want to do with the machines?
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Hey Orlando!
We are currently manufacturing the first prototypes. I will keep you updated!
If you are interested in Beta testing drop me a PM.
Its not a Watchout specific device and you will be able to send control messages to all the standard video hardware in the future too.
However we were inspired by the need to handle more than 500 aux timelines for the TV studio of the footbal champioship in France for german TV.
We are just using all the TCP control messages and return informations the production pc is providing.
The device is based on a single board industrial PC. So its not just a nice button unit with displays but it also
brings the intelligence of the software compared with the reliability of a custom Linux system build in.
It will be modular and expandable. You will get the option of manual droping the Aux Timelines to a display with 2 buttons which you can then assign for example with
Play/Halt/Kill or you can jump to a specific cue. Alternatively you can let the panel handle the Aux timelines and when you add one it will be assigned to a display/button unit without further interaction. All of this is controlled through an easy to use web interface. We are using the standard broadcast switches from NKK which will give you a nice tactile feedback and they will glow in the dark too...
We hope to finish the first prototypes by september this year.
We really want to make this an affordable device an operator can buy. So it should be priced between 2300 $ - max $ 3000.
This will give you 20 Buttons / 2 Push Encoders / 8 OLED Displays. Of course there are pages and a scroll function so you can assign multiple functions.
The new Barco EC-30 in comparison is arround 8000$
What functionallity would you like to have?
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Wow cool introduction to 6.2 Mikael!
When can we get our hands on it? Cant wait to use it!
One question about NDI. Is it completely size and frame rate indipendent from the input side of Watchout?
Im planning to build a small pc as interface with dual 4k60 HDMI 2.0 / DP1.2 input cards. The cards are capable of custom resolutions.
Will Watchout just recognize the stream size and framerate and be ok with everything whats going in?
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When pushing m2 disks to the extreme with tiff sequences we find them overheating soon. So remember to keep them cool!!!
On some machines we use M.2 SSDs in raid configuration but on the normal machines we use INTEL SSD 750 or Micron 9100 PCIE SSDs, sometimes in Raid 0.
These are made for 24/7 usage and are way more reliable then M.2 disks also because of overprovisioning of storage space.
Depending on the configuration they will give you 2500 - 6000 MB/s of data throughput
.When ugprading to fast SSDs you should also consider moving to 10G ethernet which, from my point of view, should be standard by now!
Once you used Watchout with 10G you never want to go back! 10G infrastructure also is very much affordable nowadays.
By the way Watchout on Win10 clients give us a transfer performance of tiff sequences which is 3-4 times faster then on Win 8.1 clients in the same hardware configuration.
Transfering files through windows 10 itself to Win 10 and Win 8.1 clients shows no difference...
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Just to give some idea of what is possible in a high end setup and to add another example of using Watchout as video processing tool:
https://www.film-tv-video.de/productions/2016/06/22/euro-2016-groesser-denn-je/3/ The Article is in German, but you might have a look at the photos.
For the ARD/ZDF (biggest German broadcasters) Euro 2016 Studio Watchout was used to not only playout the contents but also to handle all PIPs on the high res LED wall in a flexible long hour live broadcast with millions of viewers on air. We used the Blackmagic cards with 8 HD-SDI inputs. 1 input was a super wide 4k camera signal which we put in using 4 inputs simultaneusly without problems.
Its always a question of the workflow you choose. What is an important fact to consider is that one operator alone can program the show without triggering (might be through a tcp action or by a classical cue from the director) the E2/ASC/Spyder which makes for a lot faster programming workflow. Especially when latency is not a problem (PPT or other Playback sources) this can be the faster workflow. Also not every show has the budget for E2 and operator. Animated overlays like lower 3rds on the live cam PIPs can be done more easily with simple Alpha Layer files compared to cut and fill workflows on external mixers. Like Rainer was saying, I guess with NDI also input latency will be even shorter than via capture cards today. Until now capture cars are a proven workflow which work very efficent depending on your setup. On the other hand an E2 is a standard piece of hardware which you can rent arround the globe and with a skilled operator you can do a lot of very nice stuff, especially in combination with Watchout. But I think to have the option of doing a lot of video processor tasks in watchout will make you consider it for certain projects!
Regarding CUEs in Watchout. For the Euro 2016 studio mentioned above I wrote something in another thread regarding MIDI control of Watchout. Here a copy of what I wrote:
"We are currently developing a control panel which will talk to Watchout. With 9 -18 OLED displays and broadcast style buttons you will be able to control and monitor
all Aux Timelines you choose. You will see the name and current timecode of the playhead per Aux Timeline. Of course the buttons will reflect the current state of the timeline with blinking and coloured lights.
Last year we were working on a TV show for a big football event on television. Over the weeks of the event over 500 Aux Timelines were created in the project.
Most of them had to be triggered by directors command very fast. To deal with it more efficiently in the future we decided to build a control panel to be able to trigger Aux Timelines with the click of a button. We talk to Watchout via standard integrated tcp commands. You will be able to arrange Aux Timelines as you wish and create different pages.
The panel will also be able to trigger Blackmagic Atem mixers macros and send TCP/UDP/MIDI/OSC messages to whatever device you choose.
More device integration is planned for future software updates. There will also be integration to another media control software to give it the option of physical buttons.
The idea is not to replace touchscreen control apps, but to give users a physical button to trigger events. Of course you can build your own controller using the tcp commands provided in the documentations here in the forum and on the website. Just search for it. Im a big fan of midi controllers as they are cheap and easy to use. Especially in fixed installations you can do a lot of stuff with these controllers and different software solutions!
With the getStatus request you should be able to get the informations you want back from watchout and connect aux timelines to midi buttons. There are lots of midi software solutions to do this. However to make it fully automatic you have to write a bit of code.What would you like to see in a control panel? We are planning to build the first prototypes this summer!"
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As the WX7100 is the successor of the W7100 there should and there is no problem in using them. Of course also EDID emulations works like with the W7100.
The only concern you should have as from our experience, they dont run with high performance with Win7.
We just builded brand new machines for Tiff sequences and decided to go for WX 7100.
All our machines were running Win 8.1 which, we think, is more powerfull then Win7. BUT there is no driver support for WIN 8.1 for the WX 7100!
So we decided to go for WIN10. Tweaking the system for Watchout was more or less a nightmare but after investing a lot of time in research we finally finished them.
Running on very high performance and 100% stable. Also everything in perfect sync with s400 cards!
But be prepared to spent A LOT of time tweaking Win10 for Watchout as its currently not officialy supported. So you should know what you are doing.
The standard Win7 will just be a part of what you need to do in Win10. Be sure to use the Win10 Pro version.
For future builds you also might think about Win10 Enterprise edition as it gives you easier control over your system!
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Hey Jocelino,
we are currently developing a control panel which will talk to Watchout. With 9 -18 OLED displays and broadcast style buttons you will be able to control and monitor
all Aux Timelines you choose. You will see the name and current timecode of the playhead per Aux Timeline. Of course the buttons will reflect the current state of the timeline with blinking and coloured lights.
Last year we were working on a TV show for a big football event on television. Over the weeks of the event over 500 Aux Timelines were created in the project.
Most of them had to be triggered by directors command very fast. To deal with it more efficiently in the future we decided to build a control panel to be able to trigger Aux Timelines with the click of a button. We talk to Watchout via standard integrated tcp commands. You will be able to arrange Aux Timelines as you wish and create different pages.
The panel will also be able to trigger Blackmagic Atem mixers macros and send TCP/UDP/MIDI/OSC messages to whatever device you choose.
More device integration is planned for future software updates. There will also be integration to another media control software to give it the option of physical buttons.
The idea is not to replace touchscreen control apps, but to give users a physical button to trigger events. Of course you can build your own controller using the tcp commands provided in the documentations here in the forum and on the website. Just search for it. Im a big fan of midi controllers as they are cheap and easy to use. Especially in fixed installations you can do a lot of stuff with these controllers and different software solutions!
With the getStatus request you should be able to get the informations you want back from watchout and connect aux timelines to midi buttons. There are lots of midi software solutions to do this. However to make it fully automatic you have to write a bit of code.What would you like to see in a control panel? We are planning to build the first prototypes this summer!
Jochri
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With the getStatus request you should be able to get the informations you want back from watchout and connect aux timelines to midi buttons. There are lots of midi software solutions to do this. However to make it fully automatic you have to write a bit of code.
Tascam 16x08, Behringer FCA610/1616 Audio Interfaces?
in WATCHOUT FORUM
Posted
I think the UA-1010 OctaCapture from Rainer is an excellent choice!
If you want to go more high end I would like to mention the Focusrite 16 Line.
https://pro.focusrite.com/category/audio-interfaces/item/red-16line
Its not on the market yet but it also has a meterbridge which can be very useful when someone complains about Watchout not playing sound
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Then you just point on the meter and show him the moving meterbridge...
But what makes it a real good choice in my eyes is the support of redundant DANTE audio networking.
Edit: Not sure if its really redundant but having two ethernet ports at the unit might be useful for this configuration...
Lots of productions putting a stagebox on top of the Watchout racks anyway. So I think its just the next logical step to avoid the D/A A/D conversion. Welcome to the future...
Some productions over the last months also had more then 8 channels so I think the 16 channels are a good choice but it all depends on the type of shows you are doing.