NDI Stream from PTZ1 Crashing Displays

[newmethos]

Hello!

I recently worked on a show that was meant to feature live feeds from 2 Newtek PTZ1 cameras. The process was so unstable that the effect had to be cut, but there were a lot of challenges to the setup, so I'm wondering if there are some fixes that we can proceed with to enable their use in the next show (they purchased the cameras specifically at my recommendation because of the integration with NDI and Watchout). 

The specific problem that kept occurring was the when the playhead hit the camera in the main timeline, the display would get behind, taking nearly a second to put the image out, losing all the information from an opacity tween and just popping on, the stream would freeze and then the display software would crash. It eventually would come back as the display program restored. Sometimes there would be a notification that the Radeon driver had crashed, but there would always be a notification that the software had crashed (that's annoying because to the best of my knowledge all User Account Control notifications had been turned off). The display machines and the production computers were built by ShowSage and they are using the FirePro W7100 running Windows 7, though the production computer was running Windows 10. I installed the latest Radeon drivers and was running Watchout 6.6.2. The PTZ1s were in DHCP mode and there was a Synology router handing out IP addresses for the cameras and the Netgear managed switch. No other programs had trouble with the NDI streams from the cameras, NDI's monitor software picked it up on my Mac and on the production computer and OBS never had a problem either, just Watchout. And even the NDI stream coming from OBS was not a problem (we were running AirServer to capture a livestream from an actor operated iPod), EXCEPT when that stream originate from the PTZ1, which was quite frustrating (I was hoping to switch from the NDI-HX coming off the camera to a full NDI from OBS, but didn't having time really mess around with making sure that's what happened in OBS). I also had no trouble streaming live from the Datapath HDMI capture cards. Is the PTZ1 actually compatible with Watchout? Are there particular tweaks to making sure the NDI stream they create is more compatible with Watchout? 

There are several extenuating circumstances here that could have messed this up, not the least of which is that in the process of acquiring the license for AirServer, the production computer caught a Windows update that turned some of the Windows Firewall features back on (that was devious of Windows and very frustrating to fix) and the backup computer had a severe enough networking issue that we had to send it back to ShowSage for repair, so this was far from an optimized computing situation and when I work with the company again, I'm going to have them start from ShowSage's completely clean image, but I would love to know if there was something else I could have done to solve this issue.

[wiesemann]

I have not that much experience with NDI and watchout together, because it seems to have been rather „experimental“ from the start. And Newtek, releasing different versions and flavours is not really helpfull either.

So in general (for Ventuz etc.) I switched to vMix to send NDI from one to other computers. 
Also I would never start an NDI Stream in the middle of a timeline but from the very beginning and fade it in and out with tweens. Also I wouldnt leave the IP-addresses on DHCP.

just my 20 cents

[bambam]

 in my experience best radeon driver  is  17.q4.1. not latest driver. i never had experience Newtek PTZ1 cameras  but 2 ndi camera may force network if you use 1 gb ethernet card .two Newtek PTZ1  take over 200 Mb/s of bandwidth.so it a big problem.As i sad never experience ptz1 but i used via ndi 3 laptop same network  with 10 gb ethernet card.

 

[newmethos]

NewTek recommends the DHCP based set up for the PTZ1 in the manual. My normal instinct is to manage IP addresses as well, but as it happens, the managed switch we are using also prefers getting it's address from an existing DHCP server and we had to have a wireless router anyway, so that wasn't a problem (using the managed switch and multicasting the camera feeds is how I was planning on keeping the network overhead for the two cameras to a minimum).

I didn't have these troubles with all NDI streams, just the ones from the PTZ1s so this remains extra frustrating. I am hoping that the restore to ShowSage images takes care of a lot of these problems. 

Thanks for the input.

[wiesemann]

well, maybe putting the OBS in between, for testing? You know that sources into OBS can be output to NDI, without the need to operate it as a switcher?