Maybe you are a little like me and have a deep appreciation for free stuff –especially when you find it to have special value.

For instance, I still remember as a boy checking out a classified ad from NASA at the back of Boy’s Life magazine. It promised treasures like a poster of the U.S. rockets used for the launches of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions, an impressive book on the space program (a quick search of eBay just revealed it was called “Space: The New Frontier,” which was published in 1967 –used edition $17.77) and a picture of the crew of Apollo 11 –Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins—all of which I wrote in for and received.

I know that poster was prominently displayed on my bedroom wall for several years and the photo arranged as the backdrop on a shelf used as a homespun trophy case. And imagine; it was all free.

Well, free stuff isn’t just for kids. Autocue is offering a free version of its QStart prompter software for the PC. With support for NewTek’s NDI and TriCaster, Autocue, QStart for PC allows users to type in scripts, format them as they wish and automatically play them out as an NDI stream by hitting the Tab key. The software is available as a free download from the Autocue web site.

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“There are more fully featured versions, but what we wanted to do is support the NDI ecosystem by providing a full workflow [for prompting],” says Aaron Brady, technical sales, Autocue. “We didn’t want to restrict people who are looking to adopt NDI by requiring them to purchase additional functionality.”

If greater capability and more sophistication is desired, users of the QStart for PC prompter software can add accessories, such as a foot controller to vary the scrolling speed of captions and add-on camera units, he says.

Autocue was an early NDI adopter and made its free prompter software with support for the IP protocol in summer 2015. The experience Autocue has gained with NDI since then will make it easier to implement in more sophisticated workflows and packages, says Brady.

Since launching QStart for PC with NDI support, Autocue has had many downloads from elementary schools as well as junior highs and high schools, public broadcasters and public access stations as well as “tons and tons of online content generators,” he says.

“That’s the target market for QStart,” explains Brady. “We developed it before NDI, and we anticipated there would be demand for it at those production levels. We were right.”

A major appeal of using an IP protocol like NDI to support prompting, especially in greenfield installations, is the ease with which network cabling can be run, especially when compared to using conventional cabling and converters, he says.

QStart Windows also supports NewTek’s TriCaster series of production switcher systems. For TriCaster, the prompting software is a good fit to support its multiviewer functionality, Brady adds.

It may not be a rocket poster or a photo of the men who made the first moon landing, but that doesn’t mean the free Autocue Windows prompting software with NDI support can’t help you make your productions out of this world.

IBC 2018 opens in Amsterdam in a few days, and IP video transport and networking are sure to be on the minds of many attendees.

NewTek will be at IBC 2018 showing its latest NDI developments. Before the show opens, I had the chance to speak with NewTek President and CTO Dr. Andrew Cross about what the company has in store for the RAI.

Besides discussing the important additions NewTek is making to its NDI SDK, Cross offered thoughts on how the market has accepted NDI and the direction in which the video industry is headed.

(An edited transcript.)

Phil Kurz: What’s new with NDI for IBC 2018?

Andrew Cross: We are going to be announcing NDI 3.7 at IBC, and I kind of trapped myself by releasing 3.5 at NAB. I don’t want to call it 4.0, but it’s the biggest reasonable step I could think of. That’s why it got to 3.7.

It’s a big step forward. There’s a whole load of improvements. The first, which is probably going to have the biggest market impact, is we are announcing what we are calling the NDI Embedded SDK. It’s a version of the software development kit for people who wish to use NDI in hardware devices.

All along NDI has been great for software, and our focus –and this goes back to what our company does—has always been on making it accessible to software users. But that’s only half of the world. So, making NDI something that truly can be used in hardware products has been missing for some time and something we have been working to fix with this embedded SDK that allows people to build actual, real NDI hardware. With that we include the tools to run it on your own device, but we are also making available our own FPGA for NDI compression.

We are actually releasing what we use for our own NDI Spot Connect Pro, which is our own 4K-HDMI-to-NDI converter. We are making this so people can build their own hardware products around NDI. That fills a big gap.

What other NDI releases will NewTek make at IBC?

AC: We are also releasing something we have been asked for a lot, which is a utility called NDI Stream Analyzer, which allows people to get a lot of information about an NDI stream. Obviously, our goal with NDI has been to make it just work for everybody. But at the same time, there are a lot of people and a lot of setups that want more information about how well a stream is working, if there is something wrong with it, the bitrate and the timing information on the stream. So, we are releasing tools that do this for free. We are giving those away.

At the SDK level we are also making big improvements. Honestly, the biggest one –although it might not sound that glitzy, it is really important—is we have put a frame synchronizer into the SDK. You know, when people are building computer software, nobody even thinks about the concept of genlock. So, your computer is running at 60Hz on its monitor, but that almost certainly doesn’t match the 60Hz the camera is running at.

It is nontrivial to take the 60Hz the camera is running at and display it correctly on a computer screen. A lot of people think you just get tearing. But you get a lot of other problems that are related to the clocks not matching. And the same is true of audio, of course.

Our frame synchronizer takes all of the complicated work in analyzing the timing and taking the corrective steps for the timing differences between your local computer clock and the remote clock, and it does all of that for free for people.

This makes it possible to build computer applications displaying and using video and audio without having to worry about timing issues so much easier. This saves so much time for people, and putting it in the SDK makes the SDK much more usable for people.

Beyond that there are a lot of other improvements, such as significant improvements in the way we send data over the network, and personally, that’s been the bane of my existence for the last three months. That is finding better ways to do this because it turns out that a real-world network –like getting UDP with forward error correction working well—is really quite difficult.

There are all sorts of weird wrinkles in the real-world that books don’t tell you about. So, we have significantly improved all of that.

Tell me more about FPGA support and the SDK?

AC: You don’t even have to buy the FPGA from us. We will allow you to buy a Xilinx test board, where anyone working on an FPGA project probably would start –so they would buy a Xilinx or Altera development kits.

We are producing in the SDK an SD card image that you can put onto one of these dev kits, and it will include our FPGA SDK, so it will serve as a testbed for people to build NDI encoders. So, if you bought one of these FPGA dev kits and put the SDK on it, you would have the basics of a working piece of NDI hardware. Now obviously people will adapt that for whatever their actual project is, but you get a great starting point.

And we allow people to get the SDK and build NDI encoders pretty much for free. To take them into a commercial application, we need to work out a licensing agreement with them. But our goal is to allow people to build something, play with it and worry about the details when they want to go to market.

How would you characterize the demand from hardware developers for an NDI SDK solution?

AC: This is a common request and answers a good number of requests from people with interest in doing a hardware-based NDI product. But with so many people and so many requests we will be talking about an embedded SDK 2.0 and 3.0 here soon with all of the additional capabilities people will want.

We are basically a software-focused company, so I am really happy that we are taking the need to make NDI available to hardware vendors seriously here. That’s a good position to be in.

How would you assess where NDI is today among developers?

AC: I have lost track is the answer. What I mean by that is there are so many people using it for so many things that it’s hard to keep track.

Something I have seen is we are about three years in. In the first two years, all of the big software vendors were using it. But if I look at the people signing up for the SDK now, we are seeing more and more startup companies needing to interact with IP video and individuals who have cool projects.

So, it has gone from being something the big vendors use to something that’s the de facto way people quickly use IP video in their startups. It’s gone one tier further from this is what the industry uses to this is the way people experiment with IP video and build products –even at the lower level of the market—and I find that to be very cool.

Has NDI become a de facto standard for IP video?

AC: Obviously, it is self-serving to say yes. But I don’t just for the sake of marketing spin say yes. My sense is certainly that it has become very widely adopted, and I believe the answer at this point is yes.

If you walk around at IBC and in the media and product tools halls and you tick off the companies that support and don’t support NDI, you end up with more than 50 percent of the exhibitors supporting NDI, which is quite remarkable.

I am not saying –nor have I ever said—that it solves all problems for all people, but I certainly think it has become commonly seen as solving a good number of problems for a good number of people in the real world.

Are you or NewTek presenting any technical paper or speaking at IBC?

AC: Personally, I am giving a talk at the IABM meeting about IP video –more about IP video and the place of computers in that than NDI, although NDI is intertwined.

Can you offer a few details?

AC: I get asked a lot of smart questions by people, and that’s helped me to realize over the past few years that the real revolution going on in our industry is one not just about networked video. It is about a broader trend in the market and how computing technology –the combination of computer software and networking—have put together the pieces needed to produce video.

We have gone from a place where computers and the associated pieces of technology weren’t sufficient to produce broadcast quality video to one in which they are.

So, the real revolution going on in our industry, and NDI is part of it, is one in which we are able to use general purpose computing products to produce real-time video.

Our industry tends to look at that as –and I hope I’ve excluded NewTek from this—but or industry as a whole tends to say, “Look these computer things are getting fast, and you can do video with that. So, let’s steal the core things computers do and put them into our products.”

That’s the way many people think, but what I am encouraging is that people think the other way around. Instead of thinking “we’re from the video industry, how do we steal from the computer” think the other way around. The world is computing. We are computing people. How do we take all of this incredible technology and bring it into the video world?

The best analogy I can give is what happened in the phone market. When the iPhone came out, this was a computing company, Apple, which decided they could take a computer and turn it into a phone. At that time, the traditional phone vendors probably thought these guys have no idea what they are doing. This isn’t a phone. It can’t even dial 911 reliably. Nobody is ever going to use this.

But the computer industry said, “Let’s put cool screens on our traditional phones.” And a few years later the phone industry is dominated by computer manufacturers. It’s Google with Android, Apple with iOS and Samsung. Three computer companies own the phone industry now.

That is the exact same shift our video industry is going to go through. And the reason for it is technology has gotten cheaper and cheaper; computers have gotten smaller and smaller; and chip sizes have shrunk and shrunk. We can do more and more for less money, and it’s all connected together via Ethernet and the internet. We need to look as how instead of stealing the pieces of that that we want, we can take all of that and embrace it and build something that is newer and bigger than what the video industry can do on its own.

This is why we created NDI –to allow people to use software and their existing networks on computers they have today. That is where the future of the industry is going to be.

ProMax Systems sees demand for NDI support growing among its customers as the IP replacement for SDI and has responded with a new product to control recording of NDI streams to shared storage and even perform frame-accurate cuts, without tying up a workstation or unnecessarily burdening a facility’s network.

As a supplier of advanced shared storage solutions for those creating film and video content, ProMax has tracked the rise of interest in NDI among the creative community for the past few years.

Some customers of ProMax, which offers an integrated, turnkey shared storage solution with asset management, backup and archiving software, have begun asking, in Cooper’s words, “for proper media management within an NDI environment.”

In response, the company recently released a beta version of its new NDI Previewer software and expects to offer a market-ready version within three months, says ProMax COO Nathaniel Cooper. To put the new product into perspective, Cooper compares NDI Previewer to NewTek’s Isocorder, an application for ISO capture of IP video sources via NDI.

“With [NewTek’s] Isocorder Pro, you can through a workstation record an incoming feed to shared storage,” he says.m“That’s not a bad way to do it, but it eats up a workstation and that workstation’s resources,” Cooper explains.

There’s also a downside from a network perspective. “It creates about double the traffic. What is happening is NDI traffic is passing through the network to the workstation, which captures the data and passing it back through the network to shared storage,” says Cooper.

With NDI Previewer, it’s possible to preview NDI streams, trigger records to ProMax shared storage and even use the Chop feature to do frame-accurate cuts in a file to give editors immediate access to content without tying up the processor cycles of an expensive workstation or creating extra network traffic.

“None of that traffic is actually going through the workstation itself,” explains Cooper. “It’s a clever thing we can do now that NDI exists.” It’s even possible to run NDI Previewer on a laptop connected to a network via Wi-Fi or from home on a laptop connected via a VPN, adds Coopers.

NDI Previewer is a gateway to the other features offered by ProMax’ shared storage solution, such as automatic capture of feeds, automatic backup, automatic file replication and automatic addition of metadata tags to power future asset management and searches.

“There’s a whole media management ecosystem we’ve created,” says Cooper. “Once you start piping files into that, it’s now utilizing all of that media management capability.”

The company chief operating officer adds that ProMax has had “a very good experience” working with NewTek’s “well-organized team” and credits the strong documentation provided in NewTek’s NDI software development kit (SDK) with making NDI Previewer development relatively fast and easy.

(Editor’s note: This is the first in a continuing series of @NDICentral blogs. We welcome your comments and active discussion.)

Fourteen leading developers of the NDI video/IP protocol joined together at NAB 2018 to exhibit their latest products and solutions. NewTek, the developer of the royalty-free standard, hosted the event from the NDI Central Pavilion. Those who couldn’t make it to NAB can watch the coverage on NewTek’s Twitch livestream. The stream showcases NDI developers and creators who are at the forefront IP video production.

Since its introduction in 2015, NDI has become a popular industry standard for sharing video on a standard Ethernet network. The protocol is now in use by thousands of products and millions of users worldwide and is potentially the most widely used protocol of its kind.

 “These fourteen companies represent some of the best innovators among the roughly 1,000 companies incorporating NDI into their products. NAB attendees will be able to explore the NDI ecosystem and discover the amazing devices and applications powered by NDI,” said Michael Kornet, executive vice president and general manager of NDI for NewTek prior to the show. “These developers share our vision of the end-to-end all IP workflow that is a reality today and we’re excited to bring them together at the NDI Central Pavilion.” 

· AJT Systems 

· Boinx Software 

· Changsha Kiloview Electronics 

· Production Bot LLC 

· Easy Media Suite 

· Etere 

· FingerWorks Telestrators 

· LiveXpert by 3D Storm 

· Medialooks 

· NewsMaker Systems 

· NIXUS · Panasonic 

· RT Software 

· Stream Circle

For more coverage on Newtek, visit the TV Technology/NDI Central Hub. 

SOUTHFIELD, MI—ENCO has announced that its enCaption4 automated captioning solution now supports the NDI protocol for to provide turnkey closed or open captions on live video.

enCaption4 is an on-premise or cloud-based solution featuring a real-time speech to text engine for generating accurate live captioning that live TV and online video require. Now, broadcasters, content producers and commercial AV facilities with an NDI infrastructure can add an automated captioning solution into their workflows. Once connected, enCaption4 can automatically generate captions through its NDI input stream, and output an NDI signal with captions keyed directly on top of the video stream. This capability eliminates the need for specialized encoding hardware.

[Read: Closed-Captioning Technology Evolves]

At the NAB Show, ENCO will demonstrate enCaption4 with this new NDI capability alongside the software-defined solution’s breakthrough accuracy, accelerated speed, extremely low latency, and expanded foreign language support.

“With the growing popularity of NDI, we added NDI support based on customer demand,” said Ken Frommert, President of ENCO. “With NDI support, we’re making it easier for TV networks, local stations and non-traditional broadcasters such as corporations, schools and universities, houses of worship, and webcasters to use our automated captioning solutions within their real-time NDI productions.” 

SAN ANTONIO–
NewBay and NewTek, Inc., have announced the NDI™ Central experience at NAB 2017, available to both show attendees and viewers around the world. NDI Central events at NAB 2017 feature a dedicated webcast exploring the video industry’s move toward NDI-powered workflows and a trade show pavilion that brings together innovative developers utilizing NDI in their groundbreaking products.“NDI Central is a valuable news resource for anyone interested in IP-based video production,” said Eric Trabb, vice president and group publisher at NewBay. “We’re excited to work with NewTek to bring the NAB experience and all of the discussion around NDI and IP video to our readership whether or not they are able to attend NAB.”

Over 40 interview segments are scheduled beginning every thirty minutes and include: NewTek president and CTO Dr. Andrew Cross, NewTek founder Tim Jenison, representatives from Microsoft Skype, Vizrt, ChyronHego, Wowza, and many others.
“NDI is spreading rapidly, and we’re seeing unprecedented displays of creativity in live production with the use of this technology,” said Olson. “Both the NDI Central booth and the NDI Central Live webcast will highlight and explore the many ways in which NDI technology is changing the video production industry.”The webcast will also feature a live game show based on the popular Head’s Up charades game. Four times each day participants will compete between the NewTek and Microsoft exhibits using Skype calling technology.“NDI Central Live” streams from the show floor at the NewTek booth, located at SL5016, and will be featured on www.ndicentral.com and hosted exclusively on Twitch at http://www.twitch.tv/newtek from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. PST on Monday, April 24; and 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. PST on Tuesday, April 25 and Wednesday, April 26.Further, NewTek brings together nine of the leading NDI developers at the NDI Central booth, located at SL5421, to showcase how different businesses and industries benefit from the industry changing technology of NDI.Featured at the NDI Central booth:

· LiveXpert™ by 3D Storm – High-end, profession tools for live video and sports production.· Chameleon NDI by Bannister Lake – Your all-in-one solution for branding, tickers, data aggregation, scheduling and graphics supporting: SDI, NDI and HTML5.· Estructure – Unique contribution tools and unmatched compatibility within the most comprehensive platform for newsroom production, archive and contents management. Just compare it.
· FingerWorks Telestrators – Demonstrating its latest NewTek NDI protocol solutions and offering hands-on looks at the tools powered by NDI.

· Make.TV Live Video Cloud – Discover, curate, manage and publish live video from anyone, anywhere for delivery over broadcast, social and OTT.· NewsMaker – The real-time link between newsroom computer systems and the IP Series and TriCaster. NewsMaker lets the newsroom run the show.
· NIXUS – The leading broadcast developer in Japan, NIXUS will present breakthrough software "Celio" using Microsoft Excel.· Pizazz – Creating products for live productions, NDI input and output solutions, remote NDI workflow solutions and complete NDI capable camera solutions.· Softron – Providing flexible software and hardware solutions for ingesting and playing out video from SD to 4K in single or multichannel configurations on the Mac.Further information on NDI Central can be found via #NDICentral, which is also collated on the website http://www.ndicentral.com.

The “NDI Central Live” webcast will be hosted by NewTek’s Rex Olson, vice president of eCommerce Business Development and co-hosted by Philip Nelson, chief relationship officer for NewTek. The program features product information and guest discussions about the latest developments in video production over IP.