Blackmagic Forum

Hi,

Not being from the Broadcast / film world hoping this forum can point me in the right direction. I'm scoping out creating a multicamera rig, matrix style, but with blackmagic micro cameras, and wondering if I can create a recording rig that uses multiple decklink cards either in one computer or across several.

I've searched around and found some info but wondering if anyone has any hands on experience recording from multiple cameras simultaneously using decklink and the API or blackmagic software - is it plausible to record 4, 8 or more channels of 1080 or UHD/4K even (if using the micro studio)? I'm guessing there's a bottle neck at some point saturating the disk write speed, though if it's a decent M.2 drive that point is higher than it would previously have been with SSDs? But in theory could I load a single computer with one or more decklink cards and record on all the inputs at once? I'm looking to get 30 or more cameras going at the same time.

Is this at all plausible or am I barking up the wrong tree?

While it may be possible to get a lot (say 8+) streams recording simultaneously it will not be fun. The overhead to encode in anything but uncompressed video will get too high for a CPU, to get this many inputs working you will need a CPU with a lot of PCIe lanes and you will not have the single core power to do that many streams. Uncompressed does not use this overhead but your Nvme drive will be eaten fast by a few streams. Frame sync will be very tough as you will need a buffer and this will make it a very difficult system to build code and run.

If this is a real project then get a channel of sync-able hard disk recorders with timecode and (like some models of hyperdeck). Do a lot of testing on rental before you buy and check for scalability before you invest.

TLDR No it is not possible on one computer and the cost of getting 4 or more computers good enough to share this task makes easier and more reliable options more economical.

yes, with software "movie recorder" for mac, up to 16 channels, tunderbolt 3, n.2 deck link card blackmagic.

I have built a rig to do this very thing! I can do a max of 32 channels of ProRes. It’s possible, but expensive. I have a new rig being built right now that can add 8 channels of H264 on top of this.

Why Mac Pros?