Blackmagic Forum

I have a live setup in which we regularly use a Hollyland Mars transmitter and receiver to transmit the camera signal to an ATEM switcher. I am looking to upgrade our cameras and our switcher, but with a new system, I am interested in sending the program REF back to the camera wirelessly to use the on camera tally light. Is there hardware that can send ancillary SDI tally data wirelessly from an ATEM 1 M/E Production Studio 4K to an Ursa Broadcast G2.

Am I better off getting a wireless tally system separate from the on camera tally such as the Cerevo Flextally?

Yes there is. But you already contacted us

The WRCU will give you realtime wireless tally and CCU control over your BMD Ursa cameras.

The data will be derived from the SDI out from the Atem mixer, converted to our BG-CCU protocol and send wireless to the camera over a range of 100-500 meters depending on conditions on location.

The RX will convert the Wireless data back to control data that the Ursa Camera can handle including external tally light output and tally in the camera.

I'd been looking for an off the shelf product to do this (didn't realize Broadcast Gear made something). At €2100 that's nearly 2/3 the cost of the camera body (UBG2) itself.

I knew of the MiddleThings APC-R (https://www.middlethings.co/apc-r-controller/) but it uses bluetooth so it's CCU data only, no tally.

I picked up an SDI arduino shield to build my own version of this. I'll be posting the code as I go for anyone else who wants to build their own.

Mike Ambrose wrote:I picked up an SDI arduino shield to build my own version of this. I'll be posting the code as I go for anyone else who wants to build their own.

Good luck especially with the Data input side of this. We spend 4 years in R&D and several different prototypes before we finally had a stable product that was ready for production environment.

Its more difficult then it looks. But yes i like to see your approach to get it going. Always good to see innovations and different approaches. Everybody learns from that.

I know there are some issues with the shield reading the data over SDI. For now I intend to do as much as possible over IP so that the transmitter doesn't need to have an SDI line running to it. (I'm also designing it for use in a house of worship and have no plans to commercialize it so I can be as specific as necessary for my particular use case.)

There are many issues with reading SDI with the BMD shield. That is why we never adopted that and developed our own capture unit to decode the data. And also why BMD never officially released that function that it could spit data out. As they knew that it wasnt stable enough.

IP based from the atem is a huge headache as BMD often put changes to the IP based protocol. And the docu from Skaarhoj is far out of date.. Using that core from skaarhoj will crash the atem running FW8.x

At least that is from my observation doing a different project trying to re-adopt the old skaarhoj core.

I remembered during the original UBG2 announcement there was a demo of how the streaming bridge could handle things like tally. (I believe the first and only tally that BMD supports on any camera that's not fed from SDI). Today I reading the manual and noticed that this also works on a local network.



I just purchased a streaming bridge along with a Belkin USB C ethernet adapter and an IOGEAR wired ethernet to wifi adapter to see if I can get this working over WiFi. I'll report back on my findings.

I'm happy to report that the streaming bridge setup works great! Tally and CCU control are very responsive on a local network (~100ms for tally, ~300ms for CCU).

Along with the bridge I also bought:

USB-C ethernet adapter https://www.amazon.com/dp/B014FBQ738
Wired ethernet to wifi bridge https://www.amazon.com/dp/B018YPWORE
USB C Hub
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08V3PHKR8

I'm currently experimenting with USB C hubs to see if the wired adapter works through a hub. (The wifi bridge needs 5v USB power and even though my V-mount battery has a USB port I'd prefer the camera power it so that it'll turn on/off with the camera power.)

Edit: running both the Ethernet adapter and the wifi adapter through a USB C hub on the camera works great!

Quick side note that I missed at first- the streaming bridge has a corresponding firmware update that also needs to be installed for tally & CCU to work.

Hello,
Would you be able to only pass the CCU information (even with video from the streaming bridge), but actually utilizing a video RF transmitter (like a bolt)?
I'm assuming that tally would be lost but might use the return of the streaming bridge to the camera for CCU and the video TX (teradek bolt) to the Atem.

Thanks,

YAL_YAL wrote:Hello,
Would you be able to only pass the CCU information (even with video from the streaming bridge), but actually utilizing a video RF transmitter (like a bolt)?
I'm assuming that tally would be lost but might use the return of the streaming bridge to the camera for CCU and the video TX (teradek bolt) to the Atem.

Thanks,

Are you asking if you can use the streaming bridge in tandem with a bolt? If so, then yes. I get my IMAG via wireless SDI and CCU/tally from the streaming bridge at the same time.

YAL_YAL wrote:Hello,
Would you be able to only pass the CCU information (even with video from the streaming bridge), but actually utilizing a video RF transmitter (like a bolt)?
I'm assuming that tally would be lost but might use the return of the streaming bridge to the camera for CCU and the video TX (teradek bolt) to the Atem.

Thanks,

And that is why we have that WRCU.. Realtime, long range, and works perfect with Bolt transmitters etc..

Without the need for Wifi networks. wifi accespoint on your camera or connected by USB on a phone that needs to run the job on 4G...

I just purchased a streaming bridge along with a Belkin USB C ethernet adapter and an IOGEAR wired ethernet to wifi adapter to see if I can get this working over WiFi. I'll report back on my findings.

@Mike I'd like to pick your brain on this a little more, do you have more detail about how you had this set up?

@Mike Thank you for all of the replies! The information about the streaming bridge was very helpful! I'm wondering if you would know if timecode and genlock can be transmitted through the streaming bridge as well?

@Freq1cy Sorry I didn't see this. How can I help?

@drews0014 Neither work through the streaming bridge. The streaming bridge is not suitable for any type of low-latency scenario. Even if you had somewhat low latency (<100ms) it still wouldn't do you any good. Timecode being off by 100ms wouldn't be helpful and genlock being inconsistent would be completely non-functional.

Your best bet would be to jam the timecode or buy a device designed for this such as a Tentacle
https://tentaclesync.com/

Jamming timecode is where you plug the camera into your TC clock then unplug it and the camera keeps counting internally. This isn't perfect as devices can drift but it's better than not syncing at all.

Also the streaming bridge has different latencies in different network layouts. It will never be the same latency. Lowest latencies i have seen is 250ms in a local network and up to 3 seconds running trough internet.

So timecode would not work at all.. Same applies to Genlock.

@mike I was basing my setup on the diagram you used, but with a wireless USB adapter in place of the USB ethernet adapter. What I'm a little lost on though is why you're going SDI out of the bridge into the atem. Wouldn't video input still be sent from a teradek or the like on cam?