 A couple of months ago, I did something that no parent should ever do. I missed out on a huge milestone in my son's life. He won his first ever gold medal at a competition, playing in a badminton tournament, and I wasn't able to be there to watch it. Now in my defense, this wasn't actually my fault. It was because of the COVID-19 pandemic that no spectators were allowed in the gym. But that doesn't mean that I accept these limitations. So, through the power of technology, I have decided to equip the badminton center where he trains with a 4K camera and microphone on every court so that I will never miss another game, and neither will any of the other parents. This is unlike anything that I've ever done before. I mean, six different streams from six different 4K cameras all coming off one machine, and I've got to do it on a budget? Oh boy. And the video is brought to you by... Ting is a customer-focused mobile provider, and they have new rates to help you save more money on your monthly service plan. Learn more at the end of the video or at the link below. The first step in the journey was to find a camera, or well, cameras. Because while we could have done this with the same kinds of cinema cameras that we use here at the office, like a Blackmagic Pocket or something like that, it would have been prohibitively expensive, and the feature sets of those cameras are designed around making short films or YouTube videos and not around broadcast. Fortunately, I came across this, the CV420CS from Marshall, who I had never heard of actually, because these guys seem to do pretty much no marketing whatsoever. The idea appears to be, if you know who we are, then you know it's good, and if you don't know who we are, you probably don't need it. The feature set of this thing is perfect. It does up to 4K, 60fps, HDMI, and SDI outputs. It's got a CS mount, meaning I can use very affordable lenses, and how's this for a nice little Easter egg? A knock to a cooling fan. This guy's got good taste. What's interesting is that some of the things I would have considered to be a downside for a cinema camera actually work in the CV420CS's favor, like, for example, the small sensor. A large sensor is great for, like, an out-of-focus background or cinematic effect, but it's not necessarily as good if you want an entire scene to be all in focus, like you would for a sporting event. Also, you might have noticed it has no built-in screen whatsoever. That saves on cost. I picked these up secondhand on eBay. They seem to be Marshall demo units, and I got them for just $750 a pop for 4K cameras. Pretty sweet. Now let's have a look at this dongle. This gives me 3.5-millimeter microphone in, 3.5-millimeter line in, a locking power connector, and, oh, yeah, remote control if I'm into that sort of thing. But you don't have to, because look at this. It's got a little built-in joystick on the dongle, and you can go ahead and configure the camera that way if it's just kind of a set-and-forget application. The final setup behind each court is expected to look a little something like this, an inexpensive wall plate and arm, a CS mount lens, and then so that you can get some of the action, you know, like the sound of the racket hitting and all that good stuff, we'll put a small microphone like a Rode VideoMicro. I don't know that I'll go this upscale. I might go for something cheaper, but this is how it would hook up. Now let's change gears and talk about our PC. Obviously, if I'm taking in six 4K video streams, I can't exactly just throw the cheapest Core i3 in it and call it a day, but I don't want to spend a fortune on this thing either. So what I was looking for was a ton of multi-core muscle, but on a budget. And first generation Threadripper ended up being a pretty good way to go. These X399 boards can be found for around 200 bucks these days on eBay, and the 1950X, which is a 16-core processor, can be had for around 400 to 450 US dollars. That's a really compelling combo if you're not gonna be doing any gaming, for example, so you don't need really high single-core performance. As for the rest of the system, I've gone pretty tried and true. Noctua U12S Threadripper Edition, WD Blue NVMe SSD, some Crucial Ballistix 3200 megahertz that I had lying around, although I don't know if we're gonna get those kinds of speeds on first-gen Ryzen, two eight terabyte enterprise hard drives that are gonna be running in RAID 1. The last thing we wanna do is lose that precious footage. A Corsair RM750 power supply, and, oh, I guess this is kinda where the tried and true business goes away. This is fun. This is a Blackmagic DeckLink 8K Pro. This is one of two of these that I will need to take in my six 4K streams, so each of these can do up to four. These are around 700 US dollars, but that is pretty much the only way to go about it. Also, this is something I'm not sure if we're going to need. We'll get into this more later, but consumer GeForce graphics cards have a limit to how many NVENC streams they can handle at a given time. It's an artificial limit, but it is one that I will have to work around, so either we're gonna lean on our Threadripper to use software encoding, or we're gonna use a Quadro to run NVENC encoding on all six streams. We'll just have to kinda see how it goes. While the plan is obviously to build it in a case eventually, and I'm gonna use a GT301 from ASUS, for now, I think what I'll be doing is building it up on the test bench here, just in case we have to swap out some of these components. For example, if I can get away with a much less expensive consumer grade graphics card, obviously I would rather do that. Spoiler alert though, from my initial testing, I may not be able to downgrade the GPU, but rather I may end up upgrading it. Look, six 4K streams. It's a lot, okay? Oh, confession time, I've already tried this, 3,200 megahertz didn't work. I'm running 2933. To make sure that our camera feeds aren't cutting out, we'll put this RGB on color cycle, so it'll be immediately obvious if the image freezes. Okay, neat. After some trial and error, figuring out what the numbering of the SDI inputs are on this card, turns out it goes one, three, two, four, obviously, and remembering that Blackmagic Decklink cards have a separate configuration utility where you have to tell them, I want it to be an input. It's not actually configured that way by default. The capture card was all set up to the point where it says simple as, yes, ha, it worked. But there are still some problems. Problem number one, even though these are first party Marshall lenses, if I screw them in all the way, they are completely unfocused at every possible distance. And you see this, normally on a C-mount or CS-mount lens, this is to actually lock the focus or zoom, but there is nothing that it locks. I can undo it as much as I want, there's nothing here that turns. So I have something booked with tech support to figure that out. For now though, I just have to unscrew the lens in order to get it to focus. That's not the end of the world. And I got another problem. I don't know who to blame for this, but if I go into the menu, 1080p60, for whatever reason, the black magic card thinks I'm running in 3D. See, look at this, Andy, 3D. It's not 3D. Let's do a factory reset. There we go. Because of course, we don't want to run 1080p60 anyway, do we? We want 4K. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, how we doing? Da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da da. Now it's a little fish eye-y, but the reality of it is we don't have that much distance between the back of the court and the wall. So I went with a three and a half millimeter, which on a sensor this size is, what did we say that was about equivalent to like 22? It depends on the crop factor. Depends on the crop factor. There you go. Whatever, the point is, yeah, it's a little distorted, but it's what we're stuck with. Oh yeah. Who needs cinema cameras anymore, right Andy? Yeah, we should just switch to those. Yeah, just switch to these, no problem. Oh, here's something I haven't tried yet. I didn't have a microphone at home. I have no idea what to do with audio here. So what was it? Mic, you wanted mic in? Oh my God, I think it's just working. Oh, I am so happy right now. Sort of. So the barrier I ran into when I was testing this is that each 4K stream that I brought into OBS, whether it was within a single instance or multiple instances of OBS, would add about 30% GPU usage on my Quadro P6000. 30% GPU usage. That caps me at three 4K streams, unless I add a second GPU. But what's crazy is watch this. I bring in four 4K feeds, GPU usage. Oh, this is actually very good news. It's not as high as last night. Well, whatever. GPU usage would go to 100%, but the fan would barely spin. So like 100% of what? But it seems to be just like working great now. So that's good. Oh man, we're 1% away from nice GPU usage on our 420 cameras. I made it this far without commenting about it. I'm pretty proud of myself. Hey, there it is. Nice. This is sick. And they're all like working, right? Sweet. For encoding settings, in a perfect world, I wanna be using Nvidia NVENC on all six of the streams so that the CPU is basically not touched. But I wanna have enough CPU grunt so that I could use CPU encoding as a troubleshooting step if I really needed to. I'm running at 5,500 kilobit per second, which is pretty good for 1080p 60 on Twitch. And then as for where we're actually going to stream, I message Twitch, because I'm a partner. So I'm gonna message Twitch. I can message Twitch, because I'm a partner, so I can message them to ask if I'm actually allowed to create like, you know, five or six Twitch channels and like stream concurrently to them all. I don't know if you're really allowed to do that. So worst case scenario, we'll try and get something set up with YouTube. And then as a fallback, I'll be like, hey Luke, do you wanna put in some engineering time and we can just do this on Flowplane? Let's start recording. These are all just going to the local SSD for now. I haven't actually hooked up the hard drives, but we can do that in a little bit. And coding overloaded. Oh boy, that happened pretty much immediately. There goes the GPU usage. Okay then, second quadro time. We all knew this was gonna happen. While we're at it, I don't have my other quad SDI capture card. So I'm gonna throw this DeckLink mini monitor 4K in here and see if we can use that to at least get a fifth one going here. To attempt to solve this problem, I'm following the steps EPOSVOX suggested for installing a portable version of OBS. So basically you just throw a portable underscore mode dot TXT file in some directory, other than program files that you have unzipped the application to. Then you go into the global config file and add video, adapter ID X equals one. So remember that one is two because zero is one. We're gonna go ahead and save that. And my fourth feed should be coming off my second GPU. Why is the fan not spinning on this quadro? Also I don't see, it's not picked up at all. What the crap? Is this quadro dead? Son of a. So start recording, start recording, start recording. All three of those should survive running on the GP100. So that's the higher performance one. And then I had to throw a lesser quadro in there because my other one's broken. Now let's see what happens if we start recording on that one. I think we're good. And there's more good news. The video and code usage on the P2000 is only 29%. So if I didn't have a P6000 or excuse me, GP100 lying around, then I could definitely use lower end quadros. I wonder if I could get away with G-Force. I'd have to put like three G-Force cards in and have each of them do two. It seems like it's getting even clodgier. Adam also mentioned that one of the things that helps with a configuration like this is actually taking those OBS instances that you want running on a separate GPU, plugging a monitor into that GPU and like moving the window over to that monitor just to make sure that they stay stuck where they're supposed to go. So all that's left now is to plug in one more SDI because that's all the inputs that we have and see if we can get five going. Oh, to get the fifth camera working, we're gonna have to acknowledge one other thing that I bunged up as part of this process. I don't know a lot about C and CS mount cameras and lenses. So I figured, oh, well, you know, rather than just getting all these sort of cheapo Marshall ones, no offense, Marshall, I'll go on eBay and I'll see if there's any better lenses available. Oh, Takina. Oh, they make good stuff. I'll just get a Takina lens. So I picked up this puppy. It's a zoom. It was really affordable. Feels good. Only one small problem. Looks fine, right? Looks beautiful when I have it at maximum zoom. And then, watch this. Oh no. Ever seen a vignette that bad? So it's designed for a sensor that's actually even smaller than the one that I have. So I'm just gonna have to get a couple more of the Marshall first party ones cause I don't feel like digging through all the compatibility documentation of which there's basically none to find which, you know, third party lens is gonna work on this thing. Of course, needing to exchange a lens doesn't prevent me from validating my solution here. I've got five feeds, four of which are still recording without dropping frames. So all I've got to do is start recording on one more and see what happens. So the Quadro GP100 is at 80% usage and the P2000 is at 40% usage or so. And we're looking good. I can play around a little bit with my GPU configs, but I think I have a streaming setup. This is five different angles of my, I have a streaming setup dance. Oh yeah, oh yeah. Got a streaming setup, got a streaming setup. Now all that remains is to set it up at the badminton center and see how it works. Teng Mobile has new rates that make it easier to see how much you're saving when you switch. 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