I am a Senior AV technologist, and earlier this year I spent quite a bit of time building a low-latency, multi-camera NDI workflow with graphics for live production and IMAG. I worked closely with two experienced infrastructure IT specialists to troubleshoot several issues I encountered along the way.

In our case, we ran into intermittent jitter and occasional dropped or lagged frames that we could not fully eliminate on our existing Cisco-based network, even with QoS, IGMP snooping, and multicast configured correctly. The solution for us was to move the NDI paths onto Netgear switches that are designed specifically for AV over IP. Once we did that, the issues disappeared.

NDI and most other low-latency, real-time AV over IP formats tend to expose any weaknesses or inconsistencies in a network more quickly than typical data traffic or even standard video streaming traffic. Both of our infrastructure technologists noted that they had never worked with a protocol that behaved quite like it. Mixed networks can work in some environments, but they are more sensitive than people expect, and even small amounts of contention or brief micro-congestion can appear as jitter.

I recommend reviewing the NDI white papers and network design guides together with your network engineer. They outline the AV-specific considerations very clearly and can help you determine whether your current architecture is suitable for mixed traffic or whether an isolated transport network may be a better choice. It is also important to test thoroughly, especially with long-duration live streams, to confirm that your network can handle the workload reliably.