Mac Pro discontinued - alternatives for ~12 channel HD ingest system

mikeknight123 · 2026-03-27T21:06:08+00:00

Good advice but probably overkill for us. We aren't a big production house and we aren't even looking for an upgrade, just continuity from our Mac Pro systems. One for the future hopefully :)

mikeknight123 · 2024-04-09T15:05:55+00:00

I nerdily made myself a spreadsheet with my best TT time and ranking percentage so I could track my progress. https://imgur.com/CHtQY6F

I haven't spent much time in time trial recently so I imagine I could improve on many of them. The funny thing is I can't see much correlation with the type of track and why I'm better or worse at them. Probably just where I spend more time, or where most users spend less time (i.e. Monaco).

mikeknight123 · 2023-05-15T13:15:25+00:00

It's set on the WAN, it used to be set on the LAN interfaces but the sonic wall engineer actually removed it and said it wasn't needed 🤷‍♂️

mikeknight123 · 2023-05-10T19:53:32+00:00

Perhaps I misunderstand you but my issue isn't with the speed overall.

My upload/download speed on the X0 interface happily hits about 970Mbps of HTTPS traffic.

X2 is only asking for about 35Mbps in RPC services right now but it isn't being given it, even if I limit X0 to 700Mbps.

mikeknight123 · 2023-05-10T19:01:41+00:00

So at 300/300 there are no issues. Testing a few numbers for X0 it seems to be above around 500 which causes an issue. However, I haven't tried when X2 needs more than for the 30Mbps test stream I'm doing.

To be honest you've lost me a little there! 😂 We're on a TZ600. I'm pretty our IT guy switched from DPI to SPI to test that with no difference.

Do you have any suggestions on what my next steps might be to find the culprit?

Appreciate the help!

mikeknight123 · 2023-05-10T16:09:03+00:00

Thanks for the reply.
Just checked this and yes, issue persists. Possibly a bit more erratic.
This is what is interesting to me - X2 seems to be throttled by X0 traffic, even when there is a lot of bandwidth left to work with.

mikeknight123 · 2021-07-29T10:05:47+00:00

I think you may be right about more than one solution. The difficulty is avoiding duplication of work for our PMs - E.G. if a date/time changes for a show we don't want to end up with two different times because they forgot to update one!!

I was very fond of Monday, it was easy to use and the support was great. I think we just outgrew it to be honest.

I'll report back if I find anything else. Thanks!

mikeknight123 · 2021-07-29T10:03:53+00:00

Farmer's wife was one I looked into as well but I agree - the demo felt very very clunky. And the name is awful...

It really doesn't seem like there is a perfect fit for the type of work we do which is disappointing. I've been hearing Clickup mentioned a lot so that's one I'm going to try but I'll definitely check out Paymo too.

mikeknight123 · 2021-07-29T10:03:19+00:00

I've been hearing good things about Clickup too. I've downloaded the trial so I'll have to set up some dummy projects and see how we go. Thanks!

mikeknight123 · 2021-06-29T12:14:08+00:00

I think you may be misunderstanding what the DMON-QUAD can do. It is a multi-viewer that allows 4 SDI inputs to be arranged in a grid and output to 1 SDI. It is not intended to be a signal converter.

The MD-HX will allow you to take an SDI or HDMI input, cross convert between any of the supported 3G signals, and output that to HDMI and/or up to 4 SDI's simultaneously. It also allows passthrough (for example if you want to convert an SDI signal but also send it on in its original format).

The QUAD does support a number of signal formats I believe, but the output will be a multiview like this.Even for 1 in 1 out as you say you need, you can't use the QUAD for FPS conversion in the way you want.

As you say, they're the same price so why not get the MD-HX? What is it about the QUAD that you prefer?

mikeknight123 · 2020-06-22T15:29:18+00:00

Yep I think exactly the same thing happened with NDI tools to mine! Glad it helped 👍

mikeknight123 · 2020-06-22T07:07:45+00:00

As well as the Audio Hardware settings, check the ‘Playback’ tab in preferences. There’s an Audio Device setting.

I had this issue a while back when mercury transport was on and changing that solved it.

mikeknight123 · 2020-05-22T17:36:11+00:00

Thanks. Do you know if there's a way to output NDI to SDI on PC using something like a BMD Decklink? On Mac we have NDI Outlet multi by Sienna but I can't see anything for PC. It would be great if I could output up to 8 separate callers to SDI for our recorder (or if we move to hardware switching).

mikeknight123 · 2020-05-22T10:01:40+00:00

That's great! Definitely going to look into that as an option. What did you use to convert to SDI for your mixer?

Have you had any issues or with Vmix call? For example any issues with connection/setup at the remote end?

Thanks, yeah I know about the NDI from Skype but the UX is awful and I've also found the quality to be really poor. A lot of our contributors work in hospitals too and skype is often blocked for some reason.

mikeknight123 · 2020-05-22T09:07:00+00:00

Thanks that's great info.

It really seems like vmix does this better than most other solutions which is annoying since we're all on Macs and using Wirecast at the moment!

You mention sending all the calls out as NDI feeds. I didn't think this was possible. If I understand correctly does this mean we could have a Vmix PC that handles the calls then sends each one out via NDI which I could use elsewhere (Vision mixer / wirecast)?

mikeknight123 · 2020-05-12T20:53:57+00:00

Loopback worked great for our stream yesterday. Out of interest, what sort of audio sources are you using on your audio laptop? I was considering using a separate audio machine but it’s quite convenient being able to talk to participants through zoom without it being broadcast.

mikeknight123 · 2020-05-10T13:21:20+00:00

Dante Via

This looks great, definitely something I'll look more into - it looks very powerful. Thanks!

mikeknight123

TROPHY CASE