I’ve never used CasparCG in a live setup, but it looks promising, and I’d like to validate my idea before buying the hardware for my church.
The goal is to do video playout and overlays on a single hardware output and that would be sent to our Atem Mini Pro. Overlays would be on a green background then keyed by the Atem. (I know it’s not ideal, especially because it will be used for video as well, but for now we have 1 input for all this on the switcher)
My questions:
I’m planning to purchase an Nvidia Quadro P400 graphics card. It has 3 miniDP outputs. (The other 2 outputs would be used for monitors) Is this suitable for the job? (I’ve seen posts about the P2000 being reliable, but that’s about 4x the cost)
Currently the computer is used for streaming, but we’ll change that and use the Atem. It would be nice to use the computer to monitor the stream. Is it possible to send separate audio to one of the miniDP outs from CaspaCG while using the integrated sound card for something else?
I would not do that. To use a screen output is not optimal.
There are a few points that speak against it:
Caspars Screen consumer uses much more system resources than, for instance, the Decklink consumer.
Lip sync on audio is problematic using screen consumer / system audio.
Having the video output on the desktop make it likely, that you see the mouse cursor in the program.
For what you want to do I would suggest to use a Decklink Mini Monitor. It has SDI and HDMI output and you get embedded audio, that is always in sync to the video. It is also the cheapest Decklink you can get, so that your budget will not be over stressed.
There is a wrong thinking in Christianity, that it has to be cheap, and that technicians always want to have the Rolls Royce. Tell them, that this solution is far away from being that, and that God deserves a good solution
I appreciate your suggestion, I’ll definitely go with the Decklink Mini Monitor. Do I understand correctly that the Decklink would not be recognized as a screen and only CasparCG could use it? That would be awesome. Also, regarding audio, would it be separate from the system output device? (So we can listen to the stream while playing a video with CasparCG?)
In terms of expectations I think it’s good to aim for the best quality while spending as little as possible. But when you do need to spend I agree you should spend on good quality solutions.
You should also avoid lower end graphic cards.
If your budget is tight, I’d advice you to choose a higher end GeForce over a lower end Quadro. Right now is not the best moment to buy any GPU though.
Look for the memory bus at the card’s specs, if it’s lower than 128bit, probably CasparCG will not run very smoothly.
That is exactly how it works. The Decklink is a “multimedia device” not a screen. Caspar’s video and audio goes to it.
As @rrebuffo already mentioned, it’s not always possible to use the internal GPU, as some do not support OpenGL 3. The better way is to use a separate nVidia GPU. I would probably buy a system, that has enough slots and PCIe lanes (you need 16 for a GPU and 4 or 8 for a Decklink) so that I could add the GPU, when the internal GPU is not performing well enough.
By the way, make sure to add a separate SSD (or RAID 0 of SSDs) for Caspars videos, so that Windows does not share the drive with the video / graphics. And I usually do a RAID 1 for the system drive, so that the system still runs, when one drive fails.
