Has there been any changes to the Wirecast / Vidblaster Battle? I hear really good stuff about both but what bothers me is the lack of support from vidblaster
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Has there been any changes to the Wirecast / Vidblaster Battle? I hear really good stuff about both but what bothers me is the lack of support from vidblaster
@Dahalabit: Don't be bothered. Just check out That VidBlaster Guy! I may be prejudiced, but he (me) gives good support! Email, Skype, cell phone. :)
Changes have to be referenced to a specific point in time. Wirecast has been rolling out features with nearly every "minor" update so what's important depends on what you need.Quote:
Originally Posted by Dahalabit
Virtual Camera and Virtual Microphone is one. More and custom canvas sizes is another but not critical for some and must haves for others.
XOS Digital® ThunderCloud LiveScore for professional sports casters is a niche feature but major in that niche. It brings in real time scoreboard data for overlay.
http://www.telestream.net/wirecast/t...-livescore.htm
Matrox VS4 Video In card support gives Wirecast ISO recording for each source.
While you can alway DIY there's now a good variety of turnkey solutions built around the VS4.
http://www.telestream.net/wirecast/matrox-vs4.htm
You cannot get any better support than what Tom Sinclair, ThatVidBlasterGuy, provides !!!Quote:
Originally Posted by Dahalabit
By far Wirecast at this point. Vidblaster seems to have removed features like the playlist and for many people there is no longer anything holding them back from jumping ship to wirecast. I have said this for years that wirecast is the total package.... Hey they even help you out if you have a problem rather then having a ruthless tyrant give people "infractions"
And more good stuff announced for Wirecast. x264 encoding is a major under the hood improvement. I also think the WebStream plugin is going to be interesting.
Cseeman,
What is the Webstream Plugin?
Quote:
Originally Posted by TommySulivan
http://www.telestream.net/company/press/2013-09-12.htm
Web stream plugin allows an IP or web-based live feed to be used as a source, supporting RTMP, RTSP, MMS or HTTP as input sources into Wirecast. This enables a Wirecast live stream to be used as a source in another Wirecast.
Allows Wirecast to use multiple streams as sources and at the same time too. Think of multiple field reporters streaming to servers in which their streams can then be used as camera shots in Wirecast.
i enjoeyd wirecast more because u can do lots with it and i love wirecast
So I like Wirecast a lot. The X.264 encoding blows away any H.264 FMLE based solution (VidBlaster) and that's one reason why I use it to encode the output of my TriCaster. I also think Wirecast's paradigm of GPU processing demolishes CPU based video processing. Wirecast was ahead of the game in that regard - they built it on OpenGL in 2004 and years later they are still doing it that way.
To sum up - things I like about Wirecast over VidBlaster:
GPU YUV processing (OpenGL)
New local Desktop Presenter - It's awesome for games
Desktop presenter
Scaling (especially 3D perspective, Wirecast looks way better)
Multiple destination streaming
Layers are much more intuitive than modules in many ways.
Use any Quicktime codec to record - VB is limited to MPEG2.
Price - WC Studio will do pretty much everything you need for $499 and that license allows any operator to use it. To get the same functionality you'd probably need VidBlaster Broadcast desktop license which goes for around $6k. At this point I'd probably be inclined to look at TriCaster 40 or 410.
Joe
OK. So lets separate the fact from the opinion. Yes Wirecast does have its own encoder as Joe says. But Vidblaster, and Vmix, whilst natively supporting FMLE can use ANY encoder. Including Wirecast, or FFMPEG which are both x.264 solutions. When there are critisicms of the encoding on both VB and VMix, the author is really criticizing Adobe.
VB will allow you to record in multiple formats. If you want .wmv for example it is there in v2 builds. Understand that the current build supports MPEG recording only AT THIS STAGE, but as with other functionality the developer has indicated that there are intentions to expand the codec support. It is quite a common practice to offload the recording to another machine (irrespective of whether you use Wirecast or VB or any other switching software) so this part of the debate is somewhat irrelevant.
All of the Switchers are very different products. You will find things that you like in each and things you don't like. For me I like the intuitive nature of VB and for broadcasting Sports I find it the best switching solution of all of the products I have tried. Can you broadcast sports with other switchers? Of course, but for me, and I stress me, VB works. I love vMix's desktop capture and the Web Interface. Both free and there well before Wirecast's offerings. I like the cleanness of the the Wirecast interface and the composition tools. That is an indication of the size of the Telestream development team.
The price on all of the tools is pretty normal when you compare them against other niche or enterprise toolsets. A tool such as SAP for example will cost over $2000.00 per user and then an ongoing maintenance charge of between 15% and 25% RRP per annum. We should think ourselves lucky that the manufacturers of our products do not charge in the same way.....
Andrew,
You make some good points. However I am not sure that I agree with your perspective. Your comment about the "Size of the Telestream development team" is certainly not correct. The WC development team consists of 2 people (according to the WC blog).
I am not sure that I would choose to broadcast sports with VidBlaster, considering I am yet to see someone sustain 720p60 or 1080i60 with VidBlaster with multiple cameras, however I would love to see any videos of this done.
As for the pricing thing, I don't know that I can agree with this. VidBlaster desktop license @ $6k seems very high considering WC starts at $500 (anyone can operate). Of course it's probably worth mentioning that you could also get a NewTek TriCaster for that price, at which point you get the hardware bundled and anyone can operate it. I'm not sure that we should considering ourselves lucky, considering it only seems to be VidBlaster that charges that much for the SW.
Joe, You keep harping on about 1080p etc. This misses the point. Most sports venues cannot provide the connectivity to stream at that resolution anyway, so most broadcaster do not try to do it. Yes the Premier League clubs can but that is not the audience of the software switcher developers. So as a broadcaster, I look for other things than simply the maximum resolution and frame rate that the tool supports. Also most of the people who use VB/vMix/Xsplit etc do not purchase the high end licences. And even with VB I would expect there be very few Broadcaster licences sold in comparison to the Pro licence which is the equivalent to the WC licence you keep referencing. As for the licencing model, yes you can disagree with how it is presented, but it is the Manufacturer's decision and you either accept the condition or you don't. As I said, it is comparable to what happens in the business world with specialist line of business applications. These are bespoke applications with a limited audience. By default their pricing will be very much higher than we see with tools such as Office etc. I would love to see you raise the same line of argument with Adobe re. their pricing for the CC Suite and see where you get! Would I like to pay less? Sure! But am I going to sway any of the manufacturers as the purchaser of 1 licence. No. So get over it.
By the way I own licences for all of the tools. Do you?
Hi Andrew, this caught my attention. I don't think that statement is correct. The WC license does not limit you to just so many "modules" or shots, and anybody can operate it :-) The cost is same, you are right, but you get more for your money I think. Am I right? I use wirecast for encoding now, so I don't know much about the rest of it.Quote:
Originally Posted by AndrewSeabrook
I know you know your stuff, so I was wondering about this statement.
Andrew,
The live streamed delivery of the production can be a very small piece of the puzzle. Sometimes you may need to deliver a program feed (or a separate mix) to a screen etc, at this point the resolution and framerate is very important. The media often needs to be reused, and of course for that reason it must look great.
What I do not understand is - it makes no sense to not process the video at the highest possible resolution. Pretty much any high definition camcorder you buy today is going to output 1080i50/60, so why would you not process the video at this resolution? If you do it the other way and downscale everything coming in, you have taken a big quality hit before the video even hits the switcher. By the time you have done any effects that you want to do, the video is already being scaled twice which will result in some pretty unpleasant aliasing and scaling artefacts. The goal should be that if you need to scale, you do it at the last possible point in the pipeline. Over wise the video will not look as good as it can. It's also far more efficient to deinterlace or scale the final program output, rather than processing everything coming into the switcher. The point is - if your cameras output 1080i50 - process at 1080i50. If they output 720P60 - do all your processing at 720P60. Doing it any other way does not make all that much sense.
FWIW, I own 2 Wirecast Pro licenses, 1 Wirecast Studio license as well as a license for TriCaster 8000.
Joe,
You are correct! This is just like the same discussion that goes on in the world of still photography when discussing camera RAW versus JPEG. If you are doing pro level stuff you will always want to shoot your stuff in RAW formant and process your files in the same resolution. Only when you are done with doing your editing should you save your files as JPEG and at a lower resolution. Once you throw those bit away you can not get them back.
Things do not work like in the movies where you can just zoom on in to an area that is blurry and have it get clearer if the data has been thrown away to make the file smaller.
- Brian
Joe,
I think you are being disingenuous when you to refer to VidBlaster as a $6k package. The equivalent to Wirecast Pro would be VidBlaster Studio retailing for $995, same as Wirecast.
Tom,
There are 2 issues here. One is the feature set, and one is the licensing type. On the feature set thing, I'd say Wirecast Pro is equivalent to VidBlaster Broadcast. Wirecast Pro can pretty much do anything that VidBlaster Broadcast can do (Check the feature matrix for both products, FWIW Wirecast Studio comes pretty close to VB Broadcast). For example in Wirecast Pro I can do unlimited shots, where in VidBlaster Broadcast I am limited to 50 modules.
As for the $6k thing, as I noted in my post I am referring to the desktop license. The thing is that if you buy the single user license, if say you where at an event and suddenly you fell down some stairs and broke your neck (worse things have been known to happen) and you need someone to fill in, you'd be breaking the license agreement at which point your license could be terminated. With a Wirecast license or TriCaster anyone is free to use it, without any licensing restrictions.
Thoughts?
Joe,
This is quite interesting. As an IT consultant and having worked in the IT industry for decades I can say that I do not get the logic behind restricting software to a user and not a system. I have seen way to many situations where people need to move software from system to system or person to person. If you look at Microsoft as an example, they do not care if an employee comes or goes but as long as the system that the software is on does not change. When it comes to site licenses, those are handled differently of course but they are still per device/computer and not restricted to a person.
Of course, any developer can chose how they want people to use their software. Either by giving it away or charging as much money as the market will allow. The thing here is that it does look to me quite shady to tie software that should be a tool to be used to a single person. This would be like Sears with their Craftsman tools saying that only one person can use a hammer and anyone else who touches the hammer has to pay more for access to that hammer. Of course that is just as insane as tying licensing to a person the way that VidBlaster has done. Just as Joe has said above, there can and will be many situations where more than one person needs to use a single copy of a software on a single install without being called a pirate.
- Brian
I am sorry Tom but the only one being disingenuous is Mike from Vidblaster. Desktop License ? Personal License? Mike is looking to screw its customers. I have been wanting to but Vidblaster for months and his bullshit licensing and the way he talks to paying customers on his forum have made me go buy Wirecast. I will gladly spend the 1000 dollars and know I will get support and not get banned from a support group becasue i dared to ask a question.
The Truth is Vidblaster is not a good product. It may have been better then Wirecast at one point but not anymore. It can not perform at the at the level of Wirecast. Your Broadcast quality is a prime example of all that is wrong with Vidblaster. Another great example is people like Brian Brushwood and Andrew Zarian no longer using the software. Why would these two broadcasters no longer use Vidblaster after many years?
Wow... I didnt know it was that bad for people who moved over to the latest Version of Vidblaster. what changed ? I know Brian Brushwood was a big supporter of Vidblaster.
Tommy,
I am glad you can see things clearly. I agree 100 percent that it does look like Mike is trying to screw his paying customers by trying to make it look like VidBlaster is less expensive than it is if you follow the licensing to the letter of the law (as you should). Plus, getting "infractions" and being banned from a support group that should be there to provide a place to discuss the product pre and post sale just does not make sense at all.
Ultimately, there are only so many people that need video switcher software and the more people you alienate the less future sales you will have. It is just like many of those restaurants that have been featured on Kitchen Nightmares. Once their reputation is shot, people stop coming and they have to close their doors. Good customer service goes a long way to getting future sales and keeping the business going for the long haul.
- Brian
Ammon...WC has two licence points essentially. http://www.telestream.net/wirecast/compare.htm The $500.00 has limits on the feature sets. Some of the things that you can do in the $500 version of VB you can't do in WC Studio and visa versa. VB has 4 price points. The feature sets available are limited by the level of licence you buy. Essentially it a similar approach. Where the difference is that VB also is offered as a named user licence or a concurrent model and wirecast is simply concurrent. I am not certain on the upper limit of shots in WC. I haven't seen them but the Studio version does not allow scoreboards, IP cameras, virtual sets etc that you can do in VB Pro.
WC then charges a yearly fee for "premium" support. VB doesn't.
When you say that you are using WC to encode you are really saying that you have stopped using FMLE. You are still using VB to output to WC.
The vMix model is similar to VB in that there are restrictions on the Inputs(modules) and resolution at the different price points. The product however is much cheaper at each price point than both VB and WC.
Quote:
Originally Posted by AndrewSeabrook
Andrew.... i don't think you understand what you're talking about. Going into a forum and being banned and yelled at is not support. The virtual set thing is not true either. VB has no support for virtual set at all, where as in WC (even studio) you can build a virtual set with layers.
Andrew The "Premium" support is for phone call support. I do not see how that is a negative.. Does Vidblaster offer the ability to call and get one on one support?
Clarifying a few things regarding Wirecast.
You can have Wirecast actively licensed on two systems at the same time. You can easily move the licenses from machine to machine as needed (wait about 15 minutes for deactivation/reactivation)
This means you can have a backup system up and running at the same time if one system should go down. For some this is a must in a professional streaming environment.
Also these two system can even be different OSs, one on Mac one on Windows at the same time.
This also allows you to take advantage of OS specific features. For example, on Mac you can record to Apple ProRes which is good for post workflow. On Windows you can record to WMV and stream MMS.
VidBlaster limits upload to 1mbps unless one goes to Broadcast version (30mbps) which is nearly $2K for Single license and nearly $6K for Desktop License. Wirecast has no limit even at $495 (and see licensing above). This also means it's easy to do a 720 stream in Wirecast in the base priced version.
Note that Ustream and YouTube have Wirecast versions that are limited to their services at much lower prices starting at free.
As per Joe's comments yes, even if you're only streaming at a standard def frame size you may be recording at 720 or 1080 for post workflow for VOD use.
Wirecast streams to multiple servers with the $495 version whereas VidBlaster requires Broadcast.
You'll probably see more features at the same price points when Wirecast 5 arrives very soon.
Premium support is an optional addition which not only includes phone support but remote access so support can login to your system to help troubleshoot. Email support is also expedited.
Regarding sports, Wirecast Windows can integrate with Xos Digital Thundercloud live scoreboard service.
There's no "module" limit. As many shots as your system can handle each can be 7 layers deep and with 5 additional Master Layers.
Don't underestimate the important of built in x264 encoding and its ability to customize so you can use a single computer for both switching and live streaming without overrunning the CPU resources.
I like to look at Telestream the same way I look at apple with certain features. Other companies may be first to implement features, but like Apple, Telestream does it best and RIGHT! Virtual Camera out. Perfect example. Telestream doesn't cease to amaze me with the innovation level. Love them, hate them, but they are ballers and you have to except it! There is a reason people flock to buy the software. Because it is reliable, and I will say no software is perfect, but I will say, if I was planning a big event, and my job depended on it, Telestream would be my choice over VidBlaster. Which is why I've used it in many ways over the last 5 years. We can sit and debate until the cows come home. But I would like to say, if you don't know the software, don't compare it. Meaning I see a lot of "Wirecast can't do this and vidblaster can." I would like to challenge your statement and say your wrong. Get the facts before comparing. This is why people are improperly informed.Quote:
Originally Posted by TomSinclair
I can see that VidBlaster had a strong feature set that Wirecast didn't support for some time.
VB had virtual camera out and live thumbnails for a long time before Wirecast.
Wirecast's live thumbnails allow control of the frame rate or can be disable to lower CPU use.
Wirecast is adding RTMPT/RTSP/MMS/HTTP support through its WebStream plugin in Wirecast 5.
VidBlaster's Advanced Chroma is very good and replay is also a nice feature.
Telestream may be slower to add those features but they're also working cross platform.
Regarding company resources, Wirecast was originally just a couple of guys with a small company Varasoft. Telestream bought them and added supporting resources so the coders could focus on just that rather than running every aspect of a company. In those early days Wirecast was Mac only and Quicktime only (no Flash). Telestream is the key reason for Wirecast's feature growth.
While Mike V has done a lot on his own perhaps it's time that he consider going the Varasoft route and look for a buyer to expand the company. At the very least CombiTech may need partners to grow. He may need to consider hiring support staff.
CseeMan,
I agree that it would be best for Mike V to look at selling off VidBlaster to a company that can handle customers professionally and courteously. From everything I have read, it sounds like he does not like to deal with people and probably has Asperger Syndrome and an Introvert. While he may not like to work for someone else, it would be much better for VidBlaster as a solution. This way he could go back to being a programmer and not have to worry about sales and marketing. While it is great to run your own company. It does take a special kind of person who can make it work well. At the end, Mike V needs to do what is best for him.
- Brian
Tom Sinclair offers that to those who buy from him. But that is by no means a "company" policy.Quote:
Originally Posted by oscarmartz
Brian, so where have I said that any of this is a negative? If you don't like the product, don't buy or use it. It is as simple as that.
My intention with my comments is to lower the personal nature of the debate and stick to more objective and observable fact. As I said above all of the tools are fine. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. I use all of them for different purposes and love that fact that they will all inter-operate. I have had excellent support on each forum and have had excellent support from each company./ Let us get the tenor of the discussion away from the abusive and destructive personal rants about individuals and instead concentrate on improving our production values in the product we are all producing. The switcher software we use, whilst important, is in reality only one small part of that puzzle.
CseeMan. Your explanation on the background of Wirecast was interesting. I hadn't realized that WC had been around as long as it has. It also supported my comment that Telestream provides a much larger team for the development of the product, and for those who will quickly chime in that there are only two developers, don't underestimate the graphic designers, testers, support people etc that the broader Telestream supplies. That is why they are more able to work with external companies to develop interfaces and functionallity than a single person team.
Quick restatement about streaming...VB and vMIx use FMLE as the default encoder. You can stream to multiple CDN's using FMLE and you can stream at multiple bitrates. FMLE can achieve the same result as the WC encoder, but it does it differently. Both VB and vMix can use other encoders...WC for example or FFMEG....or hardware encoders. Please let us stop confusing the encoding question with the switcher.
Backup systems. In WC/VB/vMix you are able to have a second copy of the software installed on a backup machine. In all cases, only one copy may be operated at any one time.
Streaming settings. Yes VB has restrictions on the upload stream if you are using the inbuilt interface to FMLE, but you can input directly to FMLE and bypass this restriction on all versions of VB.
Recording and streaming at different resolutions. You can do this with all three products. As I said before there are different ways of achieving this result.
Yes, VB and vMIx are resticted to windowsOS's, but you can run them on Macs using a Windows install on that hardware. I have also been able to run them, and WC, in virtual machines on WindowsOS.
Recording Codecs. What most miss in the discussion about codecs is that they, in the main, have to be licenced, and therefore add to the cost of the product. Also as the codecs are updated, so there is an increased resource load on the development teams to test and modify their code to support the new codecs. Each of the companies makes a commercial decision about the codecs that they will bundle and support into their product.
Your point about CPU use is valid. WC and vMix take a lot of advantage of the GPU, whilst VB primarily targets the CPU. The VB chromakey module uses both CPU and GPU resources.
I agree with what you said, just one small correction, Wirecast will allow 2 computers to operate off 1 serial at the same time. But other then that, agree 100 percent :)
Andrew, I'm not sure if or why you want to limit discussion to switchers when, in Wirecast's case, it includes an encoder as a key feature.
I'm willing to be educated but Adobe FMLE, at least through the GUI, has a destination and backup destination URL server points. Are there more I'm not seeing? Wirecast is not limited to two.
Adobe FMLE can use VP6 and MainConcept H.264. Wirecast can use VP6, MainConcept H.264, x264 (which is better quality efficiency than MainConcept), WMV (on Windows), Quicktime. Yes there's license fees involved and they are factored into the cost of the product and that's one reason we compare cost and features (including the encoder).
Adobe FMLE allows up to three bit rates. Wirecast can use any number of bit rates even using different codecs going to different servers.
Adobe FMLE does support multibitrate Dynamic Streaming whereas Wirecast doesn't yet sync the keyframes to do that.
So while the switchers can stream to external encoders both software and hardware, Wirecast has a much more flexible built in encoder than others dependent on Adobe FMLE.
Wirecast does have a built in DSS for Quicktime streaming although the demand for that is relatively small these days.
Wirecast's encoder is more flexible than Adobe FMLE. Of course one can use Wirecast's encoder with other programs including VidBlaster (and some have done that) but that certainly speaks to the importance of developing a good encoder. Given that, for VB to use Wirecast's encoder it's an additional purchase of course. For Wirecast to use Adobe FMLE is no additional cost.
I'm honestly not sure why VB would limit bit rate to 1mbps in all but Broadcast if it's so easy to work around (and free). I'm open to hearing an explanation.
Granted Wirecast is also pursuing its encoder as a desirable feature even if one isn't using the switcher whereas VidBlaster is not. I do think that's worthy of comparison though.
Yes Telestream has greatly expanded support for the original Varasoft Wirecast team which is why I suggest that Mike V and CombiTech consider looking for partner. Some might consider having a QA team and a Customer Support team important features.
After all this forum thread is "VidBlaster vs Wirecast" so we are participating to make comparisons.
Andrew - Can you link to a recording of your show? i would really like to see the results you get out of VB. I will put money on the fact that there are loads of dropped frames in your recording.
The statement on codecs is not necessarily true. In Wirecast's case, it is able to access any Quicktime codec installed on the system and write a file to that codec in real time. Telestream does not have to pay any money to license these codecs as they are available system wide. So the argument that codecs must be licensed and tested is really non sensical in the case of Wirecast, as the user can use any codec they wish (and the developer of the codec will have tested it in another QT app where it will work the same). On the Mac version of Wirecast users can get Apple's ProRes codec for free - http://support.apple.com/kb/dl1396Quote:
Originally Posted by AndrewSeabrook
As for the comment about GPU use, I think the "takes a lot of advantage of the GPU" is kind of disingenuous. Both of them exclusively process the images on the GPU, as there is no other way to do it. Wirecast is an OpenGL app and VMix is either OpenGL or DirectX. If you watched Tim Jenison's interview with Leo Laporte you'd also note that the TriCaster uses OpenGL for processing. From years of using these products, I can comfortably say that this is the only way that a computer based switcher can work. VMix Wirecast seem able to output pretty solid frame rate video, stack layer after layer of video all in real time . The CPU should only really be used to handle the encoding, playback of media, audio mixing etc.
Joe
Cseeman...not trying to limit discussion but want people to understand that VB, and vMix are not encoders. WC is.
Joe, even Open-Source codecs have to be licenced and supported. There is a cost to all of that. Using the GPU is not the only way to manipulate images, however it may be the best way...no argument there,
Glad that the discussion seems to be moving further away from personality!
Jack...and what will that show really? That my cameras are outputting at the wrong settings? That my capture cards and their drivers are dodgy, that the recording tool that I use has issues? By the way I record on a separate device to lower the system requirements on my switching machine....irrespective of the switching software. The point being that frames drops can be generated in a number of places in the chain and why they is generated are dependent on a number of factors. The switching software being only one of these. That is why NewTek has designed the Tricaster in the way it did, matching dedicated hardware and software to optimise performance of both.
Using an audio analogy. If I hear clipping on my audio does that automatically mean that it is my microphone at fault? My mixer? My recording device? My Audio streamer? My CDN? My audio client? Or is it a combination of all of those and how I have configured and calibrated them to work together?
My concern about depending on Adobe FMLE is that version 3 came out in Jan 2009 and 3.2 was late Dec 2010. It's now approaching Oct 2013 and no updates. On the Mac side it's a problem since FMLE is still Quicktime based whereas Apple as moved from QTKit to AVFoundation CoreMediaIO. Basically FMLE is nearly dead on Mac and while that might not impact Windows users directly we're approaching 3 years without an update. It's conceivable that it's EOL. That would mean Switchers without Encoders may need to start developing Encoders. Of course maybe we'll see a 3.5 or 4.0 soon... but 3 years is a long time between updates.
I share the concern about FMLE, particularly as HTML5 becomes more important on the web. All vendors will need to respond to these changes. I don't know that it means that the necessarily need to develop bespoke encoders, but certainly there needs to be the ability to take advantage of external encoders whether they be software or hardware based.
I love the discussion, lets keep it going.. but lets remember to be respectful of everyone's opinion :)
With that said I have used both Vidblaster and Wirecast for an extended amount of time. I started using Vidblaster in 2009 and I was generally happy with it until 2012 when I went to HD. The modular interface makes Vidblaster very easy to learn and use. Wirecast was a little intimidating to me. in 2012 we started to use Wirecast as our encoder due Vidblaster's limitations as far as an encoding a live stream goes (By limitations I mean not having the ability to add custom settings for Bitrate)
When we went to Wirecast we were shocked at how little CPU usage it uses when encoding to multiple CDNs. We went from having to use 4 different computers to just one encoding box.
Early 2013 we started playing around with Wirecast as a video recorder rather than using Vidblaster. At first we did this to free up some CPU usage on our Vidblaster machine but after a few weeks we realized that Wirecast is a far better system to record our shows. At this point I was still hanging onto Vidblaster due to loyalty and the financial investment that I had made into the software. The more I read and researched the more I had realized we needed to move on the bigger and better things.
There were a number of issues that I'm not going to go into right now but the two biggest ones were dropped frames and video tearing. We can argue that the issue is caused by hardware / drivers but I do not think that is the case. When we moved over to Wirecast The problems all went away
When It was announced that Vidblaster 3 would be released I was excited to hear about all the “ HD optimization” that was incorporated in the new Vidblaster. Along with better HD support Vidblaster had now re-written many of the modules to better optimize cpu usage. Sounds great right ? Well it was not. I bought my copy from Tom Sinclair in June of 2013 and started using it. Boy was I wrong about the software. Many of the key features like a playlist and different video recording options were removed from the latest version and I still had many of the frame rate issues and tearing. It was then that I realized it was time to move on.
I installed Wirecast with the help of the IAIB community. Nick Craig, Jim Castro, Steve Heywood, Joe De Max, and Sunkast made sure everything that I needed was setup and spent hours teaching me how to use the software. I immediately noticed a quality difference. My frame rate issue was gone, no video tearing and I was able to build about 65 shots in Wirecast with my CPU being under 30 percent This was a huge improvement from my previous setup. Also key features like desktop presenter, and the ability to create different video effects were huge improvements to my video production.
Looking back I'm a little disappointed in myself for not giving Wirecast an opportunity early on. I spent endless hours trying to fix something that couldn't be fix, and spent thousands of dollars upgrading something I no longer use. I recently did the math and it was shocking. I have spent over 3000 dollars for Vidblaster over the last 4 years and spent nearly 4,000 dollars upgrading and adding computers to our workflow for a total of 7,000 dollars.
In my humble opinion I think its fair to say Wirecast is the superior software based solution for Internet Broadcasting at this time. It outperforms Vidblaster in every possible feature. I know that there is still an argument for using Vidblaster in the sporting world but when it comes to Internet Broadcasting I have yet to see someone use Vidblaster at 720p and not have dropped frames and quality issues.
