Vidblaster Vs Wirecast

[AndrewSeabrook]

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.....

[joedemax]

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.

[AndrewSeabrook]

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?

[Amnon]

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.

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.
I know you know your stuff, so I was wondering about this statement.

[AndrewSeabrook]

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.

[JackWarner]

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.

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.

[oscarmartz]

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?

[joedemax]

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.

[brianmonroe]

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

[TomSinclair]

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.