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  #1  
Old 08-07-2020, 02:33 PM
tomaspal tomaspal is offline
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Default Clearview, Evercast, Millicast, Etc.

Is anyone using any of the higher tier real-time remote reviewing services like Evercast, Clearview, or Millicast? Any pros or cons to any of them? I've played a bit with live-streaming using Millicast and their modded OBS software. It's been really impressive so far: under 1 second latency, fantastic audio and video quality. What's everyone else using?
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  #2  
Old 08-08-2020, 04:07 AM
Cheesehead Cheesehead is offline
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Default Re: Clearview, Evercast, Millicast, Etc.

I'd be very interested in hearing what people are using too.
Trinnov hosted a Zoom with Jonathan Wales who said he'd been using Evercast during the pandemic and it worked really well.
I've demo-ed Source Connect Live. I could get it to stream on the lowest video quality with good sounding stereo audio, but it has an up to 12 second buffering delay! I suppose you could work with it, but it would be frustrating to say the least. Also there are no popup windows for video chat or even audio communication you can use in the software, so you'd have to run a Skype or Zoom at the same time and then there'd be massive sync problems
with the buffered stream. It seemed pretty unusable to be honest.
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  #3  
Old 08-08-2020, 04:49 AM
Cheesehead Cheesehead is offline
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Default Re: Clearview, Evercast, Millicast, Etc.

Hi Tomaspal, I had a look at Millicast.
What would you use for communication with their software?
It seems to be set up more for entertainment streaming than remote working with clients.
It still looks like Evercast is the only option that provides a potentially good working environment.
Crazy expensive for Indie budgets though!
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  #4  
Old 08-09-2020, 04:35 PM
Brandonx1 Brandonx1 is offline
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Default Re: Clearview, Evercast, Millicast, Etc.

I have used Clearview a few times. Works really well. Zoom or hangouts for comms.
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  #5  
Old 08-10-2020, 03:02 PM
VRS VRS is offline
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Default Re: Clearview, Evercast, Millicast, Etc.

We used Evercast several times in the past 6 months on the movie I'm finishing. We did an entire mix (4 days) locking 2 PT rigs over the internet - sending 5.1 mixes back and forth, while simultaneously sending a stereo mix and picture stream over Evercast with video conferencing.

Apart from Evercast timing out every hour it worked very well. We would get a notice on the web page "Do you want to continue" or something like that, and if we didn't respond - you know, because we were MIXING!! - it would time out and we'd have to re-log in. Once we knew this was happening then we could anticipate it. Strange behaviour for such an expensive system.
Audio quality isn't great (320 kbps MP3) but for review it works.

Vince
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Old 08-11-2020, 08:46 AM
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dr sound dr sound is offline
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Default Re: Clearview, Evercast, Millicast, Etc.

I have been using Evercast and it works great. Been mixing with it sending live Stereo output and Picture to the clients. The reason that one mentioned about "timing out" is that if it doesn't see any movement on your system such as you talking to the clients using the Evercast control panel it will give you a screen notice. If you hit any button on the panel it will play fine for the next hour and a half to 3 hours. Clients have been loving it. Solid and Safe/ Secure.
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  #7  
Old 08-13-2020, 02:36 PM
tomaspal tomaspal is offline
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Default Re: Clearview, Evercast, Millicast, Etc.

Thanks for the input! I really appreciate it. For Evercast, are you guys running the OBS software on your PT rig, or do you have a separate machine for streaming? How are you getting your picture to Evercast, a capture card, or screen capture? I really like the idea of Clearview because of the dedicated hardware. A hardware solution seems like it would be much more fool proof than software running on the PT rig.
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Old 08-14-2020, 05:58 AM
Tim R. Tim R. is offline
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Default Re: Clearview, Evercast, Millicast, Etc.

Anyone using Session Link Pro? Experiences?
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  #9  
Old 08-14-2020, 11:36 AM
Hugh-H Hugh-H is offline
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Default Re: Clearview, Evercast, Millicast, Etc.

Hello,

Our experiences of products we've used -

Evercast works well and is expensive. Support seems to be pretty good. Some of the setup dialogs are, well, perhaps not the terminology we would use in our world but once you learn their odd dialect it's easy enough to onboard a new remote. Works well, secure enough for the studio IT police, picture quality pretty good but needs differ on that. If you're using it for detailed remote approval of VFX or colorizing, 10Mb/s in a browser window may not be adequate and you'll send the encrypted video file to sync ahead of time anyway. But for edit decisions it's pretty good video quality. Audio quality is good enough as most of them are but of course you wouldn't use the streaming audio as a master which is the case with all of them. Latency is indeed quite short, their 200ms appears to be accurate depending on internet latency and jitter.
We prefer using most of these products on a dedicated computer with I/O which gives us the most flexibility in our workflow and least amount of loopback-style software running, but that's a personal choice. We always have a spare something laying around.
The collaboration aspect, i.e. "zoom/teams-type" participant windows, give a professional feel to a now-ubiquitous zoom/teams-type meeting workflow. Some need the collaboration features, some don't.
At $1k/month for one virtual room it needs to pay for itself and it can if you're doing remote approval and time matters.
I'm not sure what their upcoming reduced price beta will have at $300/month, we'll see how that works, could be useful depending on limitations. If we're lucky they'll only remove a few features because competition is forcing them to lower the price. TBD.

SessionLinkPro works well. Affordable and adequate for many things and in my opinion good for a lot of applications, we have our subscription because it's easy, affordable, and adequate for many circumstances. The studio end and the remote end are entirely Chrome-based, no DAW integration, but that's not an issue for it's use cases. Very easy for the remote person to use, click on the link and it opens in Chrome. Not a collaboration platform but of course with bidirectional audio and video you can use it that way if you route correctly. Only streams video to one remote and audio to either one stereo or two mono remotes. Again, fine for many applications.
The audio sounds fine as most of these products do, the video maxes at 5Mb/s at 1080 and 3Mb/s at 720, and it looks like it but still far better than Zoom or Teams. We've also experienced a few quick glitches during streaming but folks are so familiar with internet video glitches they don't care. Again, fine or even great for many applications especially the price.
It comes in two parts "recording" and "video" which do audio and video in separate Chrome windows or tabs. The separate window/tab thing might be off-putting but it works fine, you get the audio running then switch to the video tab and you're good. I haven't done exact sync comparisons between the two streams yet but when we've used it they're close enough.
Also low latency, around 200ms or so. Our workflow with it has been to stream audio, video full-screen, and use Teams for collaboration on another computer but that's just us.

If you're just looking for audio streaming there's AudioMovers ListenTo that we've used on a number of productions. It's daw plugin based only so you insert the ListenTo plugin on one DAW and the ListenTo Receive plugin on the remote DAW. If you want bidirectional insert more plugins. If you want lots of stereo channels bidirectional, insert more plugins. When you instantiate the plugin and log in you start with a session name that the other end can log into with or without a session-specific password. The only oddity we found was if you have several plugins inserted for multiple channels, it sort of makes sense to name them all the same because it's the same session. However then the order you log in on each plugin matters, the first login will always grab #1 instead of, for instance, track 3 logging in as #3. The solution is just to name the plugin sessions differently on each track by for instance appending a number or letter, no big deal. They use a relay server so no peer-to-peer which is good on the IT-tight studio lots. No end-to-end encryption, just transport encryption, which matters in some situations.

Then there's the OG Source-Connect. Overpriced for what it does nowadays but we use it a lot because so many other remote VO and sweetener folks use it. Recently they've added the capability to instantiate up to four instances, before it was only one. The sync capability is nice for remote PT sync although you can do that in any of them by sending LTC as audio, which we do in SC anyway because some folks don't like using ReWire in PT. The file sync is ok I think although we've had a few issues with it over time but, honestly haven't used it much. It was peer-to-peer only until some point so you had to open ports on your firewall which on a studio lot isn't going to happen, they now have Source-Stream, a relay server, to get around that. I did a bunch of testing with Source-Stream last week in prep for another production and it had more audio buffering issues than peer-to-peer. If I read their site correctly they only have one relay server in the Americas (although that could be a simplified site explanation and not detailed) and at this time it's not reliable enough for us to use it for live production. For post work Source-Streamrelay works.
Source-Connect Multi-Connect, the up-to-four instance functionality, works well in PT and as standalone, the VST version in Nuendo does not work correctly. They acknowledge this and gave us a temp license for Source-Nexus in order to use Multi-Connect in Nuendo until they fix it. We mostly use it standalone.
One thing I plan on suggesting to them - when you launch SC you log in and that's the username and password to the SC account. When you add a contact to connect to, you're redirected to the web site in a browser and it opens your full account profile. I would very much like one password for the SC application and contact-add login, and a separate password for the master account login. Scary considering we have a bunch of operators using SC at various times. SessionLinkPro has a session specific password.
Source-Live includes video and has unacceptably long latency for remote video approval work. Many seconds worth. I suspect with the competition they'll improve it, I hope.

My opinions only.
Hugh

Last edited by Hugh-H; 08-14-2020 at 01:28 PM.
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  #10  
Old 08-14-2020, 08:49 PM
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dr sound dr sound is offline
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Default Re: Clearview, Evercast, Millicast, Etc.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Hugh-H View Post
Hello,

Our experiences of products we've used -

Evercast works well and is expensive. Support seems to be pretty good.
I'm not sure what their upcoming reduced price beta will have at $300/month, we'll see how that works, could be useful depending on limitations. If we're lucky they'll only remove a few features because competition is forcing them to lower the price. TBD.

My opinions only.
Hugh
Hugh,
Where did you read about Evercast upcoming reduced Beta at $300?
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