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(00:19):
Start recording the computer… the tight shot… overhead… closeup… and the shoulder shot. Let's fire up the RØDECaster. It does look kind of cool starting up.

(00:51):
Yesterday I dropped a brand new video on the new RØDECaster Video. This device right here. You guys seem to love this thing, which I completely understand and there were a whole bunch of questions. So this is a video to try and answer some of those questions. I've got some of this sort-of pre-planned in my head, but a lot of this we're going to make up as we go. So let's just see if I can get through these questions and answer the ones you want to know about. First big question; if you yank the SSD drive while recording, will the files close. This is one of the really cool things about the ATEM where if you are recording and you yank out the SSD, the way that it writes its files, they're always closed, I guess frame by frame, so you don't lose anything.

(01:30):
So we're going to test that out. The drive's already connected, everything's already running through. I'm just going to hit the record button there and yank the drive. We'll plug this into the computer. There's a folder… the videos do not look closed. So these are corrupted. Okay, the answer to question one; no! If you yank the SSD drive, the files will not be closed. You will lose the files. Question two, how long can the RØDE last on battery? This obviously is going to depend on the battery that you plugged in. In my original video, I had plugged it in this big SmallRig VB112. That's 212 watt hours of power and it reported a very conveniently 12 hour runtime. That may not be scientific. I haven't actually run it through the 12 hours, but this 212 reported 12 hours. So you can do the math and extrapolate from there.

(02:24):
Can it route a phone call through Bluetooth? Now this is kind of interesting because the device can make a Bluetooth connection and it can connect to your phone, can you route a phone call through it? So the only way to find this out is to test it. Let's do it. I do have a Bluetooth spot, so let's go ahead and turn that on, and in my phone I'll go to the settings. Bluetooth, there's the RØDECaster Video. Alright, so we know the Bluetooth settings are set to go out the RØDECaster Video. So now to find out if we can route a call. So I'm going to call my buddy Chris.

(03:03):
Hello, do you hear me this time? Excellent. It works. Okay. Alright, well that works. That is extremely cool. Someone was asking about the RTMP streaming settings. I know I didn't really explore that last time, so let's just have a look in there. There's not a whole lot that you can control, but here's what you've got. If you go into the streaming profiles, the way that you create a profile is just click “Add Profile”, there's your new one, give it a name and then enter the server and the stream key. So that's the URL and the stream key that you get from YouTube, Facebook, Twitch, wherever you're streaming to. So this means you can stream it to anywhere that will take an RTMP stream as far as the control over the quality. You don't have much. Under Stream Settings, you have the options to go from LOW, MEDIUM or HIGH and the actual bit rates are not exposed in there.

(04:02):
I'm sure you could test 'em and start running them to various networks and they would report to some degree what you're getting. But that information is not disclosed in here. There's no customization of it. That's basically it. What if any latency is being added by the RØDECaster Video itself? So we all know that when you run an HDMI camera into a recorder or switcher or whatever, there is some degree of latency. Some cameras have lower latency than others, but there is pretty much always some. How do we measure that? Well, I thought up a kind of a cool clever way. So here's what we're going to do. I'm going to enable the timecode preview on my cameras. I'm running everything through timecode here. So we're going to see the timecode coming out of the top down camera. We're going to then plug that output into a recorder.

(04:42):
Look at the inherent latency, meaning what we normally have from the camera to the output, and then we're going to route the same signal through the RØDECaster Video and check it again. So to do this, I've got my trusty old ATOMOS Shogun with timecode going into it. We're going to take a look at the settings for the overhead camera and I'm going to enable, on the Info Display, “over SDI”. These are the BGH1 cameras that I'm able to control through software. If you aren't familiar with those, I'll link to that video as well. It's an older video, but the BGH1s are still so cool. Alright, now I need to take the top-down camera that was routed into here, which is the green cable here on input 2 and I'm going to plug this into the Shogun and we can see on here the timecode coming out of the camera and the actual timecode that the Shogun's getting from the timecode generator.

(05:32):
So what I'll do is take a picture of this screen and let's take a look at the difference in those timecodes. Timecode from the camera is 03:14 frames and the timecode from the device is 03:19 frames. So that's 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 – 5 frame delay from the camera to its own output. Now we're going to route the same signal through the RØDE. The camera's back into the RØDE. Let's take the output, we're going to plug that into HDMI B. So we get the program out and there we go. So now we're looking at the same thing. Camera, now passing through the RØDECaster into the Shogun; let's measure it again. 15:09 to 15:16 or :17. Let's call it :17. So that's ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen; eight frames! That's only a three frame difference. I did remember that number, right? Cool, not too bad.

(06:29):
Next! Test how the auto-switching handles silence and people talking over each other. Now this isn't something that I can just test here on my own. I do plan to do a full video on that capability; the auto switching. because it is just so incredibly cool. I really want to put it through the paces; not something I can do by myself. So that one will have to come another day, but make sure you're subscribed, so you see when that video comes out. Since the audio delay is on the master signal, you see in here, if we go to the audio mixer, there is a delay that is programmed into the master. This is not a per-input delay. The question was, what then happens to the videos that are playing internally? Are those also getting delayed or what's happening there? Aaron Parecki, in his video, has apparently explored this more deeply.

(07:13):
The short answer is that the video playback is not going to be delayed while the inputs are. However, it seemed like there might be some differences between how the wireless is handled using the Wireless Pro and other microphone sources. So I'll link to his video down below. Make sure you watch that when you're done watching this one. Can the device get power over PoE or PoE+ or PoE++? I very, very seriously doubt it. I think that if it could, they would've told us this, but there's only one way to really find out, and that's to test it. So let's get rid of all this and let's see if I have a long enough ethernet cable to run from the rack.

(07:54):
I knew it was a good idea when I measured all of my cables and labeled them. So this one's 15 meters. 11 meters to the back of the room; this should definitely work. This is now plugged into a PoE+ switch, so let's power it off – safely. Remove the power, remove the existing network and plug in a PoE cable. Moment of truth! No. I really would not have expected that. I think they would've told us that if that worked. A viewer was concerned about the power being over USB-C and that it was not a locking cable. The ATEMs have a nice little locking cable. This USB-C cable could be unplugged quite easily. Turns out there actually is a little lock for this. I saw it in one of the marketing photos that RØDE had sent. There it is. You can see the little lock on there that would plug in right there. And I don't have one of those unless there's one in the box and I missed it.

(09:01):
There's something in here. These are just the caps for the antenna. They did include their own USB cable, which I'm not using. I'll have to ask them about that. That seems like something that they would've included. It's obviously just a tiny little piece of plastic, but… Someone was asking if the audio does come over the HDMI. Now I did show this in the first video, but maybe I went by it too quickly. So we're going to assume that and not that they didn't watch the whole video. The way that audio comes over HDMI is in the audio settings. You click on the plus and you can add audio from whichever HDMI input you want. So let's see, HDMI 2 is my top-down camera. There you can see the audio coming through from that camera. So there is audio over HDMI, you just have to enable it. Another viewer asked if it was 8-bit or 10-bit recording on the input and I said, “well, I'm sure it's 8-bit; it's just H.264”. And they said, “well the ATEM Mini Extreme ISO does 10-bit recording”. And I thought… “Really? That seems interesting. I don't think I know that”. So I figured we should test it. We're going to compare. We're going to compare the recording of the ATEM Mini Extreme ISO and the RØDECaster Video. Lemme go get it.

(10:27):
Just a little size difference comparison for you in case you're curious. First I will record with the RØDECaster. So let's plug the drive back in, hit record and I'll just switch to a couple of different inputs in there. Good enough. Now let's fire up the ATEM, put it on the network, give it some power and I'll steal a couple of inputs from the RØDE and plug in my OWC drive. Everything appears to be ready to go. Let's hit record and we're good to go. That's all we need. Now to check these out, I'm going to import these into Resolve because I can see the bit depth in Resolve, which I don't think I can see in QuickTime Player. There's the files. I'm going to grab an ISO file from the ATEM and an ISO file from the RØDE. Alright, let's take a look at the differences.

(11:29):
We can see that one camera, which is the RØDE is an H.264 Main L4.2 and it is an 8-bit bit depth as expected. The ATEM on the other hand is H.264 Main L4.1 and it is also 8-bit bit depth. So the viewer who reported that there was 10-bit bit depth; that doesn't seem to be the case. Now if you're seeing otherwise, I would certainly love to know where. So if you're watching this, do comment below. Let me know where you thought that 10-bit came in. But this hardware is completely up to date. I did verify that. And we're getting 8-bit. An observation; that you can connect a RØDECaster Pro II via USB if you want physical faders; physical sliders to adjust your audio levels. So instead of using the built-in audio capabilities via the XLR and controlling it in software, you can take a whole separate audio interface from RØDE, plug that in over USB-C and get all your audio through that. That's pretty cool. And I guess that's it. So hopefully that answered some of the most pressing questions. I'm sure there will be more to come. Go ahead and drop them below on this video or in the original one. Maybe I'll do another one of these later. But I certainly am going to be doing a lot more videos about this RØDECaster Video because it is kind of cool. Don't forget to subscribe. Don't forget to like the video; you know the routine. I'll see you guys in the next video.