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If you’re looking to use any uno overlay in your NDI workflows, Singular, our parent company, has a dedicated tool that can convert our overlays to an NDI stream. Newtek’s open source NDI (or Network Device Interface) is one of the most widely used professional streaming formats, with over 900 development partners worldwide.
The NDI contains an alpha channel, which can be used to composite the overlay footage over another video source.
Alpha channels are layers of transparency on an image or video that represent the degree of transparency of a color (the red, green and blue channels). White represents areas of 100% opacity, gray represents translucent areas, and black means 0% opacity (so 100% transparency). Alpha channels are often used in the film industry, in adding backgrounds to green screen shooting, and are often the foundations of any visual artist’s toolkit.
What this means is that the NDI stream is a recorded video of any uno overlay that can be ‘layered’ over any other video or image you want to edit. Alpha channels are compatible with HEVC, WebM, animated PNG, OpenEXR, and many more formats. For example, in animations, you might have a character with no background saved with an alpha channel, allowing the character to be placed on any scene or background seamlessly.
By using Singular Recast, you can integrate any of the overlays on overlays.uno into your NDI workflow. Here’s a quick guide on how to set up an NDI stream:
1. Download Singular Recast for free (currently only available for Windows)
2. Install and open up Singular Recast. Click Settings and type your desired name into the Stream Name textbox.
3. Go to overlays.uno and double click on the overlay you want to use to launch its control interface. 4. Click on the Copy Output URL button on the top right of the screen to copy the URL.
5. Go back to Singular Recast and paste the output URL in the Output URL textbox.
6. Set the overlay’s resolution by choosing from the Resolution dropdown menu.
7. Set your NDI output frame rate by choosing from the Frame Rate dropdown menu.
8. Click the “Start NDI Stream” button in the upper left corner. The Status box will turn green if your output is successfully being sent out as an NDI feed.
Note: If you want to view the NDI stream, use Newtek’s free NDI monitor.
We suggest having Singular Recast dedicated to its own computer, and controlling the uno overlay interface from another device (like your phone or iPad). NDI is very heavy on network traffic and demands a lot from your computer’s CPU.
Singular Recast can render the uno overlay on CPU, or on GPU. You can find the switch toggle next to “GPU Rendering”. Here’s a little more information on both options:
We recommend that you use the GPU Rendering Option for better performance. Using NDI software is very heavy on network traffic and demands a lot from your computer’s CPU.
While GPU Rendering is on, Singular Recast will render the web page on the GPU, which typically results in better performance and quality in the rendering. However, due to differences in GPU manufacturing, there can be different results in how the HTML is rendered.
If you see any anomalies in the rendering, you can turn this off and render on CPU instead.
If GPU rendering is turned off, rendering will be pushed to the CPU. This is much more consistent on different computers, but can be much slower.
8GB RAM is usually enough, but more is always better!
You can run multiple additional Recast instances from the same instances by taking the following steps.
To start additional Recast instances, you have to start the executable with channel=”name”. The easiest way to do this is:
Starting Recast from your newly created and modified desktop icon opens a new Recast window with its own config settings. The channel name will be displayed in the header of the UI.
You can start as many Recast instances as you need – or at least until you run out of memory, CPU or GPU power.
If you get stuck, or experience any problems with Singular Recast and using your NDI stream, the uno team is happy to help! You can send your feedback directly to us through our feedback form on overlays.uno, or come talk to us in the uno #support channel on Discord.
