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Macbook Pro or AlienWare? Wirecast or vMix? AJA or BlackMagic capture/PCI Thunderbolt 3?
Rank: Newbie
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Joined: 9/29/2020(UTC) Posts: 5
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Hey, just need some advice from you guys. Im going to put together a streaming kit. I currently have a MacBook Pro 19” 2019 with four Thunderbolt 3 ports. I have been considering the AJA IO 4K Plus in combination with Wirecast. I don’t particularly like Wirecast though as Ive tried it sometimes in the past. And I understand that it is more CPU-demanding than vMix. vMix looks really great though so another option could be to buy an AlienWare laptop with Thunderbolt 3 and put a Blackmagic Decklink 8K Pro inside a StarTech Thunderbolt 3 PCIe Expansion: https://www.multicom.no/...pansion/cat-p/c/p9772895I can not get a hold of the Akitio LITE enclosure here where I live so Im hoping this StarTech enclosure will do just as fine. I will mostly be streaming and recording ISO (3 or 4 inputs) in 1920x1080 but do you think the MacBook and Alienware laptop would be able to also do this in 4K if I should ever need to? It would be nice to have the option so I don’t have to upgrade later. I first considered the Blackmagic Duo card but it is PCI generation 2 and I think that a faster performing PCI card (Generation 3) would be better in terms of speed and a safer option. The StarTech PCI Expansion is Gen 3 as well. Any other laptops I should consider? I saw that the AlienWare laptop was recommended on the vMix site. Any comments on this is great.. is it noisy? Is it reliable? Is the GSYNC thing that important? I can now get a 15% discount on it if I order before the end of September. Cant wait to start putting this stuff together So what do you experienced Vmix users recommend? :)
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Joined: 10/7/2015(UTC) Posts: 635 Location: California
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Rank: Advanced Member
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Joined: 7/1/2015(UTC) Posts: 1,151 Location: Houston TX Thanks: 319 times Was thanked: 263 time(s) in 233 post(s)
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The big disadvantage of choosing a Mac is their preference for AMD GPUs. vMix works best when you can leverage the hardware encoding found on nVidia GPUs. If you can't, it will need a lot more CPU.
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Rank: Advanced Member
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Joined: 9/9/2020(UTC) Posts: 94 Location: Noord-Brabant Thanks: 3 times Was thanked: 13 time(s) in 12 post(s)
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I run on an Alienware Area 51m. It has thunderbolt, but for additional GPU power i would use the alienware GPU enclosure, as were the thunderbolt will use 1 pci exprsess lane. To my knowledge will there be 4 lanes to the alienware enclosure.
Also the alienware has 3 drives. 2 are in a raid0 and 1 is a normal drive.
I run the application from the raidset. But if recording is needed I will put it on the hdd.
But keep in mind that the apple is portable. The alienware that I have is mobile, but with 7.5 kilo no fun to carry around.
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Rank: Newbie
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Joined: 9/29/2020(UTC) Posts: 5
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Thanks, I chose an Acer Predator Triton 500 (i7, 16GB, 1TB and Geforce 2060-2080) Works like a charm!!!
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