Overview

• The OWL Media Input Wizard significantly simplifies the process of adding media to your Unreal scene.

• It’s integration with the Unreal Media Plate ensures color-correct, non-anti-aliased, non-blurred video playback (including with alpha channel).

• It will also automatically set up any audio inputs present in your media.

• It’s easy to switch between different media inputs and you can even make playlists for switching or cuing.

Basic Set-Up

1. In Unreal Editor select the Off World Live drop down in the Editor UI and select Media Input Wizard:

   

2. A pop-up will appear in which you can select the Input Source you want as well as the Media Location (Media Plate, Plane, Material):

   

3. Select the options you need and click Create. The relevant Unreal Actors will instantly generate in your Unreal scene and you will see your media playing:

   

Alpha Channel

• Spout and NDI input options support alpha channel:

  

• If you select this option then you will normally be asked to restart your project to automatically change your Project Settings so that they support alpha channel.

Audio Support

• NDI and Media Source input options both support audio playback:

  

• Depending on the Media Location option you select, the audio will be added differently:

  • If you select the Unreal Media Plate, then the audio will be managed through that system in the Media Plate Component:

    

  • If you select Material or Plane options then an Unreal Soundwave will be created which will enable playback of the audio:

    

Performance

Frame Rate

• Generally, you can add multiple media inputs without it having a noticeable effect on FPS.

• However, if you add high FPS (>60FPS), high resolution (>4K) inputs, eventually you will see your performance in Unreal suffer because it has to use resources to render/ playback content in your scene.

• The largest performance impact will come from NDI and Media Sources as they have to be decoded, although both can use GPU decoding to manage this.

Visual Appearance

• The Unreal Media Plate offers great visual quality and combined with the different inputs options will allow you to have high intensity detailed colors without any anti-aliasing or ghosting.

• The most effective use of this some kind of ‘screen’ where you can put a border around the edges of the Media Plate which otherwise will be jagged due to the lack of anti-aliasing:

  • This will give you effective reflections and translucency.

  • Although you won’t have effective shadows, these aren’t very important in the case of a screen in your level or project.

• Alpha-channel inputs are a lot less effective for these reasons:

  • Due to the lack of anti-aliasing, although the media will be clear, the edges of the talent will show jaggedness. This can be softened with blur but that will slightly shrink the talent.

  • Shadows, which are an essential part of integrating talent into a scene, don’t work at all.

    • If you are capturing these in your studio or you have them in a playback video, you can include these as a separate synchronised feed which will work.

  • Reflections and transparency have a large black border (due to the selection of a Masked or Translucent material).

• If you want to do talent capture in Unreal you should use the new Unreal compositing tools (available from 5.7 which are high performance and have a lot of great features).

Media Input Options

• There are currently five input options:

  

Spout

This is the best option if:

• You want perfect color matching (and high color bitrate).

• If you need video only (alpha channel is supported).

• You are sharing media from the same machine.

• Your sharing software has a Spout Sender option.

That’s because Spout uses GPU Texture sharing and so has zero latency, compression, encoding or CPU overhead.

• Spout can support up to 32bit color, and will automatically match whatever is set in your sender.

• Spout is supported in media software like OBS Studio, TouchDesigner, Resolume, MadMapper etc.

NDI

This is the best option if:

• You are receiving media from across a network (normally a local network but it can also be over the internet using NDI Bridge),

• You need audio as well as video (alpha channel is supported).

• Your sharing software has an NDI Sender option (this is quite common) especially if it can send NDI HX-3, which is 10bit color with no visual compression artefacts.

However, NDI needs to encode the media to send over the network so:

• There is a decoding cost in Unreal which slightly reduces FPS.

• You may see small visual artefacts, especially if your NDI Sender is using SpeedHQ codec.

• You will need large available bandwidth to receive the video (Ethernet is recommended).

• NDI can receive both 8bit and 10bit video, and will automatically match whatever is set in your sender.

Window and Display Capture

This is the most convenient option for adding a screen share capability into Unreal.

• It works via GPU Texture Sharing (like Spout) and so has zero latency, compression, encoding or CPU overhead and has precise color matching to what is on your screen.

• You can select to capture either a whole Display or any individual Window on your machine.

• Both include cursor capture.

Media Source

This is direct playback of a video file on your machine such as an MP4 (not all playback media types are supported).

• It has support for video and audio but not alpha channel.

• You can select any compatible file from your machine and it will automatically load into the Media Plate.

• You may need to click the down arrow Open the current media once the Media Plate has been added to your level to start the playback:

  

Media Location Options

Media Plate

Overview

• This is the recommended option because it avoids anti-aliasing, motion blur and depth-of-field artefacts which create a highly visible ‘ghosting’ effect when using a normal plane in Unreal.

• Colors and image fidelity will be identical to your input source (see examples below).

• There is no responsiveness to lighting or post-process effects (this can be a positive as it makes the media easy to see) and the edges of the image will have small anti-aliasing artefacts (you can cover this up by adding a virtual frame).

• Reflections, transparency and shadows are not good enough for shooting talent in recorded contexts (use Unreal Compositing tools), but may be good enough for broadcasting.

Settings

• By default it uses a Plane but it can be used with any mesh (Sphere, Custom mesh etc):

  

• To switch between opaque and alpha channel options you need go to the Materials section in the Media Plate Details panel and in the Material Element select between the different Media Plate options:

  

  • Original media source:

    

  • Opaque: The Media Plate doesn’t support alpha channel but has full reflections and translucency:

    

  • Masked: Alpha channel works correctly. There are reflections and translucency but they have a black border (this is less visible in less reflective materials).

    

  • Translucent: Alpha channel and translucency works correctly. Reflections do not work.

    

• The Media Plate avoids elements of the Unreal rendering pipeline like Anti-Aliasing, Motion Blur and Depth of Field using a Component called the Holdout Composite, which will be enabled automatically, and can be found here (ensure it is ticked):

  

Unreal Plane

• This is a standard Plane in Unreal. It will be affected by all anti-aliasing and post processing effects.

• It is not recommended to be used unless you have a specific purpose for it.

• The image is blurred and the colors are washed out:

  

• This is the same with non-alpha channel media (original source):

  

• Unreal Media Plate:

  

• Unreal Plane:

  

Material

This is an Unreal Material which you can add to different Static Meshes if you want to display your media on surfaces throughout your scene.

• It will be affected by all anti-aliasing and post processing effects.

• The image is blurred and the colors are washed out.

• However, if you want to use your media on a HUD then it will bypass the anti-aliasing issues and look the same as the input image.

Media Switching/ Playlists

Media Plate

• The Media Plate has a Playlist section where you can switch between different media inputs.

• There are three media types:

  

  • File: This is a standard media file like an MP4, you select it from your local files using the …

    

  • Asset: This allows input from a wide range of different options in the Unreal Media Framework (including the OWL Spout and N DI integrations):

    • When you use the Media Input Wizard and select Spout or NDI, it will automatically create a Media Source which you can manage here:

      

    • To change the settings of the Spout/ NDI Media Source, find it in your Content Browser and double click it to open the settings:

      

  • Playlist: This lets you cue up multiple media inputs into a playlist that you can then control or let run on the Media Plate.

Unreal Plane or Material

• If you select a Plane or Material then the media will be input via the OWL Receivers/ Actors rather than the Media Plate.

• You need to switch the input Render Target to the Material used in order to cue different media onto the Plane:

  

Trouble-Shooting

• Please check the guides for the individual OWL Actors which all have extensive trouble-shooting recommendations.