Review: Telestream Wirecast Gear

As sort of a valedictory test, I ran a 40-minute test streaming 720p Quick Sync videos to YouTube and Ustream, while recording the output at 1080p Quick Sync and four ISOs using the Good setting. CPU utilization remained very stable and close to the 60% mark.

Overall, as long as you’re using Quick Sync rather than x264, you should be able to deploy a range of streaming and recording options without bumping into either CPU or hard disk limitations. Of course, this begs the question as to whether the Intel Quick Sync codec delivers significantly lower quality than x264. Anyone who remembers the earliest versions of Intel’s hardware-based codec has to be concerned about this issue, but my tests found that Intel has come a long way towards achieving parity with x264, particularly in the relatively generous data rates used for streaming.

Whither Quick Sync?

Specifically, to test Quick Sync against x264, I captured a 1080p stream at 6 Mbps with each codec. Then I tested the two captured streams using the Moscow University Video Quality Measurement Tool and the metrics shown in Table 1 (below). As you can see, Quick Sync held its own, winning the blocking metrics test, which is likely the most important, since blockiness is the most obvious artifact. Quick Sync also proved very close to x264 in the Blurring Metric, though the difference swelled to 6.33% in the Noise Estimation Metric.

Table 1. x264 won two of three tests

Then I loaded both captured clips into Premiere Pro, and aligned them vertically on the same timeline, so I could enable or disable viewing of the top video and compare the frames that way. At 100% resolution, the two videos were very close in terms of quality, with very little noticeable difference beyond a slight edge in sharpness for x264. At 400% viewing, you could see that this additional detail occasionally resulted in blocks that swung the Blocking Metric in Quick Sync’s favor.

In any event, at this encoding configuration, the differences wouldn’t be noticeable in side-by-side videos. Since Quick Sync is clearly more efficient CPU-wise, this makes the Intel codec the obvious choice for streaming and non-ISO recording.

Overall, the value proposition for Telestream Gear is clear. You’re paying a premium of about $2,500 for a system that’s configured and tuned by Telestream and clearly powerful enough for most productions. Given the mission-critical nature of most live event productions, it seems like a pretty good deal to me.