By Peder Boberg, Product Owner, Intinor.
Building a new studio or expanding into remote production requires decisions that have a lasting impact on your workflow. The technology must work on day one, and it has to keep working as the demands on it grow. For mid-tier live events especially, that means finding the right balance between video quality, bandwidth, and operational reality. NDI® has earned its place in that conversation. It delivers reliable video quality through efficient compression, letting production teams move high-quality signals over standard networks without expensive infrastructure upgrades.
Intinor has been watching how its customers use NDI® in practice, and the latest update to the Direkt series reflects what those conversations revealed. The upgrade from standard NDI® to NDI® Advanced, alongside support for NDI® version 6.3, addresses the real challenges engineers encounter when NDI® moves from smaller setups into more demanding production environments.
One of the most significant changes is support for 10-bit input and output. Color depth needs to be preserved consistently from the camera through to the production switcher. Enabling 10-bit for NDI® ensures that image quality and color precision are maintained through the entire workflow.
To understand what this looks like in practice, consider a remote production at a live venue. An Intinor Direkt link encodes multiple camera feeds and transports them back to the main studio over the public internet, using Bifrost™ Reliable Transport to maintain frame-accurate synchronization across the multi-camera setup. At the studio, a Direkt router receives those streams and hands them off as individual NDI® sources into the production environment. Once the live mix is complete, the program feed passes back through the router via NDI®, which distributes the final broadcast and sends a low-latency return feed back to the field unit. The field and the control room are connected entirely over IP, with no unnecessary baseband conversions and latency kept firmly in check. It is a clean, coherent signal path, and when it works well you stop thinking about the infrastructure and focus on the production.
That level of simplicity is harder to achieve as networks grow more complex. Larger facilities, segmented studio networks, cloud deployments across multiple subnets: these are the environments where plug-and-play discovery reaches its limits and engineers need direct control. The IDM interface now provides access to the NDI® Advanced toolset for exactly this reason. NDI® traffic can be locked to specific physical network interfaces. Dedicated discovery servers and additional IP sources can be configured to ensure hardware is reliably found and routed where it needs to go.
For engineers who need to go deeper, IDM exposes the underlying transport mechanics. Send and receive groups keep workflow architecture clean. Protocol selection between Reliable UDP and Multi-TCP allows the setup to be tuned to the specific network topology. For large-scale distribution within a facility, precise multicast controls cover TTL parameters, netmasks, and network prefixes.
The goal throughout has been to make complexity manageable. Networks are unpredictable, and the engineers working with them deserve tools that are not.
For more on how to use NDI® Advanced with the Direkt series to support your workflow, contact our team at Intinor.