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Epiphan Pearl 2 – 4k Live Streaming and Recording

By: Todd Stabley

We’ll be looking at a number of new capture and streaming appliances here in the coming months, as there has been a lot of interesting activity in this product space. To start with, we wanted to highlight a significant update to the Epiphan Pearl. We’ve raved about the Pearl in past posts, and it appears there is a lot to be excited about in its successor. In the move from the Pearl to the Pearl 2, Epiphan cranked up the power of its core processor so that in could introduce a number of new features all built around support for full 4k. With the Pearl 2, you have six HD video inputs that you can composite or crop into any number of configurable layouts, and you can output the results into 6 separate HD streams. That’s a powerful toolkit for anyone looking to do mobile video capture and streaming.

Highlights/ New Features & Upgrades:

  • Full 4k capability for capturing, encoding, output and streaming, supported by new, beefier Intel processor
  • Integrated scaling and cropping on the box
  • 6 video inputs–two 4k HDMI, two standard HD HDMI, two 12-G SDI (note–no VGA/ analogue video inputs)
  • Control via front touchscreen, mobile interface, web UI or full API for integration into control systems
  • Video outputs for larger monitors
  • 12-G SDI or HDMI
  • Now has XLR audio inputs (plus RCA)
  • New hardware RS-232 inputs for integration with classroom control systems
  • Rugged metal chassis and comes with heavy duty hardshell road case
  • USB 3.0 ports on the front and back for offloading content
  • Rackmount options available
  • One interesting note is that Epiphan says a future firmware update will introduce UVC and UAC support for the USB inputs on the device to allow additional video inputs from webcams and other USB video sources

Uses:

  • Live event production
  • Classroom recording
  • Get 1080p or 720p segments of your 4k stream to make it look like you have a multi-camera setup
  • Composite/ multi-view up to four 1080p sources
  • If your source if 4k but you need to scale down to 1080p or 720p, you could do that with the device’s native scaling capabilities

Pearl-2 – Tech Specs

Epiphan blog post detailing the new features and possible workflows: https://www.epiphan.com/blog/how-to-live-stream-4k-video-production/

Video overview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nPQ9ZGxT23E

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