Video Transcript
Unreal 5.7 Huge improvements to video in and out. USB and NDI too!
Greg Corson · 2,475 views 28 Dec 2025 #unrealengine #virtualproduction · Duration 25:46 · youtu.be/lWuwAkB-iu0
Unreal 5.7 introduces MediaProfile, a much easier and better way to handle video in and out. Support for USB and NDI video is much improved also! In this tutorial I cover how to use MediaProfile with Pro video cards, USB devices and NDI video over network. This is a huge improvement that makes handling video much simpler than before, so regardles of which video input device you use, this will be useful for you. Tutorial 1 • Unreal 5.7 NEW Composure Tutorial, Part 1 ... Unreal 5.7 Tutorial Playlist • Unreal 5.7 Virtual Production Tutorials NDI Tools https://ndi.video/tools/ OBS Software https://obsproject.com/ 00:00 Intro to New Features 00:30 What is MediaProfile 00:56 What is NDI 01:50 Proj
Auto-generated YouTube captions, grouped into ~45-second blocks. Product and technical terms may be misspelled. Timestamps link to the video.
New in Unreal 5.7. Hi everyone. This tutorial turned out to be a lot more interesting than I thought it was going to be. It turns out that in Unreal 5.7, there's a lot of improved features regarding bringing video into Unreal. This affects Provide cards, USB, and even using NDI to bring video into Unreal Engine. So, without any further delay, let's explain exactly what the new features are that we're going to be going over. First is media profile, a single asset that lets you control all your video inputs and outputs from one place. It handles Pro Video, NDI, USB, and video from disk, and allows for easy selection of media textures wherever you
might want to use them. Since it's new, it does have a few minor bugs, but Epic is planning on fixing all of them fairly quickly. These bugs and missing features may not affect you at all and all do have easy workarounds. The other big improvement in Unreal 5.7 is NDI, a system for sending and receiving video over your network. It used to be a real pain to install it and use it. But in Unreal 5.7, they've made it a single click to install and made it easy to manage through the media profile. With NDI, you can use a smartphone as a live camera, or you can set up a phone, tablet, or computer as a monitor to keep an eye on the output of Unreal. Probably the best use for NDI is to use it to
send the output of Unreal directly to OBS where you can record it or live stream it. You can even send the output of Unreal to a completely different computer and run OBS or other streaming software there. This reduces the load on your main Unreal machine. So, we'll start off with the basic setup. This project is basically the same one that I started with for tutorial number one. And if you want to know more about that, you can go back into the playlist for tutorials, which I'll link in the description to this video, and you can watch tutorial one first. But basically, what it is, it's the virtual production template, as you can see right here. And I've already created a basic composure
setup and added a camera. So, we're pretty much ready to go. The last thing I'll show is which plugins you need. So, if you're using a pro video card, that means either Aza, this one here, or Blackmagic, this one here, needs to be turned on. In the virtual production template, these start turned on, so you don't have to worry about it. Then if you want to fully be able to use USB, you need to have media framework utilities and media IO framework both be turned on. And finally, if you're going to use NDI, which is uh video over your local network, you need to have NDI media turned on. That's the only one that the
template doesn't turn on by default. And now with a restart, you should be ready to go. And now I'll show you how you set up a pro video card, in this case a Blackmagic using the media profile system. And if you've done this before, you're going to probably be surprised by how easy it is now. And then I go up to this icon up at the top where it says it looks like a TV set. And I will say new empty media profile. And I'm going to call that tutorial one. And save it. And the window immediately pops up. I'm going to dock it here. And you can see there's several media sources already populated. So I'm going to pick the
first one. And I go down and select Blackmagic media source. And you can see this is a similar setup to what you would see in the the separate Blackmagic asset, but you haven't had to create one. So now I can just go in here and I'm going to turn off auto just to make sure I get exactly the settings I want. Click apply. And look at that. I've already got video coming through. That was a lot quicker than the old method where you had to create a media bundle and populate a few other things before you would get any video at all. So now in a matter of a couple of clicks, you've got media input running. I'm going to finish setting up
my uh settings for this. I usually use 10 bit and sRGB. Uh don't worry that this is a little bit dark. It's because it's rainy today and I don't have my lights on in the studio right now. But you can see all the settings you'd normally see in the Blackmagic asset are right here. And now I can save this and I can close it. You notice I haven't had to drag out anything into the world and I don't have to leave any windows open for this to work. Now, the next uh thing that's interesting is the way you make use of that feed. If I go to the plate layer, which I'm going to move to the front, normally you'd have to hunt around for the media texture to put in here, but
now you don't. You can go to this again media profile icon, same as the one up in the title bar and open that and it already has Blackmagic Media Source Zero right there. And I click it and I'm up and running. And that's really all there is to it now. Now, since we're using a professional video input here, we probably also want to set up time code and genlock. I click on the media profile again, and we're back in it. I select black magic media source and you see this tab that says time code and genlock and you click on that. Now genlock is basically means that it's going to lock Unreal's renderer to the frame rate of your camera which helps avoid tearing and other problems as we've discussed
before. But now instead of creating a whole bunch of different assets and configuring them, you just come in here, you click on the override project settings, you select custom time step in this case from Blackmagic and I can just configure it quickly and easily. 4K 29.97 and hit apply. And now you can see here and up here it says there's a custom time step configured for 29.97 and you haven't had to do anything else. If I jump back to the main screen, you
can also see that uh the custom time step has been synchronized. By the way, to see that you go to viewport stats and frames per second. So, with almost no effort at all, we've got the custom time step going. Then, if we want time code, right now, watch up here, it says 1652. That's the current time. But I can come in here and say override Blackmagic SDI input. And then I can configure this 4K UHD 29.97. And you've got a choice of LTC or VITC. LTC is for when the time code is coming in on an audio channel. And VITC is when
it's embedded in the video, which is what it is for me. So I hit apply. And now you'll see here it shows 173904, which is the time showing up on my camera right now. So, in just a few moments here, we've gotten video up and we've gotten time code and we've got gen lock or frame sync as some people would call it. Much easier than the old technique. Now, if you want to send media out your professional video card, it's similarly easy. I go here to media outputs over to my details tab again and I say I want to blackmagic media output. I'm going to tell it I want to
capture the media viewport. This is the [cough and clears throat] viewport of my active camera in the project. So I'll select that camera and that's all ready. Now I'm going to configure the Blackmagic output here. Single link UHD 29.97. And I let it free run. And I hit apply. And now we're pretty much ready to capture. To do that, I just press this red button. And you can see over here in the pre in this window that it says it's capturing. The red light is lit. and it'll continue to capture until you
stop it. Right now, the video you're seeing on the screen over here is coming out of my monitor, which is plugged directly into my Blackmagic card. I don't have an easy way to show you that, so you'll have to take my word for it. [snorts] But again, this was a very easy and fast setup to get output and input. Now, I'll mention here that there are a few minor bugs in the media profile right now. Uh, I'm not going to do talk about them as we go along because possibly by the time you watch this, they'll all be fixed. So, if you want to see what the bugs and the workarounds for them are as of 5.7.1, uh, go towards the end of the video. There'll be an index where you can look at a summary of bugs and workarounds. Now, let's move on to USB. If you've
ever tried to use USB in the past, you know, it was kind of a hassle. a lot of devices just plain didn't work and the setup was kind of complicated and very similar to what you'd use for a pro card. Well, they've simplified that with the media profiles. So, we go back up here to the media profile icon again, and you see the media profile we already had set up, and that's my main camera. Now, I can go to this empty slot here, and I can choose stream media source. And here's one thing that's going to be fixed in the fairly near future. You need to get this stream URL. Eventually, there's going to be a popup here that lets you select the correct URL for your
USB device, but for the moment, you have to find it in a sort of roundabout way. And I'll show you how we do that. Go back to the main here and into my content browser. and I'm going to make a media player. Open that media player up and you'll see up here in the corner there's a little file folder icon and under that they have audio and video sources that Unreal recognizes. And you can see here, this is my webcam right here. And I've got it pointed down at my keyboard just to give you a different view to look at. And you can see we've
got live video. But what we really care about right now is just this URL up here at the top. So select that and copy it. And then you can close this new media player. And we won't ever touch that again. and I go back to my media profile down into stream UI. Paste in that URL. And there we go. So, there are still a few things missing here. Uh, but they've always been missing. There's a playback format that you can select that isn't available here yet. Uh, so what you're going to get is typically
the highest quality output of your webcam or whatever your USB source is. Um, sometime in the very near future, they're going to add the menus you need to select whatever quality level you want. But for the moment, you can see it's working. And now to hook that up, I can come back to my main here. I go to my plate layer. And again, I can just click on this media profile icon and se and the stream media source is already there. And bingo, here it is on the screen, live and direct. Now, unfortunately, I don't have a USB output device, so you'll have to figure that one out on your own, but it should be pretty similar to what I showed you for the professional video card.
Now, let's move on to NDI. NDI allows you to send video over Ethernet or any local area network. Uh, and it can be picked up by any device on the network, including things like phones, other computers, and so on. This can be really handy if you want to use a separate computer as a monitor or want to record your video on a separate computer so that it doesn't slow down the one you have Unreal running on. There's also quite a few other things you can do with it that are really nice. The nice thing now is the updated NDI is very easy to get running. All you actually have to do in Unreal is set up the NDI plugin which I showed you at the beginning of the video
and then you can come into the media profile and let's say I want to add another potential media source. Now, like with all the other media sources we've done, you just have to configure it. So, you go down into this area here. The media source I want to be NDI this time. And bang, you can see it's already up and running. Um, this feed is coming directly from my phone, which I'm holding in my hand. The NDI source won't let you configure anything unless there's an active source on your network. So, if you have trouble with this, just start one up. You can see in here it's autoconfigured itself
to go to my iPhone progressive 3D and only HD 1080 is supported with the app I've got loaded. So, that's what I get. And then there's some other stuff down in here that you may or may not not want to set. There's a bandwidth setting you can use that reduces quality but cuts down how much you send on your network. But overall, you don't really usually have to set much of anything in order to use an NDI input. I'm going to switch back to my Blackmagic source. NDI can also be used to do output. You can use it to send the Unreal output to OBS, open broadcasting
software for recording or for directly streaming to a platform. Or you can send it to another computer and use that other computer as a monitor or to record as well, moving the load of compressing the video off the machine that's running Unreal so you won't slow it down. Again, this setup is pretty simple, but before I show you, I'm going to show you the NDI tools. That'll make it a little easier to record this demo for you. This is the NDI website, and I'll have a link in the description to the video to get you here. When you come here, you'll see the list of tools here on Windows. And I'm you'll get all of them in one
package. And the one I'm most interested in right now is called Studio Monitor. So when you want to download these, you just click Windows and you'll get a file that is a ready to run installer. I won't go through that because it's there's nothing unusual about it. Once you've run that installer, you'll be ready to use the tools. Setting up an NDI output is pretty much the same as what we saw for Blackmagic. I can come up here and add another media output. And then I come down and configure it to be an NDI media output. And this is showing me what it's going to output when I start the capture. You can do whatever settings you want
here. I'm going to set my media viewport again like I did with the Blackmagic and tell it I want it to send cineic camera actor. There's a number of other settings down here that you don't have to touch. And unfortunately, as of 5.7.1, there is one missing option here, the one that lets you choose the frame rate um for the output. So, it'll unfortunately default to 60 frames per second for now, but that should be fixed in the near future. And you'll see an additional menu down here to select frame rate. So, now I've got it configured. I've already started the NDI monitor program.
So, I press the start capture button and it tells me it's capturing. And then I can come over to the NDI monitor and I can see the source here. And there it is. And that's coming over live and direct. for the purposes of debugging your NDI connection if you have problems. There's also a test pattern tool in the NDI tools and it looks like this. You can see there's a number of different kinds of test patterns that you can send. I'm going to send the bars 709F because
it's different than the one you normally see. Let me put this off the screen. Now, if I go to my media source, you can see I'm still getting video from my phone, but if I want to get to test it, I can go to the test pattern generator. Give it a moment to sync. And there's the test pattern. And just to show that it actually works, you'll notice that if I click a different test pattern, that comes right away into Unreal. So, if you don't happen to have an NDI source set up or you don't want to set one up right away, that's an easy way to test and make sure that your NDI setup
in Unreal is right and correct. So, maybe right now you're probably thinking about how you can use NDI. Uh, and where do you get NDI supported devices? Well, there's quite a few. Some cameras have Ethernet connections on them and support NDI directly in the camera. You can get an NDI camera app for your phone. Just about any kind of phone or tablet will work. Just check your devices app store and search for NDI. You'll probably find quite a few different ones available besides the ones I just used. Some of those are free and some of them they charge for. Now, the last thing I want to show you is how you can use NDI and OBS to do recordings of what's going
on in Unreal. Just like in Unreal, OBS used to be kind of a pain to set up for NDI, but now it's much easier than it used to be. So, I'll give you a quick run through of how that works. So, OBS is free. It's available at obspro.com. And that's this is what the website looks like. You can click the version that you want, download it, and install it, and it should just work straight away. And there's one more thing that you have to install in order to get NDI support. So, to add NDI support to OBS, you go to this GitHub. And I can already hear you moaning because you probably remember how hard it can be to install things from GitHub. But thankfully the
developers here have made it pretty easy. What you're going to be installing is called DiscoAV. And if you scroll down on the GitHub page, you'll see a section on installation. You can on Windows just open up a command window in admin mode and type this command and it should completely install it with no drama. Just in case if you have to do something a little different, there's an installation wiki that explains other methods of installing things manually. And if you do the
automatic install, you'll get a thing called the NDI runtime installed as well. But if you use some of the other methods, you may have to install it separately. Again, it's just a standard one-click installer. So, you can see how to do that right here. And once you've got that installed, you'll probably need to reboot your computer. Then, you can start OBS and you should see NDI options appear under tools. That's right up here. And you can see DROAV NDI settings is here under tools. Meanwhile, back in Unreal, my screen looks something like what you're seeing here. Unreal is just taking my USB
camera, which is pointed at my keyboard, and it's sending it out. I've already gone to my media profile for NDI, and started the media profile capturing. So now over here in OBS, I just have to set it up to receive the NDI feed from Unreal, which is pretty easy. I go down here and hit this plus button in scenes, and I'll create a scene called NDI test. Then under sources, I'll hit plus. And you can see I have an NDI source option right here. So I'll click on that. and okay it.
And then I've got some choices. And all I really have to do here is choose my Unreal Engine output that I already have running. And there it is. Okay. That and you can see everything is appearing live in OBS. Now, from here, you can go over and press the start recording button to do a recording locally, or you can start streaming if you want to. And that's about all there is to it. Very simple. There's two other things you can do with media profile. You can use a file media source, which is basically a compressed video file on your hard disk, or you can use an image media source, which is a
directory that has multiple images numbered in sequence. I'm not going to show you that here because the setup is almost identical to the way you use USB. You just choose file or image source and then browse to the directory that contains the files and select them. These are both useful if you want to have a pre-recorded video or a slideshow playing on a screen somewhere in your Unreal 3D environment. You can just set up the media profile and then apply the media texture to your object. I said earlier that media profile does have some minor bugs as of Unreal 5.7.1. Those are pretty easy to deal with as most of them are just missing UI
elements which I pointed out earlier, such as the lack of a frame rate selector in the NDI plugin. The only other issue I've found so far is that there can be some problems when you switch from editor to play mode by pressing the play or the stop button. Every type of source and output behaves a little bit differently. Sometimes a video input or video output might freeze or go black when you press stop or when you press play. You can usually get around this by just going into the media profile and clicking on the source or clicking on the output. And in the case of an output, you can stop or start it again. These problems aren't too serious anymore because if you're using NDI to
send your Unreal output over to OBS to be recorded, you really don't have to press play anymore like you did when you were doing screen captures from a PI window. You can probably just stay in editor mode all the time. Now, that's about it for this tutorial. If you found it useful, please remember to leave a like and subscribe to the channel if you haven't already. If you have a problem or question, please leave a comment and I'll do what I can to help you. In the meantime, have a good day.
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