NewTek NDI Powers Up Epic Game's Unreal Engine 4

—Industry-leading IP Video Standard Streamlines Virtual Production & Access To High-Quality Gaming Streams— IBC Booth 7.K11, Amsterdam, September 9, 2016—NewTek™ and Epic Games, the creator of the Unreal Engine and numerous award-winning series of games, today announced that NewTek Network Device Interface (NDI™) will be implemented for Unreal Engine 4. Epic joins the industry’s largest IP video ecosystem of products and the rapidly expanding number of companies enabling IP-based customer workflows. NewTek NDI will enable Epic Games to easily bring live video sources into UE4 without adding support for multiple codecs and video cards. Video signals are converted to NDI and made available to any Unreal Engine on a standard local or wide area Ethernet network.

"As Epic becomes increasingly involved with virtual sets and virtual production, adopting NewTek's industry-leading IP protocol made complete sense for us," said Kim Libreri, CTO of Epic Games. "Having multiple live video sources and the outputs of all Unreal Engine technology available on a standard GigE network is liberating. The challenge of getting video in and out of UE4 and then distributing it are made exponentially easier with NDI. The NDI SDK is also very easy to work with, and NewTek have been very helpful throughout our implementation process. We look forward to bringing NDI to the UE4 community." “With the convergence of live video production and gaming engines, Epic Games integrating NewTek NDI into UE4 is a natural fit and thrilling for us," said Brian Olson, vice president of product management for NewTek. "NewTek’s NDI simplifies input to the Unreal Engine, while NDI output from UE4 will streamline virtual production and make full resolution gaming streams accessible for arena events and online competitions. We look forward to working closely with Epic Games on other projects where NDI will help producers use virtual technology to provide a whole new level of storytelling."

Unreal Engine 4 will also support additional features in NDI version 2 when the updated software development kit (SDK) becomes available in Q4 2016. The NDI SDK is royalty free for any company looking to establish IP workflows within their organization, or in commercial products and applications they deliver. Building on the widely adopted and ground-breaking Network Device Interface announced at IBC 2015, NewTek’s NDI version 2 adds higher performance, resolution independence, 16-bit per channel support for the highest precision color of any IP standard, 16 channels of floating point audio, improved cross subnet support, integrated fail-over support, network-based re-routing support, and more. At IBC 2016, NewTek will demonstrate IP interoperability between NDI-enabled applications and devices located at NewTek’s booth 7.K11. NewTek¹s royalty free NDI technology allows video and audio sources to be shared bi-directionally across a network, eliminating the need for costly direct connections, expensive cable runs, and infrastructure upgrades while turning every source into a destination instantly available anywhere on the network.