More testing yesterday…
Resolve was a bust. It just didn’t want to use the second screen correctly when Sidecar was active. I couldn’t figure out if it was something I was doing wrong or not but it just wasn’t having it. It would put the interface on the iPad screen just fine but full screen video playback was always pushed over to the Mac’s display. So much for that option.
I tested with the Mac connected via a wifi hotspot while the iPad remained connected to house wifi. Surprisingly, this worked. I didn’t think it would but they found each other and were able to start Sidecar. Performance seemed fine with Premiere. Flame still dropped some frames here and there.
I also tried it with both machines on the same wifi hotspot but this didn’t work out as well. It worked enough to make a connection and at first it seemed ok. But letting anything play for more than 10 seconds would result in dropped frames and one time Sidecar lost the connection completely. It probably has a lot to do with the little hotspot thing I was using. It’s older (4G LTE) and I’m sure wasn’t designed with sustained fast wifi in mind. Wondering if a new 5G hotspot would do better. So that was kind of a bummer.
My next round of testing was with NDI using the NDI Monitor app Randy recommended. That actually went pretty well but it definitely wants a fast wifi connection to get the quality up where it belongs. I need to experiment more with it but it seems promising. I wish there was a way to control the bitrate of the NDI stream coming out of Flame but I don’t think there is. At least not in a direct slider kind of way. I assume setting the broadcast timing to 720p would be less bandwidth than 1080 but I haven’t had a chance to try it yet. And I’m not sure of how the scaling on the iPad would cope with that but it’s probably worth a shot.
Maybe I could stick OBS in the middle and see if it allows for bitrate adjustments? Maybe none of that matters with NDI streams (they are new to me). The other thing I haven’t tried is using the Mac’s wifi Internet sharing thing and seeing if that would allow the iPad to connect and find the NDI stream without a router in the middle. That would be nice but I’m doubtful it will work or have good performance if it does work. Just thinking out loud and entertaining myself while I have the time. 