Wireless video transmitters are nothing new and there are lots of different units on the market. But the Accsoon CineEye 2S stands out from the crowd for a number of reasons.
First is the price, at only £220/$300 USD it’s very affordable for a SDI/HDMI wireless transmitter. But one thing to understand is that it is just a transmitter, there is no reciever. Instead you use a phone or tablet to receive the signal and act as your monitor. You can connect up to 4 devices at the same time and the latency is very low. Given that you can buy a reasonably decent Android tablet or used iPad for £100/$140 these days, it still makes an affordable and neat solution without the need to worry about cables, batteries or cages at the receive end. And most people have an iPhone or Android phone anyway. The Accsoon app includes waveform and histogram display, LUT’s, peaking and all the usual functions you would find on most pro monitors. So it saves tying up an expensive monitor just for a directors preview. You can also record on the tablet/phone giving the ability for the director or anyone else linked to it to independently play back takes as he/she wishes while you use the camera for other things.
Next is the fact that it doesn’t have any fans. So there is no additional noise to worry about when using it. It’s completely silent. Some other units can get quite noisy.
And the best bit: If you are using an iPhone or iPad with a mobile data connection the app can stream your feed to YouTube, Facebook or any similar RMTP service. With Covid still preventing travel for many this is a great solution for an extremely portable streaming solution for remote production previews etc. The quality of the stream is great (subject to your data connection) and you don’t need any additional dongles or adapters, it just works!
Watch the video, which was streamed live to YouTube with the CineEye 2S for more information. At 09.12 I comment that it uses 5G – What I mean is that it has 5Ghz WiFi as well as 2.5Ghz Wifi for the connection between the CineEye and the phone or tablet. 5Ghz WiFi is preferred where possible for better quality connections and better range. https://accsoonusa.com/cineeye/
I have no personal experience with this particular model, I’d like to try one though, but with other similar cheap wireless video units the RF spray is terrible. Sound mixers have been complaining about them stepping on radio mics whether direct interference or over loading the front end RF strip circuitry.
During the live stream I was using a radio mic with no issue. These devices “spray” no more RF than any other WiFi device as they all fall under the same regulations and use the same transmission methods as normal consumer WiFi. Where there can be problems is with the use of poor quality SDI cables as SDI uses frequencies close to radio mic frequencies and leaky cables can cause interference issues.
At the moment it doesn’t do 29.97psf via SDI, only HDMI, support say they are bringing out a firmware update.
That is an issue with many of this type of device. Sadly they rarely correctly comply with the full SMPTE specs for SDI.
CineEye 2S support SDI very well, we test it with Arri AMIRA, Arri Mini, Sony FX9, FX6, FS7 and other Sony models, also tested with Canon C300/500 and Red Komodo.
Hi Alister,
Great video.
Would I be correct in assuming that we could stream a multicam shoot using a Shogun 7 output connected to the CineEye?
Yes you can.
I guess I’m very late to the party. I just got my unit last week and tested this week. Worked like it’s supposed to the settings for my tablet are not working like
It should just yet but I like the concept. This unit worked with my SDI
and HDMI cables. The BNC/SDI version was a little pricey at 299.99 the HDMI version is only 219.00 during the current 2021 holiday season. I bought this unit before I decide to buy their larger combo unit for live switching event.