I’m sure many of my readers will be familiar with the Blackmagic Design Atem Mini’s. But how many of you have looked into the alternatives? I’m in the process of putting together a mobile production unit that can be used in my camper van or transported in a few small flight cases. I was going to use one of the Atem Mini’s but they only have a single HDMI output and this means you can’t have both a multiview output and a program output for a high quality feed, perhaps for a screen or projection at the same time as the multiview. So, that led me to have a look at some of the alternatives and the one I finally settled on is the Osee Gostream Duet.
No one asked me to do this review and I purchased the device based on the manufacturers spec sheet from Amazon, just as anyone else would. This review exists simply because I actually really like the product.
The Osee Gostream Duet is a 4/5 channel vision mixer designed for live streaming. It supports 4 HDMI and 4 SDI inputs plus a further external source which can be a UVC camera via USB-C or an NDI camera over the connected network. You have to choose between SDI or HDMI on each individual input, you don’t get 8 inputs at the same time, but you can have a mix of both SDI and HDMI sources. The very easy way the setup menu can be accessed from the Gostreams front panel means that you could quickly change the input settings during a session if you needed to have access to an extra source or 2.
You get a free NDI licence when you update the units software, so as well as the 4 main inputs you could have a camera connected over the network attached to the units ethernet port. Or you can add another camera via UVC as the device can accept a UVC input via one of the 2 USB-C ports. In total you can have up to 5 external sources at any one time.
It has a built in video player able to playback H264 HD files from an SD card. If you use a suitably fast SD card such as a V60 or V90 card it can also record to the same SD card as used for playback. Or you can attach an SSD or thumb drive to one of the USB-C ports. You can connect it to a Mac or PC where it will be seen as a webcam making streaming very simple or the device can stream to 3 separate destinations at the same time. There is a companion program for Mac or Windows to control the unit remotely and you can also control it via a Streamdeck or similar via the companion software.
It has an upstream keyer as well as a downstream keyer. There’s a DVE that can be used to resize and reposition the input sources and still frames. The DVE’s and keyers can be used to create a multi-source “supersource” which can be instantly recalled as needed. You can chroma and luma key with ease and the setup for the keyers and DVE’s can be done without a computer as you can access the menu system from the units front panel.
All in all I’m really impressed by the Osee Gostream Duet, it doesn’t cost much more than an Aten Mini, yet offers a lot more flexibility. Please watch the video to learn more.
