Excalibur – live multicam switching: hardware needed?

[Gary Kleiner]

“Live switching” in this context (post production)is meant differently than “live switching” as the event is actually unfolding.

So, you would go ahead and shoot your separate camera tapes, capture onto your hard drive(s), set up a project where the footage is all in sync, then you have the option of desginating your camera switches as the timeline plays back.

Gary

[Edward Troxel]

As Gary said, if you want it mixed “as it happens”, you’ll need a hardware switcher and simply capture the mixed video while it happens – for post mixing it doesn’t eliminate the need to capture multiple camera’s tapes into Vegas.

What “live switching” in this context means is that you don’t have to stop playback of the timeline in order to switch to a different camera. In Vegas 5, you have to stop playback, change the camera, and then restart playback. In Vegas 6.0b or newer, you can simply change cameras and the playback will give a very brief pause but then continue.

Edward Troxel

[Barend Jasper]

OK, thanks for your swift replies. So it’s live switching between tracks as I understand. That’ll save us a lot of work anyway, and give us the possbility to redo certain switches if necessary. Remains the time consuming problem of having to capture 3 tapes. Ah well.

Thanks again,

Barend

[Gary Kleiner]

[Barend Jasper] “So it’s live switching between tracks as I understand.”

Of course, you can scrub back and forth or go frame-by-frame too 🙂

Gary

[Russell Robertson]

Barend – in my limited experience shooting multi-cam events, if possible, use DV Rack on as may cameras as possible and you can bypass the entire capture process (shoot to tape just in case anyway)- saved me hours on a recent football game – allowed me to turn around the game in hours vs. days – try out Serious Magic’s DV Rack 30 day trial- KRR

[Edward Troxel]

There are other devices that connect direct to the camera that will also capture direct to hard drive. Several are available such as the “Firestore” devices. This wouldn’t require an actual computer for each camera.

Edward Troxel

[Daniel Thornton]

You can use a old laptop, 1394 cardbus and firewire external HD combination with Scenalyzer software to record direct to the external HD. I can get many hours of uninterrupted video with this setup. You could use this combination on each camera. When done connect each external HD to your editing computer. You will have all the files already captured to disk. I would also capture to tape for backup.

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[Edward Troxel]

At church, we do it this way:

We have multiple cameras running to a video mixer via S-Video. We have a sound feed direct from the soundboard also connected to the video mixer. The video mixer is then connected to a deck vid S-Video for the video and RCA for the audio. The deck is connected to a computer via firewire. We then capture the fully mixed church service direct to the computer in real time. As soon as the service is finished, the fully mixed service can be dropped onto the timeline for final editing (i.e. shrink to fit the time, add titles, etc…).

Edward Troxel