HMX100 & HS50 into Mac Pro

[Walter Soyka]

[Kenton Olson] “I… have a question about the best way to get the SDI signal into our Mac Pro encoder for live web streaming.”

Does your encoder only support Firewire, or does it allow you to use video from a capture card?

[Kenton Olson] “The option I am looking at currently is to purchase an AJA or Blackmagic SDI to analog converter and input into a Canopus ADVC110 we currently own and input in the computer (we will not be streaming HD), but I am not sure if there is a better way to do so.”

That would work, but of course you’ll be throwing away a lot of quality even before compression for streaming. You may not be streaming HD today — but when are you planning to start?

[Kenton Olson] “I am hoping to keep the conversion price down as much as possible and hoping to use an option that does not rely upon a PCI card so we could potentially use it with a laptop if we needed to. I would be ecstatic to do it for less than $500.”

The Matrox MXO2 LE (if it’s supported by your encoder) allows SDI/HD-SDI capture and can be attached to a tower with a PCIe card or a laptop with an ExpressCard slot. It’s a very clever solution which might have a lot of use for you outside of your streaming. You could use it back in the studio on the tower for capture or monitoring, then bring it on the road for your streaming events. If you get the MAX version, you can get hardware-accelerated H.264 encoding. Again, this won’t help in your streaming, but you might find it useful for other projects.

This won’t make your budget of $500 as the SDI/analog converter does, but given the added functionality, maybe it’s worth a look.

Good luck!

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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