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Live broadcast graphics and keying off a MacBook Pro – Possibilities?
Hi Guys,
I’m soon to come into posession of my new macbook pro. I volunteer at the local community tv station where kids do some basic shows in a simple studio.
I’ve been curious for a while wether there are any systems you can buy to do broadcast type graphics off a laptop – ie a program and to run the graphics and perhaps a PCI card to output a signal and key channel.
I don’t know wether anything like this exists or if anyone has any efficient and effective work arounds to achieve this sort of thing. I’ve done stuff before such as running prepared graphics straight off a FCP timeline with a green background and chroma keying it in the desk, but obviously this is far from perfect or exact.
If anyone has any ideas, experience or knows of appropriate products I would really appreciate hearing from you.
Thanks heaps guys.
Jason Allen
Melbourne, Australia -
3 Replies
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OK, I had looked at the Channel Storm in more depth, and you are stuck with one DV input only, can’t handle two live DV streams coming in, so it’s more useful for a single camera mixing in powerpoints.
I found this Edirol switcher on the B&H web site:
for under a grand. It’s nothing fancy, 4 composite/s-video analog inputs, cuts, fades, and keys. You would set your mac laptop video-out to mirror mode display, (you might need to add a scan converter at this point, unles the laptop has s-video-out, but you can get a scan converter under 100 bucks) then you could build rapid CG thirds and other titles in Apple’s Keynote, Powerpoint (ugh), even Livetype, if you did a little pre-rendering. Bring in the laptop and use a luminance key to make your supers.
Switcher output would be analog; you could run that into a digital recorder of your choice, perhaps a $300 DV camcorder with analog pass-thru. It’s a bit of a kludge, but it’s realtime and live, and if you already have the laptop, it’s under a grand.
There used to be a mac flavoerd CG program called Comet CG, I think it must be defunct now.
Good luck with your project.
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Check out Newtek’s TriCaster. Stand-alone box, though, and around $5K I believe. Three or four inputs plus iVGA from your Mac. Can’t remember all the specs on it. Go to http://www.newtek.com and look under the TriCaster section.
Tim Johnson
KUTV 2 News
Salt Lake City, UT -
Bug TV (based in Canada) developed software and a hardware architecture for delivering graphics from a mac. It may be overkill for your project, but wanted to point out that the technology exists.
NBC delivered a lot of graphics in HD utilizing this system during the Torino Olympics and their demo at NAB was prett impressive.
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