Live event recording gone wrong

[Mark Suszko]

Boinx needs to see a dedicated firewire bus for every firewire source, is why I think you’re having trouble there. The laptop has only two busses, and while you can add stuff to each bus, the Boinxtv software needs each source dedicated just to one bus. Your third camera goes in as a USB bus source, and that one’s going to be lower res, so you dedicate that camera to the kinds of shots that might not need high rez.

What you’re trying to do on the mac is to imitate a video toaster or tricaster, but without the toaster’s dedicated processing hardware. That only goes so far, as you’re finding out. My friend used to call this approach “stepping over dollars, to pick up dimes”.

If you want to do professional live switching to a master recorder, well, to be blunt, get a real switcher. Ot at least a tricaster. They come in HD flavors now as well as composite, and are rentable.

Roland’s Edirol brand makes an inexpensive HD live switcher that could work well for you, as it can mix HD and SD sources. And it is a real hardware interface with buttons and t-bars and all, so if the point is to get students familiar with how we do it in the broadcast world, this is the kind of thing you want.

Knowing very well about low student budgets, what I might try in your case, meanwhile, is to shoot sd anamorphic over composite. Won’t be high def, but it will be 16 by 9 and much cheaper infrastructure.

Finally, contact the GM of your local TV station and ask about inheriting their surplus gear which the station might take a tax deduction for as a charitable donation.

[Fred Jodry]

What does a computer do? Compute.
What does computing always take? Time.
You will always have troubles trying to mix live video and audio through a computer.
No matter what else you do, feed the cameras and audio through the mixer boards before the stuff hits a computer.
Now Michael, you have a better workflow than an expensive Alexa. Fred Jodry