[Brandon Rohde]

Hi Mark,

We use a Teradeck Bond unit which works very well. There are 3 hardware components, and 1 software setup, but overall its pretty easy to get going. They make composite, HDMI, and HD-SDI units. On the camera, you will have 2 pieces, a video encoder which takes your HD-SDI video input and converts it to a MPEG-2 (H.264) video stream. On top of that is a data card Bond unit which takes up to five 3G/4G cards and puts them all together for a really fast stream. Together, these units weigh about a pound and they mount right on the hotshoe mount on the camera. That will stream your video footage back to your base news station, or wherever you point it to.

Then at your base station, you need a Linux server setup with their software to receive the stream. Once it is received, you hook up a decoder box that plugs into the server, and that decodes the stream back and has an HD-SDI output which you can feed into your video mixxer.

They also have HDMI or analog SD models if you so choose.

Overall these units work great. The latency is 1-5 seconds from live until its in the news room. The downfall in your application would be if the cell towers are taken out by the tornado, or if you are out of 3G/4G range. The units do have adaptive streaming, so it will send the best quality video based on your available bandwidth.

Turn-key, its about a $7,000 solution.

[Brandon Rohde]

FWIW, I upgraded to Lion when it first came out on my home computer. I don’t do much work with FCP at home, but I do a little bit for personal projects here and there. Recently, I was doing a slideshow for a friends wedding a home on my Lion/FCS3 machine, and everything booted/works fine except a few plugins. Specifically, I was using the Photo Montage plugin from Noise Industries. I could build the project fine and everything worked and rendered, however once I would close the file and reopen it, half the settings I changed on the plugin in the timeline were reverted back to the default. After a lot of frustration, I emailed Noise Industries Support and here is what they said:

I’m sorry for the inconvenience. The problem you’re having is a known issue that appeared with OS X Lion. When Final Cut Pro 6 or 7 are running on Lion, they “forget” to save certain parameter configurations.

We’ve notified Apple of this problem, and we are hoping they will fix the issue in the near future. In the meantime, you have two possible workarounds:
– Use Motion to set up the same animation, using the Photo Montage generators. Motion supports the same effects as Final Cut Pro, and it is immune from the issue.
– Switch to a system that is still running Mac OS X 10.6.8.

I took that file to my work computer running 10.6.8/FCS3, reapplied the changes, and it saved with no issues. Outside of the plugin though, I have had no other issues in the limited work I have done on my home machine.

[Brandon Rohde]

Thanks JS. I am checking into those right now. I also came across the Reflecmedia kit just now, and that seems pretty ideal for what I am doing. The background lighting does not matter so much, just the fill lights. I have no problem with the lights on the subject, but I have a hard time getting light on the screen behind them. Also, due to space, the subjects are relatively close to the screen, which is not ideal. The Reflecmedia kit recommends about 18″. Does anyone have experience with this setup? It seems to get some pretty good reviews around the web.

-Brandon