[Jonathan Zemmer]

Bob, thanks for waking me from my dreamland post. I have been asking for a budget to create a live switch system for over 7 years and now that I actually have a budget, a very small one at that, I was easily getting carried away into a dreamland of my perfect production world….

Back to reality…We have roughly 9k to purchase all equipment needed for broadcasting our events and services to an overflow room while recording these events for DVD mastering and vodcast. This is for a church ministry, so unfortunately 9k is all I have.

Its not a lot, but at least its something…. I am just trying to decided how best to spend this money given my limited budget.

BMD seemed like the logical choice. We are planning on buying two cheep Canon cameras(Canon VIXIA HF R21 Flash Memory Camcorder ), tripods, post production computer, switcher, and several other minor components needed to make the system work.

So that brings me back to the switcher question. ATEM Television Studio OR ATEM 1 M/E Production Switcher

Needs:
1. Broadcast live feed from switcher to overflow room. This signal does not necessarily need to be in HD. ( In fact the room overflow room layout lends itself better for a 4:3 output. Although I would prefer to broadcast an HD picture)
2. Capture the program out to a hard disk

We will never have the need for more than 3 inputs.

It seems to me that given our need, the TV Studio will work fine. The thing I am unsure of is the media capture from the switcher. I am concerned about having a MAC system that controls the switcher if it can’t also capture the program out. It almost seems that we should have Windows based system for the switcher and capture and use the mac stickily for post production.

Do you agree?

Thanks!

Jonathan Zemmer