I'm looking to switch between pastor, choir, and the audenice and make a finial DVD or VHS tape and also send a dv tape to TV station for a 45 min show on Sunday mornings. Hope this helps. Thanks for your quick reply.

So, it looks like you're wanting an SD system. Do you want to switch in analog and digitize to the DV recorder after the switcher? Or would you rather run firewire from the cameras and keep everything digital?

Personally, i would suggest recording all the cameras and doing the switching after the fact in Vegas. That way you never have to worry about bad timing on a switch, or switching to the wrong camera. You'll have it all and you'll be able to sit back and take your time to get it all right afterwards. Of course, if you need finished output immediately then a switcher is essential. But if you're planning on editing anyway ... go all the way.

I do live camera switching about twice a week. Datavideo has excellent products. Stay away from Focus Enhancement products. I would really need to know what type of signal you are geting from your cameras. By signal I mean is it S-Video, DV,SDI,Composite, & ect. I would also get a recorder that captures DVI files. I use a NNovia recorder. Then all I do is transfer my files to my hard drive or most of the time I edit direct off the unit. This will save you hours of capture from tape. You should have a tape backup or another NNovia unit for backup. If you have any other questions feel free to call my office at 410-758-0322 x 2011. Thanks for helping to get the Gospel out and seen. John 3:3 We must be born again.............

The MX50 is now defunct. It's replacement the MX70 does have issues and the MX50 is pretty low res (half frame) too.
Avoid firewire mixers / switchers. The delay can is really bad mostly, quite useless if you plan to switch live to projectors.
Datavideo do a very cheap unit that's impossible to beat. It includes a quad split of all inputs with tally lights. So you only need one monitor to monitor all inputs. They do a 2x1 monitoring bridge to go with the switcher. One monitor for your 4 inputs and the other for your output. This unit also has one PC input for PPTs etc.

Bob.

Thanks will go over your suggestions in a meeting tomorrow morning and the sermons wil be 3 weeks delayed like this Sundays sermon will air 3 weeks later this give us time for editing I failed to say that the cameras are about 75 feet away. What we have now is a old Videonics switcher the old cameras are hooked to it and the video out to the the panasonic dv recorder into the computer, but we want to upgrade to better dv cameras 3 ccd. At present are video quality is pretty sad. Our interinal sound system is not bad.

Herb

You did not mention anything on the cameras you have.

http://www.newtek.com/tricaster/ministry.phpNewtek Tricaster[/link] is a good unit and many churches and church media
groups recommend it too. For base price of $5000 they have 3 camera inputs (composite included)
can switch a laptop signal (vga) so you can use graphics such as from powerpoint
and popular lyric and bible verse programs.

MPEGs can be stored on the units internal HD for cued playback and can
record to hard at the same time. You can also run projectors out of it.
Also you can stream over a network.

Heres the scoop. If you want to stay all digital at a budget price. You can use DV cameras like the cannon gl2. They run about 2000.00 each. Switcher for DV firewire the best I have found for the price is Datavideo se 800 dv. Just one thing. There is a 5 frame delay in your video from your audio if you use the firewire from camera. You can adjust this in the mixer. If you use the Tricaster that someone mentioned you will only be able to use s-video signal. You will be able to see the quality differance from s-video to firewire. But remember firewire has a 5 frame delay so if you want to put the image on a big sceen live during service the persons lips will not be in sync with your audio. If you do not display service live on sceen when you film. Then firewire will work fine. Please call me I can explain it better over the phone. 410-758-0322 x 2011. I have put together alot of budget systems and know what works and what looks bad.

A little off topic of this thread, but related
Is there any such thing as a programmable switcher? One that can have maybe 5 or 10 presets, user adjustable, and the presets can be switched with a remote. Oh yeah, VERY CHEAP. I don't even need fades, just a clean switch. But the option of fades would make it fantastic.
I can't believe the ridiculous prices live switchers command.

TGS:

Maybe a video router or patchbay would work??? (Routers might be expensive though.) But that will not give you a clean cut(/switch?).

2- If you want a clean cut, your sources either need to be synced (via genlock) or your switching device needs frame synchronizers.

3- I don't understand what you mean by preset.

TGS:

By remote do you mean one of those wireless presenter "clickers"?
The Tricaster can use a touch screen so if your clicker will act like a mouse
then it is a possible solution.
There are "presets" like play a video, switch to camera with lower third, etc.

Mike:
It does accept composite, but yes use s-video where possible.

I've done a lot of work with the NewTek Video Toaster on live events it's a larger version of the Tri-Caster (more or less). They're pretty easy to use once you get used to them, and other than the wicked annoying video lag, they're good to go.

Dave

It was a sudden thought when I asked. It has to be too expensive for me.
By presets, I meant, if using 3 or 4 stationary cameras, that you could program a series of camera cuts in a certain sequence and time lengths per camera in a cycle. That would be one preset And then you could use a remote control, like a TV type, to switch presets, so you could sort of randomize the type of cuts, from a series of presets, programmed by the user.
I guess, sort of along the lines of a surveillance type of system, but user friendly and better quality. More like a programmable mixer with one decent video signal out from 4 or 8 cameras. I want to be able to have some sort of control, while I'm performing music.
I'm mostly just toying with ideas right now, as sometimes the editing of certain things is time consuming and I'm thinking of short cuts.
I asked too soon, because as soon as I did I realized it had to be too expensive if it exists. But feel free to talk about it if you know anything.
Why is Genlock so expensive? Don't they have it down, by now? Can't somebody afford to make it cheap for the masses yet? There are so many cameras out there. Let's get them sync'd at a reasonable price.

Why is Genlock so expensive? Don't they have it down, by now?
1- The cheap way of doing things is to get a mixer with frame synchronizers. The cheap mixers tend to have it, the expensive ones don't.

The Videonics MX-1 was the first mixer to do this, and it listed for $1,000. It is discontinued now (and replaced by more expensive models).

2- Consumer cameras don't need genlock, so they don't have it.

Cameras aimed at professional markets tend to have it; they are also priced for professional markets.

Recently there have been "prosumer" cameras now implementing more professional features... e.g. some of the JVC and Canon HDV cameras have genlock.

I don't think it's genlock itself that's so expensive it's all the ancilliary issues you have to deal with. Like having a master clock, distributing that to everything and if you do happen to need to input non sync sources then they need to run through a syncroniser and worse still with a lot of this kind of gear if any of your video sources (like VHS) is a bit wobbly they just refuse to handle them.
The advantage of using genlock is it cuts the delay to the barest minimum, time base correctors (like the one in the MX50) add around a 1 frame delay, for most of us hardly noticeable with an image projected at the event, for a broadcaster that's unacceptable.

Just one word of warning about mixers like the MX50 etc. They come in PAL or NTSC. They will not handle anything that they're not designed to. We had one client in a total tail spin over this. His LED video wall would happily handle PAL or NTSC but when he fed NTSC from his camera through our MX50 no chroma came out the other end!

Someone was asking about a vision mixer with a sequencer that can be remotely controlled. I'm pretty certain Roland do such a thing. They've got some very funky VJ units that can be controlled through MIDI from memory, certainly worth checking them out.

Bob.

Hi, and thank you for goood info. This is a good place to be around. :) I do not know what I would have done without this forum.

What about checking out Adobes Visual Communicator 3, recently out. I did quite a bit of testing on their beta and it had a few bugs, but they took feedback seriouly and it seems to be fine now. There was some audio out of sync, and some transitions lagging, but thats now of the past.

3 camera mixer with 3 small monitor windows, dv,
Editing jpegs and mpegs into the stream on the fly (i mean live).
Teleprompter for scripted work.
Trial version.

The need of 4 cameras has been mentioned and I tried a Laird Telemedia FireCut 4x1 in connection with VC3 and it worked fine. No transitions but that can be worked out in post.

One important technical issue. The VC3 need DV from 3 separate firewire cards. Wont work with 2 plugs in one card. I got it working fine on an old P4 2,4Ghz with 2Gb ram Win XP home.

It is just a shame that BIG Adobe ate a small and user friendly company as Serious Magic was.

I plan on using this setup for church seminars and the like. Probably also some scripted work. Gotta get the WORD out!


Thommes, Norway.

Herb, why the three week delay? We edit ours on Sunday afternoon and have it ready to go out by Monday morning (they don't pick it up until Wednesday). Besides, you STILL have to edit one per week - even on a three week delay.

I wrote a nice Custom Command for Vegas 8 that we're no using. The scripts really simplify everything and help really speed up the process. Since the video is pre-mixed (through a switcher live), it's just a matter of cutting it down to size and adding titles as needed. Editing can be finished in well under one hour (usually closer to 30-45 minutes)