Vegas 6 and Niagara Max 4922

Xavion wrote on 5/5/2006, 12:16 PM

Anyone familiar with the Niagara Max 4922? I know it's for
Web-Cast and presentations but I'm wondering what else it
can be used for.

My A/V department will be over all Web-Casting from our Plano
facility. My training starts next week and one of the tech's said
this piece of equipment does everything and I won't need to use
vegas 6 for any of our video related projects.

I'll always find a way to use Vegas but I'm wondering how powerful
this ViewCast Niagara really is?

Comments

farss wrote on 5/5/2006, 4:32 PM

I think it's a live switching / encoding / streaming system.
Very different use and target to Vegas or any NLE for that matter.
Even with that system you'd still use a NLE to prepare material that's fed into the system, motion titles, graphics etc.
A typical broadcaster will have many live (i.e. on air) systems AND many edit suites, some of the output from the edit suites goes into the on air switchers.

rmack350 wrote on 5/5/2006, 5:39 PM

We have something similar here at our shop. It's not an editor, it's an encoder.

You can play programs into it and they'll be encoded on the fly, usually using Windows media encoder. And of course it's supposed to handle streaming as well.

We were using a similar system from Digital Rapids to take SDI output from out Media100 systems (macintosh) and encode it to mpeg or to wmv. We had no other way to make wmv files at the time.

The limitation is that it's just realtime so if you could do better than realtime then it becomes a weak link.

It's not an editor.

You could send program straight out of Vegas to it for encoding, but of course you have to send audio and video so it has to be a rendered file and then you'd have to PTT or find another output program.

Don't worry.

Rob Mack

Xavion wrote on 5/6/2006, 7:11 AM

Thank you for the feedback!