Suggestion for worship service setup?

[MikeVarney]

I'm looking for suggestions on how to do a simple (read: inexpensive) recording for a church worship service. The end goal is to be able to post the videos on YouTube or similar service with minimal post-production.

We have a Mac Mini available for this purpose. We'd like to avoid the need for a person to man the camera(s), so we've been looking at wall-mountable PTZ cameras. However, we don't really know where to go from there. Most of those cameras are IP cameras. Is there MacOS software out there that's non-security camera intended to do live switching between IP camera feeds? I haven't been able to find anything other than what you would use in a security office to monitor and loosely record feeds. Nothing that I would compare to a "video switcher" than an operator can just hit keys on the mini's keyboard (or click) to choose the "active" camera for the recorded feed.

The audio for the feed would be coming over FireWire from a mixing board.

Any suggestions or directions to look in would be greatly appreciated. We would be prepared to sacrifice a little "high tech-ness" or video quality (HD not necessary!) in order to make it affordable, but would like our eventual solution to last.

Thanks!

-- M

 

[robanga]

In the not so cheap category,) I think its like $450) but have you seen Wirecast? The pro version which is even more allows for multiple wireless IP cams.

 

[MikeVarney]

I had seen WireCast... while I have no problem with the price (we're not looking to go OBSCENELY cheap... we just don't want to spend $10k!), the actual number of IP webcams they support is rather slim. When you eliminate like the Cisco one for example, they only support 4 or 5 models.

Other than that, the features seem to be in line with what we want.

Has anyone tried going the non-IP camera route with WireCast? Like getting a capture box, and using a standard camcorder-like camera?

-- M

 

[Paratel]

You need to make sure that any camera you get is a 3-CCD camera. Our church got one that was not (against my recommendation) and the video was horrible. These cameras are hungry for light so in any low-light situations the video will be grainy. As for our church, we purchased a Canon HDV camera and have it running to a DVR in order to burn DVDs of the service. We also have it running via firewire to a MacBook Pro and we broadcast our services via Ustream live for free.

 

[MikeVarney]

Are the Canon cameras you're referring to the ones that cost between $2k and $3.5k? Do you have a person "manning" the camera?

It seems like the best way to go is to make sure that the camera is low-light capable, and FireWire connectable?

-- M