Custom BoinxTV Live-Switching Computer: Hardware suggestions?

BoinxTV
#1

Greetings! I have recently stumbled across BoinxTV in my search for a good Mac-based live-switching application for our stage productions (the post-production editing was taking all my time…). I have downloaded the free trial of BoinxTV and really like it so far! Well designed, nice UI, and seems to do just about everything - nice work.
Anywho, to replace the post-production work with a live-switcher I really need to be able to live-switch at least four Sony HD 1440x1080i 30fps Firewire cameras simultaneously and record the output of the switching to disk. I have tested the app, and so far I am dropping frames with just one camera hooked up. My Mac is an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.6Ghz with 3GB of RAM, a 1GB ATI Radeon HD 5450 and almost a TB of hard drive space running OSX Lion 10.7.3. This is a computer I built myself from brand new PC components (a Hackintosh, I guess you could say). Since I need full 30fps and record to disk, what is my minimum hardware requirements to be able to live-switch 4 HD 30fps Firewire cameras?? I’ll probably be building a dedicated machine to do this.

Thanks so much far any help!

#2

BoinxTV is built closely to the hardware/drivers. So the first answer is: Don’t use a Hackintosh.
The second answer is: From our tests, there is currently no hardware available that can support 4 1080i cameras in BoinxTV.

#3

Can I suggest that if you want to handle so many cameras that you should have an upstream video mixer that has a single output to boinx. So in boinx you have a single “Main Camera” layer defined, and then the upstream video mixer switches between your four cameras and then passes the (single) signal to boinx. Thus you don’t have to have a quantum computer to handle the switching in boinx, its handled before getting passed to boinx.

#4

@ichrisis

Sounds like excellent solution (hope that Bastian could second this)
Did you try any particular mixing board? So many out there and pretty expensive.
I would appreciate any info.

#5

ichrisis’ Solution sounds like a good one.