Engineering a live TV weather setup

I have a 2.6GHz Intel Core i7, 16 GB Retina Macbook pro and will be purchasing an HD camcorder, most likely a Canon VIXIA HF G30 or something similar to it. It will have an HDMI port, USB, external microphone and record in AVCHD.

What I am looking to do is stream live video of a weather report or severe weather coverage. The final product would look very similar to what is seen on TV by broadcast meteorologists. I need to use a program such as Boinx TV to chroma key. This will require two video sources into the Mac. One will be the actual video of me with the green screen in the background. I would assume this would be done using an HDMI cord from the camera to a Blackmagic Intensity video capture device/ converter and outputted through thunderbolt into the Mac. Please tell me if I am correct and add any specifics to what I may be missing. The second video source needs to be Doppler weather radar or a PowerPoint presentation of weather graphics. I have radar software programs on two different windows machines. One is a Gateway laptop and the other is a Dell XP desktop. I need to live screen capture from ONE of those computers and send that into the Mac as the second video signal. The desktop has VGA and DVI and the laptop has HDMI. Would I need another Blackmagic live capture device in order to grab what’s on the screen? Is there a way that I can control the area of the screen that is captured and displayed when doing the live chroma keying?

As this whole operation has to be done live I also need to control the radar remotely while standing in front of the green screen. This should be no issue for a remote desktop iPhone app, correct? I also need to see what I am pointing at, so is there a way to see what the final product version looks like coming out of Boinx TV in full screen? I want to see this on a TV that I have in front of me using HDMI from the Mac to the TV. Is there a way for the Boinx final video output to come from the program, through the HDMI and into the TV?

The last main part of this operation involves streaming this final video product via livestream via the livestream procraster. Will my Mac be able to handle all of this work simultaneously? If for whatever reason it cannot, then how can I send the final Boinx product live video feed off to my desktop computer into procraster to be streamed? I have one HDMI output on my Mac and like I mentioned, I need to see what the output from Boinx is on a TV monitor in front of me in real time. So if this would need to done, how would I do it?

Also during this process I would like to keep the audio source the same, this would be a external lav mic hooked into the camera.

Thank you for considering BoinxTV! Indeed it will help you solve most of your problems:

  • Your machine is just fine to make all this happen depending on your output resolution and targeted frame rate! The heavy parts are chromakeying and encoding the live stream: If you are going to do an HD/30 fps output this may cause the machine to stall. If you are only going to live stream it in a certain resolution and frame rate, try to keep everything (including your video source) on the same resolution.
  • For grabbing the VGA output of your windows machines we suggest to use the Epiphan VGA2USB device. this works great for slow changing content. See http://www.boinx.com/boinxtv/equipment/
  • For live controlling the radar machine we suggest to use some screen sharing app to control the windows machine.
  • The BoinxTV chroma keyer has some options to crop the video source from all sides if you happen to have dirty parts on the sides of you video image because your green screen is to small or some lighting rig is in the way.
  • BoinxTV is able to output the result on the secondary monitor output of your computer. you can use this to monitor it. However, there may be a delay between your real action and the output because of all the buffers needed to process your video (beginning in the camera, for the transmission, decoding, mixing). This may confuse you if you think you can “point to some location on the weather map” and control your hand by looking at the screen. You will end up pointing to far. You may also consider to use a green tape and mark the country boarder on the green screen as an outline. The chromakeyer will be able to remove it too but you will have a good orientation while looking at the green wall.
  • Thinking about green screening: you are also able to green screen (or use any other color) your cloud image from the weather map! So you can use the normal weather map screen as a background, put yourself in front of it and overlay it again with a chromakeyed version of the weather map. This may look like you are standing just between the clouds…
  • Live Streaming: As I mentioned this is a high CPU intensive work and you may have to shift it to another device (e.g. there are 3rd party streaming boxes that can take a HDMI signal and stream it to a certain streaming platform, or you can use another computer+BlackMagic-capture-card to feed in the HDMI signal from the BoinxTV machine and process the streaming here. On the other hand, if the BoinxTV machine is able to handle it, you should watch this tutorial how to do it: http://docs.boinxtv.com/video_streaming
  • Audio: it is a very good idea to get the audio through the camera because then you don’t have to deal with the delay difference between audio and video.

I hope you can get your weather broadcast to work! Please post a link once you are running! :slight_smile: