I’ve just recently been asked to take over my high school’s morning announcements and I was directed here via a Mac forum. I was looking for some advice as to what I’d need to get a Boinxtv broadcast up and running. So far we have a 27" iMac with a 2.7GHz Quad-Core Core i5 with 8GB of ram & the AMD Radeon HD 6770M 512MB. I will also have access to a MBP with 2.4GHz i5 with 4GB of ram and the Intel HD Graphics 3000. I’m looking to run 2 cameras to create a 10 minute daily morning news program that will be recorded then uploaded to either the school’s webpage, or Vimeo. Myself and the students will have a 70 minute window from the time we receive a paper copy of the announcements to the time this will need to be online. A live broadcast is out of the question at least in the beginning. Any advice or suggestions on how to make this work and the types of cameras/other equipment I’d need would be greatly appreciated. This is new territory for me as my focus is FCP where I’m not under so much pressure to produce a finished product so quickly.
BoinxTV is used a lot in schools to record the morning announcements. Its the right choice!
If you want to run two cameras you will need to have BoinxTV Full-Version (since the Home version gives you a single video source only). Cameras: If you don’t have them already look out for once with FireWire connection. USB-cams won’t work because they don’t provide a live video output through USB. Anyways, connecting two cameras to an Mac via FireView is kind of hard, because the cameras has to be connected to separate FireWire busses. Usually the two FireWire ports on a Mac are on the same bus so you need some extension card to have another bus. for MacBooks with ExpressCard-Slot we recommend the Sonnet USB/FireWire ExpressCard|34 (more information on hardware can be found here: http://boinx.com/boinxtv/equipment/ )
You can setup intro and outro triggers to play intros and outros automatically at the beginning and at the end of a production so you won’t do any postproduction.
The actual recording is done with Apple Intermediate Codec and gives big file sizes but can be played back immediately. Once your recording is finished you can convert it to a smaller file size to upload it to a video platform of your choice.
Achim, thanks for the advice and I’ve received approval from my school to use Boinxtv beginning this coming fall. I do have a few other questions as I prepare my shopping list. We’d Ike to run a minimum of 3 mics for each broadcast (2 lavalier & 1 standard mic on a stand), is there a mixer you’d recommend? Am I right in assuming that once the mixer is connected to the iMac I should be able to select it as the audio input in Boinxtv? Also anything else you can suggest to make this run smoothly would be greatly appreciated.
Hi there,
I can really recommend Mackie Onyx Mixers. If the 820i has enough inputs for you, you might consider this http://mackie.com/products/onyx820i/ or maybe the 1220i. It goes in over firewire and you can select it in BoinxTV as an audio device.
A little bit more affordable are the products by Alesis: http://www.alesis.com/multimix8firewire
You could also take a look at the Peavey PV-8 USB audio mixer. Works very well, fairly inexpensive (100 GBP or so), and also appears as an audio source in BoinxTV.