Taking it up a notch

I want more for you. I do. I’ve been live streaming church tech & creativity training five days a week for almost two months now and I love it, but I can do better. I know I can.

First, my little IPEVO webcam is okay, but as a videographer it makes me sad everytime it tries to change the brightness, when I don’t want it to. Here’s the thing. I have a better camera. I own a DSLR that I use for shooting most videos other than the ones that stream live (and also for shooting the recorded version of my Tuesday and Wednesday shows).

What I need is a way to take the video from my Canon T3i and put it into my computer so that I can stream with superior video quality.

I’d also like to be able to do live screen casts. I have software that can make my desktop seem like a webcam, but that and the Flash Media Live Encoder really bog down my system making it virtually unusable, especially for when I edit video.

I have a solution. I believe that the Hauppauge HD PVR 2
will allow me to take HDMI and stream it to my streaming partners. It’s not expensive at around $180, but I haven’t tested all the pieces to make sure it will work, yet.

I just ordered the cables from Amazon to connect my T3i and also my MacBook Pro with HDMI. The biggest question is if these both have audio out via HDMI and if they have HDCP copy protection. If they have audio and don’t have copy protection, it should be trivial to use my good camera or my computer as a video source anytime I want.

Here’s where you come in. $180 isn’t a lot, but it’s more than I have to spare, so I’m hoping you can put a few bucks toward it. It’s purely voluntary and if you don’t want to, no biggie. If you do, just click on the paypal donate button below.

I want to share what I learn so that churches can get more “bang for their buck” out of using products like this. It could be it won’t work, but I won’t know that until I try it.

Should this be a crazy success and I get around $1000, the piece that will really take this up to the next level is the Blackmagic Design ATEM Television Studio Production Switcher, so I’ll get that as well.

So, I guess I should say that my ultimate goal is about $1200 so that I can switch between a good camera and my computer live and beautifully, reducing my post production time to nothing. That would be awesome and it would enable me to do more shows, maybe even two a day.

I’ll post all the pieces and parts as well if you want to do what I’m doing in your church, since my tech budget is more aligned with small churches than large ones. 😉

Paul

Oh, if you’re planning on ordering anything from Amazon, can you click on one of the links above first? It doesn’t cost any extra and I get a piece of the sale (a small piece, but a piece nonetheless; that’s what affiliate links are). Every bit helps.