My friend, Lorraine, has a public access show that she's been producing live in the public access studio - no room for an in-person audience. However, what she wants to do is move to a new location (not a TV studio yet) that has room for a live audience and move from a call-in live show to a live-to-tape show.

She could do it with a single-cam setup pretty easily, of course - connect the firewire to a computer and record from there.

But what I'm wondering is if there's a way to do a multi-camera setup, where we can switch views live-to-tape, either by connecting two firewire cables to a single computer and getting some sort of multi-cam software, or by getting an inexpensive mixer that takes HDMI (or possibly RCA).

I believe she's got a HV20 as the primary cam; I can bring in an HG20 and possibly an HG10. The question is mixing them all together.

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Edit: The show is broadcast in SD - it's just that the HD cameras are what we have lying around. One possible solution is to build a media computer with multiple firewire inputs, and use that as the mixer? Or if we wanted to go the HDMI route, two blackmagic intensity pro cards? (Four HDMI inputs)

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Edit #2: Might it be concievably possible to use a HDMI consumer-TV switcher - you know, like the kind you use to switch between your Blu-ray player and your Xbox - as the mixer? You'd lose the preview - which is an important part... but... would it work?

Edit #2: Might it be concievably possible to use a HDMI consumer-TV switcher - you know, like the kind you use to switch between your Blu-ray player and your Xbox - as the mixer? You'd lose the preview - which is an important part... but... would it work?

Not sure about HDMI switching but analog "bang boxes" don't work because they don't "time" the signals (which are not Genlocked) to each other, therefore creating "tear". I would ASSUME that HDMI "switchers" would exhibit similar issues with the video stream.

Here's another similar discussion. Both of the mixers mentioned in the thread are about $10K. May not be what you want.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/open-dv-discussion/236961-how-do-live-switchers-work.html

Hmm...

More I think about it - the more it might be easier to just record and do the multicam in post, there was one thing she really wanted, which was that part of the show is done in chromakey...

Hmm...

What we could do is set up the HV20 as the wide shot, and the HG10 and HG20 later. Then we just use Vegas's multi-cam edit to edit them together.

We then hook that up via FireWire to a laptop... and we can use a computer monitor to show the result of the video to the studio audience and to the staff. That one section of the show will be one-camera only.

Now all we need is Windows software that will both do live chromakey and record...

It'd take a while to cut together in post and render out, but - and this is a huge but - it can be done.