Does anyone here have experience with VidBlaster as a live production platform and which capture cards have you used? We were going to stream SD for the time being. Just want to run a bunch of BNC from our cams (HM700U and an xdcam), and switch it for web streaming.

We would like to take in HD, and output SD for bandwidth purposes obviously.

I was thinking about Black Magic cards as the input and wanted to run VidBlaster as the production software. This will be live events so we were going to run VidBlaster Pro. However, posts from 2009 (there are no newer ones, I looked) said there were some framerate issues.

Any other cards to consider?

It is looking like this so far:

i7 2600k
MSI Big Bang for lotso PCI slots
~2-3TB of something WD
12GB of Kingston/Corsair
A 1GB quadro card

And capture cards

Not using vidblaster - Wirecast is my primary platform.

On various boxes, I'm currently running:
Firewire for DV and HDV - this works better as a card than on the MOBO, I always look for TI chipsets, or at least non-VIA.
Viewcast Osprey 220 PCI.
Blackmagic Intensity Pro PCI-Express.

Used to use a couple Osprey 110 PCI as well.

All these cards have worked great for various capture and streaming. BM Intensity is a little touchy on the settings, but once set up has been fine.

There's been discussion over on the telestream.net forums about usb capture in SD... apparently there are inexpensive methods that allow you to suck in 2-4 sources.

More recently, the Intensity Pro Shuttle USB3. If I were buying a new MOBO today, I'd seriously consider setting up for this capture "card". I've not used it yet.

The i7 is a *very* nice processor for dealing with multiple source streaming! It doesn't break a sweat, I'm not sure I've seen a processor peak above 60%, which is pretty darn good for a live encode!