Audio & Visual recording solutions - help much appreciated

Liam mckenna

Hello everyone, I'm hoping someone could help me with a project I'm working on.

Here's my goal :

1) To record a live DJ'ing set using video coming from my camera and direct audio coming from the mixer.
2) To simultaneously Livestream while recording.
3) (BONUS) have the ability to swap between multiple feeding camera's.

I recently attempted to record this with Quicktime on my mac and ran into a lot of trouble with blanking and crashing over a long period of time. Furthermore I cannot swap between camera's using quicktime.

If anyone know's the best software and/or method to do this I would be extremely greatful.

Thanks!

Liam

ScumLord

That's a pretty complicated task. Recording the audio onto a camera from the mixing desk is doable but you're probably better off just recording onto a separate device.

It's possible to live stream but if you want to do it right you probably could do with a special connection and some hardware specifically for the task.

Running multiple cameras is going to generate an awful lot of data, I don't think your average consumer PC is going to be able to handle that kind of data.

The rest is probably doable on a budget with standard equipment, it will be prone to breakdowns but it's doable. Switching camera feeds I would guess is another ball game entirely.

Tow

http://www.vmix.com.au/

You will need a decent PC with quad cores (or better) and proper branded (Osprey, Blackmagic etc.) capture cards for the video inputs. USB dongles etc will not work well and break your hart in trying! Take the audio output from the mixer into one of the video cards. Many good cards will have balanced XLR inputs and be better than any built in sound card.

If you don't need to record/stream then most VJs will used a hardware video mixer, the 'Roland V4' is a favourite, but there are others which are just as good. An other options is a hardware mixed going into a basic' PC to stream the video.

Liam mckenna

First off, thanks so much for helping with this!

Computer I have currently is macbook pro 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7, 16bg 1600 MHz DDR3. Is this something that'll up to the task? What program would be best suited to record? When you say record off separate devices do you mean record Audio off one program and Video from another then match them later?

The Roland V4, is this just to swap the camera feed? would this still be recording all the video feeds or just the one selected?

My apologies If I'm coming across as uninformed in this area. I've little experience with this type of recording!

Tow

Liam mckenna wrote: »

First off, thanks so much for helping with this!

Computer I have currently is macbook pro 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7, 16bg 1600 MHz DDR3. Is this something that'll up to the task? What program would be best suited to record? When you say record off separate devices do you mean record Audio off one program and Video from another then match them later?

The Roland V4, is this just to swap the camera feed? would this still be recording all the video feeds or just the one selected?

My apologies If I'm coming across as uninformed in this area. I've little experience with this type of recording!

Computer: If you use VMix, you need a desktop with enough expansion slots for the capture cards. USB cannot handle the data throughput, Blackmagic sell a external USB3 capture device, but the reviews were not great a while back, especially if you have more than 1 running at the same time. Plus the software is Windows. The i7 is ideal, and 16bg would be more than enough. vMix does not use a huge amount of memory. It is all about raw processing throughput. A solid state drive would be nice, and I would say a requirement if you want to record all the camera inputs streams separately plus the output at the same time. The PC also need to be clean, there is no point in using a machine loaded up with crap, which slows it down and causes pauses etc.

vMix can do everything. It can mix the camera inputs and audio, send the output to a second monitor and/or Blackmagic card (projectors), Stream to the internet, Record the output (and all the inputs in the pro versions) at the same time.

The Roland V4 is just a video mixer (like a audio mixer) with 4 composite cameras in and one composite video signal out, you would then need to feed the output into a computer to stream, record, send to projectors etc. A laptop should be fine with one USB Capture device (Intensity Shuttle etc), but don't use a cheap eBay Chinese dongle.