Fed up with Tricaster, need another switching solution. Suggestions?

[rafikiwilliams]

Ive been using tricaster systems for the past couple years and Ive never liked using them. Im now finally looking towards other solutions.

I need to have the ability to do live video switching between 3 cameras and ideally would like to capture the raw switched footage straight into my macbook pro.

In a perfect world I would want a hardware device with 3 bnc inputs and a firewire output of the switched footage.

Any reccomendations?

 

[nosys70]

you can use a videonics mx1 mixer and any video to firewire converter (the canopus ADVC100 is great)
then you got 4 composite/yc inputs with preview andmany effects (pip, chroma key, wipes etc...) and a firewire output. for cheap .
you should be able to find the videonics mx1 for $300 and the canopus ADVC100 for $100.

I switched to Vmix 2010 that is a great software (for PC) and use it with 3 Blackmagic Intensity pro cards in a cheap tower pc.
It allows me to capture composite/YC/components/HDMI in SD or HD and even record it on disk or stream on the net.

I find it very superior to any proprietary solution since you can build a pc with your own spec (i purchased a $80 Asus motherboard, took an old Core2 duo 3Ghz processor, some refurbished RAM, a $60 Nvidia video card and build a win 7 64bit for very cheap.), cost me less than $300 for the PC and the intensity pro card are priced ok (about $200 each).
If a need to upgrade then i can add more ram, more disks, change the processor to quad core.
The application allows to mix video files from disk or DVD, capture desktop screen from another pc thru network, play picture and powerpoint presentation, overlay titles or credits . It is perfect whatever you do.
I use the vga output from my nvidia card, so i can get the output in any resolution from 800x600 to 1920x1080

you can hardly find such video tool that does not cost at least 8000$