Live video feed troubleshooting

C

CenterpointVideo

New member
My apologies if this is the wrong place for such a question. I'm new to the video community and found this board through some searches. If this is the wrong place, please let me know and I'll repost elsewhere, or if anyone is familiar with a forum where my question might be better answered I'd appreciate any direction.

I work as videographer for a midsize church. I have no real training in video work and am just figuring things out as I go. Recently our church purchased ProPresenter as presentation software during our church services. ProPresenter allows us to display a live video feed with graphic overlays. We have been running our video output through a switcher box, we had 1 channel for powerpoint, 1 channel for video stream, 1 channel for external dvd player. But we're hoping to condense all of that to 1 video source with the use of ProPresenter.

The Issue:
Our problem is with getting video from the camera to the computer, with the computer recognizing the incoming signal as a video stream (like a webcam).

We're using a Sony HDR-AX2000 camera. As far as I've been able to find, the camera does not support video streaming via USB, meaning we have available Composite, Component and HDMI video outputs to work with. We need to run that video output to a 2007 iMac with Firewire 800, 400, and usb ports.

Is there any cable that will convert any of those outputs to any of the available iMac inputs? Would we need some sort of USB capture card to enable that? The built in iSight on the iMac works perfectly with the live video stream capabilities of the software, we just need the computer to recognize the AX2000 as a video source like the iSight.

If you have any questions about what we're running or trying to do, i'll answer as quickly as possible. We'd like to get this worked out in time for our Christmas Eve service, so time is of the essence :)

Thanks for reading, and for your help!
 
With regards to this board, the question kind of overlaps between this sub-forum and the "live events/documentary" sub-forum, but I don't know that either is necessarily better than the other.

I am not super familiar with iMacs, but if I'm right in thinking that they have no PCI or similar expansion slots, an external composite video-to-USB encoder would be the way to go. Something along the lines of the Hauppage USB Live 2, although there are probably dozens of choices on the market. I suggest composite because it's going to be less expensive (not only for the encoder but also for the cabling), easier to find, and also require less horsepower from your iMac to process.

You mentioned having a DVD player previously; something like this would also work for that, but I don't know that you can run two simultaneously, so you might still need to switch prior to the encoder if you want to continue using that.
 
You're right about iMac's not having a PCI expansion slot. I'm a PC Gamer on my spare time and that's really where my expertise lies too. However my job uses Mac's, so i'm learning them through trial and error.

Thanks for the advice, I'll look into a usb capture card like the one you mentioned. I need to check with Hauppage and see if the one you linked is Mac Compatible.

We currently have a personal dvd player (like what you'd take on an airplane) hooked up to one input on a switcher box
The Mac hooked up to another input
and the camera separately hooked up as a third input
They all feed out to a projector that shows on a screen onstage during services.

That means we have to manually switch between inputs each time we want to show another video source. If all goes well with ProPresenter, we can simply use "live" slides to show the video stream, import .mov files as slides in order to play recorded video clips, and have the standard slides (like powerpoint) to show pictures or anything like that.
 
Hi, I've had experience using the composite output of a video camera, converting it to firewire with a Grass Valley adapter. Here's a similar model which accepts HDMI:
http://www.grassvalley.com/products/advc-hd50
Once in the Mac, we had to use the video in Skype. For that we used this software:
http://b-l-a-c-k-o-p.com/CamCamX.html
It's able to trick Skype into thinking that the Firewire video is actually the built-in camera.

I hope this is useful for your particular situation. This solution has worked for us for years.
 
what is the reason that you don't want to use the switcher?

(i ask this question because i too work at a church doing multimedia, and our system is set up with all the inputs running into a switcher/scaler, then out to screens and record)
 
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