Busy with Video
I’ve been spending some time lately putting together and tweaking a live video system for my church, Rock Family Church in Colorado Springs. They wanted the ability to do I-Mag live on the projector for the audience as well as record and stream the video for the web. This was really something that is right up my alley. I priced out a bunch of components and put together a decent standard definition package with a lot of flexibility and expandability. Since we rent our Sunday morning venue from a large event center it needed to be flexible and portable. We have storage and offices in the same building as the event center, so I decided a rolling rack for all the production equipment would be ideal. We lock up the cabinet and roll it out to the back of the venue each Sunday morning and plug into the semi-permanently wired video and audio cable runs we set up to each camera position. I’ll talk about the cameras another time.
We decided to go with the LVS-800 switcher by Edirol/Roland. This was the switcher that seems to be in the right price range and has a lot of flexibility including 2 computer RGB inputs, and 4 s-video inputs, all shared with the systems 8 total composite video inputs. It seems to be a well designed switcher. Not a lot of frills, no genlock, no still image frame buffer, no linear keying, only a few basic wipes and PinP funtions. But the built in DSK(downstream key), could be useful at some point, and the large number of inputs seems like a smart move. Of course, possibly the biggest downfall to this unit is that it’s not HD, but we were going for budget.
Something to consider now though is that Panasonic has released a 5 input HD switcher for $4000, the AW-HS50. If I were to roll out another simple video production system I think I would consider this switcher and some lower level HD camcorders that support HD-SDI. Potentially you could spend the exact same amount of money as the setup I’m describing with full HD support as long as your projector can handle it. One thing I cannot recommend enough is to spend some time on the churchmedia.net forums before you make any real shopping lists.
So, back to the LVS-800 switcher. We noticed it has a few frames of delay in the big video that goes to the projector. If you don’t want this delay you need to use the A/B outputs on the back. That delay is coming from the effect processor that adds in the DSK overlay. So, if you’re using this switcher for I-Mag you might not be able to use the keyer to put lyrics over your video. But if you were putting lyrics on side screens in the main venue you could run the keyed lyrics over video to another venue that might only have a single screen, which is pretty convenient.
The other thing I’m looking into about this switcher is it’s support of a tally system. Tally lights let the camera operators and the talent know which camera is active at any moment. The LVS-800 has a DSub 15pin connector on the back for connecting to the tally system. But, the tally systems I’m seeing online are more than a thousand dollars just for the controller. I’m thinking I can build my own with some LED’s some resistors and some long Cat5e cable which we have lying around. I can’t find anything too specific online for this switcher, but it seems like a simple enough circuit to build, even with optoisolators, it doesn’t seem too crazy hard. I’ll post again how it goes if we get around to building it.