The VidblasterX website says: “VidBlasterX is a versatile and powerful ultra-low latency cascading vision mixer and video router with built-in scalers, time base correctors, frame synchronisers, IP video encoders and decoders, video players, recorders, keyers, effects and much more.”.
If you’re ever been tasked with recording a lecture or a panel discussion at a conference, you know how time consuming and tedious video recording and post production can be. Transferring DV tapes to your computer takes hours.Editing multiple camera feeds together takes even longer. If you want to live stream the production, that requires another camera and audio setup. You can rid yourself of all of that tedium if you switch to a live production model. Until recently, this was incredibly expensive, something only TV stations could afford.
Then came, a product quickly adopted by geeks and gurus like of the. But the TriCaster is still expensive, the cheapest model coming in at just under $4,000.00. For a small business or a non-profit trying to run a conference on a shoestring, four grand is still a pretty high price to pay for video production. Enter BoinxTV, an oddly titled software package from Boinx Software, a German company founded in 1996 by brothers Achim and Oliver Breidenbach. BoinxTV allows you to turn your Mac into the hub of a fully digital production studio that can capture video from multiple sources all in real time. That means you can connect multiple DV firewire cameras or USB web cams to your Mac and switch between those video sources, creating the look and feel of a live television broadcast. A license for the software can run as low as $199 for the sponsored edition that places an add for BoinxTV at the end of each of your videos.
The non-sponsored version is $499. If you’re affiliated with an educational institution, a non-sponsored license costs only $249.
Bottom line, at any of these price points the software is worth every penny given the amount of time it will save you and the amount of stress that it will wring out of your work flow. You can use CamTwist, to capture the output of BoinxTV—complete with video switching and graphical overlays—and broadcast it over Ustream, Justin.TV, or Stickam.
![Production Production](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125445888/918017149.jpg)
I recently used this software to record a panel discussion with Elinor Ostrom, the 2009 Nobel Laureate in Economics. The room was incredibly crowded, so the ability to switch from the camera at the rear of the lecture hall to the camera placed at the front of the room came in handy as I needed to readjust the rear camera in order to avoid taping the back of peoples’ heads. Here’s the video: Boinx has produced a whole bunch of videos that will show you the ins and outs of the software before you buy it.
![Live Video Production For Mac Live Video Production For Mac](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125445888/556701899.jpg)
This overview and “getting started” guide really give you a great idea what features the product contains: You may also find these videos helpful. They illustrate how to work with devices and how add RSS feed tickers to your videos: If you really want to delve into a whole host of features that BoinxTV offer, you can watch this lengthy webinar video: As always, please post a comment or email us at if you have any questions about this or any other post.