Tricaster Studio

Absolutely no moto content in this post.

Today turned out to be a much nicer day than it was yesterday. This is the view from Brower's Cafe and if you look carefully, you can just make out a bit of open water. It shows up as a dark strip just above the sea ice. There is still a bit of open water right next to the shore. The blue sky was pretty much horizon to horizon. It was still pretty cool but today it was a pleasant breeze where yesterday it was a biting wind. I think that this is one of my favorite places to take pictures up here as this isn't the first picture of these whale bones and skin boat shell.

I ended up spending much of the day unpacking and setting this up. It is a Tricaster Studio. Basically, a video production studio in a box. It has six video inputs, two digital video recorder channels, three virtual VGA computer inputs and four audio inputs. The audio inputs won't get much use since I prefer the tactile feedback of an actual audio mixer. There is a twelve channel Mackie mixer somewhere in the pile of stuff. Its output will just be fed into two two of the inputs on the Tricaster. Today, I just unpacked two of the Sony cameras that will be mounted to the ceiling of the conference room (once the mounts get here tomorrow) and connected them into the unit. There is a huge selection of transitions available and I, naturally, got the optional control surface. I also set it up to optionally feed the output to UStream.tv. This was a test as in actual production, I will feed either a Windows Media server or a Flash server on the Fairbanks campus. It was still fun to try it out.

I plan on using a Mac Mini to capture and feed the resulting video to a Podcast Producer server. To do this, I need to have a "box" of some sort to convert the S-video output to Firewire for the Mac Mini. Since I didn't want to devote a lot of desk area to the podcast capture monitor, I picked up a 9" DoubleSight USB monitor for the Mini. As you can see, it works great. You can't see the boot process but once it's up and running, no problem. Compared to the Mac Mini, the monitor seems pretty small. I like it and may be tempted to pick up a couple more...