almost there

as i said last time, i've spent some time over the past couple of months researching switchers. to fill in some back story, i work for student life (sl, www.studentlife.net). it is a christian company that started in 94 by doing summer camps for middle and high schoold students and now today has progressed into doing an online-global bible study, still summer camps, global missions trips, and what is soon aproching, what we call tour. i work for the production half of sl which entails creative assistants, writers, a video aquisition team, editors, motion graphics, and then my end, the live event side. our half of production is containted by myself, the live video director, our lighting designer, and audio engineer, a master and assitant carpenter. between us in production we put on all of the production relating to the events at any number of our year round events. as we do what boils down to entertainment production on the live side, we own aproximately five sets of gear from audio, to video, to lighting, and possess our own set shop. we are one of the few, to my knowledge, "camp" organizations that owns and maintains their own stock of equipment. we have, in my opinion, and very formidable array of gear. while our gear does its job relentlessly it has begun to show it's age. i'll stick to telling my side of just the video story. we own five video rigs for live use which always output to projection. the rigs contain your basics, a switcher, monitors, playback decks, recording decks, distribution amps, intercom, cameras and projectors. sounds pretty standard. a detalied look into one of my rigs looks something like this... switcher, panasonic mx50a cameras, dvx100s or gl1s signal, all composite decks, svhs for recording [archive] playback, philips dvd player projection, [we rent dont own] pana dw5000u pretty basic, but does the job well, especially considering our audience is students. while compsite is far from great these days, it does [somehow] get the job done. same with the mx50s. for those of you who dont know the mx50a is this thing. it's a four channel compsite/s level switcher that was put out around ten years ago [i believe, let me know if someone knows the history]. we own for of them which work but it's image quality that just isn't there. our cameras, as i said, are panasonic dvx100s and canon gl1s. when they were all bought in the realm of five/six years ago and since, there really didn't exist a formidable live productin camera in that under five thousand range. so it seemed that it was either something of this sort, a canon or panasonic which only really offered composite level output then via adaption through loomed cable to get to where it was going. we have since adopted canon xh-g1s, which i'll write about more later, but are solid cameras. from quality output to feature set they were the best bet for what we do. for under 8k at the time [earlier this year] they were the only thing on the horizon which could do native 16x9 and sdi. we've purchased tweleve of them moving us past our dvx's and gl's. but this is besides the story i embarked on. i think it was something about switchers.. heading into our upcomming tour which runs from dec 27th to april 5th and then into cam which runs from about may to early august, it came time to upgrade our swithcers. as i said previously, i began researching what was out there and it is astonishing to see the options that proliferate the market today. compared to barely five years ago you could not come close to putting together a video rig outside of a corporate/production setting mostly because you just couldn't afford it and also because of the lack of options out there. these days i could repilcate the current state of one of our video rigs, on composite level with something like an edirol v4 and some misc parts for probably well under 10k possibly even 5k. it's really al in how you look at it. next time i promise to get into the swticher dilemma and post some pics of our final decision and new acquisition, as well as some pics of our upcomming spring tour. till then, //n

i've been researching broadcast/presentation switchers at work for some time now. while we do a bit of production we are at no means ready for a gv kalypso or anything. while i looked at everything noted below, i ended up focusing the majority of my research on the seemingly new crop of mid-range prosumer/professional range. my entire list boiled down to the following... midrange/broadcast gv indigo hr/kayak broadcast pix slate 1000/2100 for-a hvs500/600/100 ross synergy 100 echo lab data video 1000/900 panasonic 1000/400/mx70 edirol v440 newtek tricaster multiscreen/presentation spyder folsom/barco analog way fsr thanks to the miracle of technology the price vs feature set is getting to be affordable for a company like us to have great gear at a relatively fair price point. in my future entries i'll start following the details on my research and final choices... till then //n