Steven Fokkinga
December 15th, 2010, 08:12 AM
Hi all,
I'm investigating the possibility of making a very cheap and quick multi-cam setup, using a laptop and three pocketcams. I basically want to film actors from three different directions in a rehearsal setup. It's not really about image quality, I just want to use it to evaluate the performance with the actors. An extra microphone would be nice to be able to hear dialogue well enough. The problem is that I'm not sure if I can make this work, since I don't have the cameras here to test.
So my ideas was to have three pocketcams, like flip HD's, or kodak zi8's, connected somehow to a laptop with a program that can do multicam, like premiere pro. Ideally I could hook them up to the laptop without the cameras recording themselves, just live outputting the video, and I could sync start/stop the actual recording with the laptop. An external mic could also be recording the audio simultaneously.
So, in short, my questions are:
- Do these pocketcams have a live video out in the first place?
- Would it be possible to get a live feed from these kind of cameras over usb (laptops usually have 3 or more usb ports)? Or, if usb doesn't work, would it be necessary to get some type of convertor, to transfer the hdmi out of the cameras into something the laptop can handle in threefold (there are usually no hdmi-in ports on a laptop, let alone three)
- Would the laptop be able to process three streams of video and one stream of audio simultaneously? I figured that an advantage is that these pocketcams usually have low bit-rates.
- Has anyone tried something like this in the first place?
Thanks!
I'm investigating the possibility of making a very cheap and quick multi-cam setup, using a laptop and three pocketcams. I basically want to film actors from three different directions in a rehearsal setup. It's not really about image quality, I just want to use it to evaluate the performance with the actors. An extra microphone would be nice to be able to hear dialogue well enough. The problem is that I'm not sure if I can make this work, since I don't have the cameras here to test.
So my ideas was to have three pocketcams, like flip HD's, or kodak zi8's, connected somehow to a laptop with a program that can do multicam, like premiere pro. Ideally I could hook them up to the laptop without the cameras recording themselves, just live outputting the video, and I could sync start/stop the actual recording with the laptop. An external mic could also be recording the audio simultaneously.
So, in short, my questions are:
- Do these pocketcams have a live video out in the first place?
- Would it be possible to get a live feed from these kind of cameras over usb (laptops usually have 3 or more usb ports)? Or, if usb doesn't work, would it be necessary to get some type of convertor, to transfer the hdmi out of the cameras into something the laptop can handle in threefold (there are usually no hdmi-in ports on a laptop, let alone three)
- Would the laptop be able to process three streams of video and one stream of audio simultaneously? I figured that an advantage is that these pocketcams usually have low bit-rates.
- Has anyone tried something like this in the first place?
Thanks!