• HV30: $899.
• 100 feet of RCA component video cable: $32.97
• BlackMagic Intensity Pro: $329
• Uncompressed high definition recording: priceless

A component distribution amp ($100+), or the Intensity Pro itself would let you send the signal to the projector as well. At our church we convert component video to an RGB VGA (d-sub) signal, run it into the 4x4 switcher, then distribute to three projectors.

My personal experience with firewire is such that it has enough problems without adding third-party extenders (cat5, etc.).

Would work for me, also :-)

But as a note: Mr. Yi Fong Yu is going to need a new computer as this won't be able to plug into his iMac. His iMac has no slots, PCIe or otherwise, or did I miss something?

You're right. Not to mention a hard drive fast enough for recording (especially if the computer would be used for something else at the same time).

Anyway, firewire should not be used for live display; the immense delay is intolerable for front-screen projectors.

I am curious about this. Is the delay because of something in the FireWire itself, or the inherent encode/decode delay when handling Long GOP HDV?

It's not FireWire itself. HDV is 15-per-GOP, so you have at least a half-second there, but most cameras (like my XH A1) take a little longer than that.

With the elimination of FireWire though, it would appear that a cheap solution for Mr. Yi Fong Yu is gone.

But at least he now knows what it's really going to take, and why.

hi Bill+everyone,

thx4 all ur suggestions! =D.

i think we're going to go with the cat5e/6 solution. the cost of fiber is a bit out of the price range. copper is perfect for this application. i knew about repeaters and knew of catxx solutions but i never put the 2 together =P. in the custom HT arena, they run cat5 for everything from hdmi to speaker cables.

with response to sdi, i was just curious how studios run things that's all =D. i know it gets expensive quick, but you are correct, that's definitely outside of our budget currently. one related question to that is:
will an HD cam w/firewire look BETTER than SD cam w/firewire? i thought there were bandwidth limitations to firewire? haven't time to play w/it yet even though i know it can capture 1920x1080 in any frame-rate.

dan, that's quite out of our current price range, but it would have been nice4sure =D.

as for the reason why we need to input the feed into the iMac, we're using ProPresenter for worship text overlays and other things. it's sort of doubles as a live studio video mixing console currently for jumpbacks, txt, video, audio and so on.

the back of the iMac also includes a fw800 cable. i know there are fw400->fw800 adapters. isn't the 800 spec supposed to include 30meter 100feet runs? i don't see any cables.

Glad I could come up with something for you.

All the DV and HDV consumer and low-to-mid range professional cams run a 25 Megabit/sec. bitstream. What changes going from DV to HDV is the codec.

Think of DV as being a motion JPEG, where each frame (picture) is its own self contained entity.

HDV on the other hand is built on the MPEG-2 codec, where up to 15 frames are bundled together. Much more computationally intensive to assemble, but it justifies itself by being far more bandwidth efficient.

Do not know. Instead I ask the question: If fw400 tops out at 5 meters, is it plausible that its double speed brother would support runs six times as long?
I see the lack of cables as implicit confirmation of what I suspect.

Your milage may vary.

However, I must admit a vested interest.

Most Sundays I am shooting one of my church's services to turn into a DVD for our choirs to use for review, and for shutins.
For special occasions (Christmas, Easter) we setup monitors in our old sanctuary, now the chapel, for the overflow crowd.

To me this looks like a good solution for the cable run over to the chapel.
The fact that there is a slight delay doesn't matter. If you go with this, I am very interested in how it ends up working for you.

Sincerely,
Bill Koehler

i'm going with the cat5. i think that'll work best in this application.

just out of curiosity. how many members in ur church and do u use the video just for the overflow or do u do other things with it?

Not sure about the total membership numbers.
I do know the total Sunday Service attendance # is ~1600.

Wednesday evening we have a Wednesday Night Supper + music program.
Around 400 - 500 people show up for that.

Alpharetta First United Methodist Church.

wow, that total attn is like 8x more than ours =p.

anywho, thx4ur help.