Camera for cable channel insertion
 

Where I work we would like to be able to broadcast live events to our in house community channel provided by the cable company. They will provide the equipment to insert the channel into the system but I would need a decent camera, probably some software for a computer to broadcast a calendar of events and other signage. Maybe a Carousel Server 310 type box.

Looking at the Canon XA30 or XA10 for a camera.

Any experience with this or ideas?

I'll run back to our TV studio and ask our manager to look. Will post a follow up after I get info for ya

OK, TV guy says your camera choices would be good - he's actually looking at buying a couple of the XA30s for the studio.

He also says you'll need some sort of switcher/control panel - it should let you decide what content is sent to the cable channel, and can manage transitions, etc. It can also take a still image and make a X second long movie out of it, so you can use a screen grab or whatever for the calendar of events and such. He really recommends the Tricaster equipment, but at $10k, probably out of your budget. A much less expensive ($1600) option is from blackmagic - https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/atem

Note you'll also need a computer to "drive" the switcher... but any current desktop or laptop would do.

That unit looks like it is in our budget, we were figuring around $10k total.

We have a few laptops around that have broken screens that are less than a year old.

Well, you'll want to see what you are doing, but you can hook up a cheap external monitor to the laptop. $100 or less.

If you need more info, PM me your number and I'll see if one of our TV guys can call you at some point.

I will probably want to talk as soon as I see what gear the cable company is providing and go from there.

I figured on using an external monitor. Even a decent size is cheap enough. Cheaper than a new computer anyway.

Thanks for the info so far.

The original "Toy Story" animated film was created with a couple hundred playstations networked together.

(or something like that..:/)

Yup. The Navy's compute cluster was Nintendo based as well. Cheap commodity stuff. One dies, pull it from the shelf, replace, boot from network, carry on.

Until they locked the PlayStation so you couldn't run a different OS. I guess they didn't make enough money on the hardware.