Video ideas needed??

[thecattlefitter]

Thanks for any ideas that you can give me, I hope some one has an idea that i can use, Please let me know if you think OTS will work for me.

What i need to do is bring 2 things together,

1st is... a live feed from a camera - via a RCA plug system in to a comuter.
2nd is... pre recorded video clips that are on a hard drive
   on the video clips i need to be able to keep the clip repeating untill i move to the next clip.

I have a few question first... do you think that the OTS system will work for this project.

Also,, any ideas as to how to get the live feed in to the computer and back out of the computer, I need to output the signal on an RCA TV type feed.

Any ideas would be great.

Thanks

Mark
   

[discodonal.com]

Ots does not support a live camera feed as yet! You can cue up the video clips to keep playing as long as you have them set in your playlist.

[thecattlefitter]

OK so how do you get the video back out to a TV screen? any ideas for a program that can incorporate live video??

[Darryl]

To get the video out from OtsAV you need a computer with a dual-head video card.  Older laptops had the second display capability via an S-Video connector, newer laptops have VGA and HDMI.  The connection you choose to use depends on what input you can practically use - HDMI is the best quality, but the cables and splitters are rather expensive.  VGA input is not present on all TVs.  Composite video is convenient and reasonable quality and RF (via a modulator) is lowest quality but convenient if you are playing in a venue where all of the TVs are wired to a single aerial amplifier, since you can connect directly to that.

As for incorporating live video input, it is possible (though I've not tried it) if you use a chroma key video processor and have a video clip to play in OtsAV that has the appropriate background colour.  You would have to manually switch of chroma key when playing music videos or other video clips since the chroma key colour might be present in them.   Alternatively a video mixer would do the job - again you would manually switch between the OtsAV output and the live camera output. 

Have fun,
Darryl.

[Dr.J]

What I use is VideoLan (http://www.videolan.org/) as it can playback video files or use a video capture card for playback. You will need a video capture card (ATI All-In-Wonder work or get a Hauppauge TV tuner card with a hardware encoder) for the live input and a basic graphics card that has video output for the playback. It is definitely doable, so let me know if you need more help once you are purchasing or setting things up.

[Hedley]

I know that this is a forum of Ots enthusiasts, but you're probably better off looking elsewhere, especially if you've not purchased Ots yet. You basically want repeating video clips (almost, in a sense, a video slideshow) and live input, and neither work with OtsAV. The best you can for the former is putting lots of copies of the video on the playlist, and stopping it as you need, but you'd still need to switch feeds between the clips and the live input. I'm sure other software (VirtualDJ, perhaps, or a regular media player like VLC maybe?) does this for cheaper and better.

[Darryl]

We often assume that members of this forum already own the product. Our answers are based on this. I agree that there are probably other cheaper ways of doing this.

Have fun,
Darryl