The
MOST IMPORTANT part of video is audio. If it sounds bad people will leave. It is too low people will leave. If it is too high people will leave. On the other hand your video can look awful, so long as you have great audio they will stay. Oh yeah, content is important too, but everyone on the face of the planet like space travel and everyone likes me, so I'm good there.
I was going to be ecstatic at my pure brilliance and awesomeness in doing the almost-impossible, but audio got in the way.
Yesterday I wrote about how I was trying to get an HD video setup for $6,000. Lo and behold I got it to work this evening. All of it. I can switch between multiple HD sources, I can add HD graphics and HD CG, heck I can even run HD clips all from the latest beta of CamTwist. Oh, I even got the streaming to a PC down. I just send the signal out of my DVI port and in to the PC via a Blackmagic Intensity Pro card and right there in Flash Media Encoder I can steam it live. Does it look stunning you ask? Of course it does!
http://www.spacevidcast.com/test/ is where I'm playnig with this. Watch that live video and you'll soon notice a problem: the audio happens a full second before the video.
Crap.
So I'm a lot closer than I was yesterday, but now I'm stuck agian. In my studio the video is delayed by the HDMI capture card by at least a second, possibly close to 2 seconds. This means that the lip sync is all off and won't work at all. I'm using a low-end PC I had laying around, but when I get a higher end box to stream and you can see all 30 frames per second, this will be a really big issue.
I'm looking at solutions from Soundflower, Audio Hijack and possibly some way to delay the incoming audio on the PC input card. I *might* be able to use one of the Blackmagic Intensity outputs to go HDMI to HDMI and send the digital audio down the line with the video. Unknown at this time. I'm also trying to find any hardware that can act as an analog audio delay line on the cheap. If anyone knows how to delay only the analog audio either on the Macintosh output or the PC input, I would be greatly appreciative!
So close yet so far away.
