Bencredible

Since we’re moving to a 3 camera setup, and cafn8ed is hosting us in his new studio space, I thought it was time for a new set.  This will be a very simple set.  The desk is *gone* and we will be standing.  The background is a giant black curtain, and we will have two 50″ plasmas over our shoulders.  In fact, here there are all boxed up, waiting to be put on stands:

There are a couple of problems with putting plasmas on camera.  First, I need to find some stands that are not scary expensive and yet are simple and elegant, preferably with casters so we can roll them on and off the set as needed.  I have yet to find any good stands that cost less than $500.00 and are 72″ tall.

Second, color calibrating a screen so it looks good on-camera is a bit of a pain.  The easiest way I have ever found to do this is to put SMPTE color bars on the screen, swing the camera around and fill the shot with nothing but the screen, and use a vectorscope/waveform to get the whole thing in to alignment.  It looks completely wrong in person, but on-camera it actually works quite well.  Each one takes a painful amount of time because they need to look exactly the same, and as with everything in life, no two plasma monitors are exactly identical.  Sigh.

The last and probably hardest problem is how to drive them.  To start I will probably just use a Macintosh with Keynote on it.  The main SVC logo animation will be on one slide, then when we start talking about news I’ll have additional slides with each news picture on them.  That’s fine to start, but I want to use these monitors a lot more than just that.  When we have call in guests, and my goal in 2009 is to have a call in guest for as many shows as possible, I want to have the guest on the plasma monitor as well as an input to the video switcher.  Two problems there: 1, the switcher only has three video inputs and 2, I have no way to switch between the Skype signal on the monitor and the graphics being used for the news and whatnot.  And if I *really* want to make it hard, I want to drive each screen indepenantly of the other one.  I’m thinking a VGA matrix switcher will do the job, but still have no idea how to get the Skype caller in to the broadcasting computer.  Anyone have any ideas?  Oh yeah, and anyone know of a scary cheap VGA matrix switcher?

We are getting there!  A lot of elements fell in to place this weekend.  I’m not sure we will be 100% ready to go by our broadcast date of January 16th at 2:00am UTC, but I think we will have enough to get SOMETHING cool out there.  And I know you guys all miss Spacevidcast, so I want to come back sooner rather than later.