What Camera is Best with QLab?
Jason
I'm looking to purchase a camera for use with QLab to create live
video feeds. The process in the program seems really easy, but I can't
really find much documentation on what kind of camera to purchase.
I ultimately want to have an HD camera so that when the image is
presented on a large screen it will have a high-quality resolution, so
I'm hesitant to use the ADVC-55 adapter since the composite signal
that it requires would not be the same HD resolution that the camera
would record.
I've gathered that I could get a firewire DV camera, but am having
trouble searching for one.
Could you recommend a model (or models) camera that has been proven to
work well with QLab or is the common go-to camera?
Sean Dougall
are supported by the QTCapture framework (which is what QLab's camera
cue uses) boils down to two main categories: FireWire DV cameras/capture
boxes and IIDC-compliant webcams.
Unfortunately, DV cameras are all standard definition, by (ahem)
definition. Some FireWire devices support HD video with a different
codec, misleadingly called HDV, but HDV is in fact completely unrelated
to DV, and doesn't work with the camera cue. This has been a source of
confusion with Grass Valley converters particularly; the ADVC-55 and
ADVC-110 work with the camera cue, but the ADVC-HD50 doesn't.
Webcams are a bit tricky, in that I've never seen one actually advertise
its IIDC-compliance on the box. Many are -- but of course, they're
webcams, so they don't generally have the best video quality.
There is an alternative that will let you use most HD sources, but it's
more work to set up. The idea is to use a dummy video cue in QLab, and
send its output through a Quartz Composer patch, letting Quartz do the
actual camera input. More instructions are under "Use Quartz Composer to
access non-DV cameras" at:
http://wiki.figure53.com/QLab+Hints+and+Tips
If you do go that route, you still need to be sure the camera is capable
of outputting live video. My Canon Vixia AVCHD camera doesn't, for
example, so no software will work with it as a live source.
Cheers,
Sean