HD For Indies

OK, file this one under Way Out There, but something about this made my skin itch along the lines of "Can't this be useful somehow, somewhere?"

The link is to a site that described how a guy essentially broadcast a local TV show to his buddy across the country using iChat A/V and an s-video to FireWire converter box, in their case one called a Pyro. I have a similar device, the Sony DVCMC-DA2.

But the idea is to send an S-video or composite signal into the device that spits out a DV stream over FireWire, and then use that as the "camera" and "microphone" in iChat.

So if you burned a DVD of your day's shoot, or played the footage out over an S-video output from another (using video mirroring or somesuch) PowerBook (if you shot DVCPRO HD this would work great) and fed that into a Pyro or DVMC-DA2, you could stream that stuff easily to somebody else. Have a text chat going simultaneously, or an audio chat or cell phone conversation, and you could be sending them (heavily compressed) but a live feed from your dailies screening.

Of course, you could always compress the footage and FTP it, but that would take much longer to compress it. This is quick and dirty, but could be somewhat effective. Maybe. It would definitely be compressed all to hell.

But if you want to show somebody something in a hurry, a DVD player, s-video to DV FireWire adaptor and a laptop is a pretty cool piece of kit to have.

Like a said, crazy idea du jour...

-mike