I've been experimenting with a new toy recently, and I must say I'm very excited at the opportunities it opens up for my business. As you can probably guess from the title (and also the picture above of me streaming from a borrowed Panasonic Lumix to my MacBook) that what I have been experimenting with is a way to get HD from a floor camera back to my laptop wirelessly.
Enter the Teradek CUBE,
The cube 220 is a network video encoder, capable of generating a unicast video stream in many flavors (from 480i all the way through 1080p) and broadcasting it over wifi or ethernet. This is very cool tech, because it brings capabilities previously reserved for production companies with access to HD-SDI Transmitters costing tens of thousands of dollars and operating using large batteries and and large amounts of licensed bandwidth.
Today, small start-ups, such as our very own Roll 24 Productions, can broadcast full HD wirelessly from light weight, ENG cameras with only several thousand invested. Naturally its not that easy, it would be that easy if the tech would just stop changing for a darn minute, but I'll complain about that some other time.
At any rate, you've probably gathered by now that I've gotten my hands on a Teradek Cube, and last week Nick and I took over a booth at the local Diner to try and get it up and running.
As you can see I'm very excited. This equipment represents large leap forward for my business. All I can tell you right now is that this thing is tiny, light on weight and light on power. It also works, and now that I have it configured its simple to bump video from anything that has a HDMI output to my laptop. you can look forward to a full technical breakdown sometime in the future, once I get my hands on a camera other than Nick's Lumix to test with, and develop a battery solution that is held together with a woodworking clamp.
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Loving the clamp
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