I know nothing about webcams, and I wanna put one or two at the club so that I can ustream my set live. Any recommendations for a webcam for a dark club?

I recommend using a video camera with digital video output. You won't get a good video quality with web cams in the dark. Video cameras have better video quality and you can even use "night mode" if the club is really dark.

I agree, use video cameras.

If you use two cameras, what will you use to switch the video?

What type of inputs that switcher has is important.

And this will go into a computer via what method?

I might get real nerd here and will prob suggest things too expensive, but I can try to help get the best video quality for the buck. Goal is trying to carry an HD signal all the way into the computer if it can fit within a budget.

Not sure about the PC side of things, but any video camera with Firewire will work as a web cam on a Mac automagically. It just shows up as another capture source in any app using the native Quicktime capture frameworks.

If I remember correctly this is actually part of the Firewire digital video spec (transport controls and feed streaming) and should also work in any proper video capture app on PC.

You'll get the best video quality with HD signal but you'll need a fast upload internet speed to send it so your viewers can see it in HD. Most clubs don't even have that fast internet speeds if you're connecting with wifi.

Well, if you have an HD source going into the machine and down convert it to SD it's still going to look MUCH crisper than inputting an SD source and keeping it an SD source. It does make a difference in streams. And if someone (looks in mirror :-p) adept to using streaming software with a lot of fine tuning features (not some basic live stream encoder), you can get a lot of lower bandwidth these days. What makes it difficult in clubs is the low-light, since codecs tend to go after killing blacks & whites in the image first, ontop of being at the mercy of how well the camera itself is in low-light settings.

A big benefit of using cameras would be in case they wanted to do some little side project with them and actually use them to record things. Might as well go after an HD (eg. HDV) for those cases, too.

Firewire (whether DV or HDV) is obviously going be the easiest way if a single source, but firewire cables don't lock and pretty much any small camera you use will use a 4-pin DV connection which are incredibly easy to knock out. Vibration from bass can also rattle it out. I mean, unless you want to jank it all and tape it the best you can so it won't just get yanked out. Plus firewire cables lose signal the longer the cable gets. They carry them much further than they used to, but it happens. HDMI has gone down the same path. They had to be kept rather short when they first came out because the video would just drop out spontaneously (then just lose it altogether) once the HDMI cable got beyond so many feet (and it was pretty short at one point. 15ft max?). HDMI still drops out over a long distance, but cables can be a lot longer at this point. Think further than HDV/DV over firewire can go these days. It also isn't a locking connector, but still much sturdy connection on both ends versus firewire since it's HDMI connection is a deeper slot.

I just wish there was a standard locking port for professionals to use with HDV/DV & HDMI, like how professional component, composite, SDI, and HD-SDI connectors all use BNC. But then again, DV/HDV & HDMI were never intended to be used in this nature. There might be some connector that converst firewire to ethernet to carry it a long distance...you just need one on each end. We used to send signals to our production area in big venues like this. Just ran long ethernet drops (but HD-SDI to ethernet) to various parts of the venue that all went to our control room into a rackmount that converted it back to HD-SDI to go into our switcher.

Last edited by DaveT on Dec-21-2010 at 01:26