Hi Dave.
Busy watching your 300th Live Show now (Well, not live, Where I am they have only got a 384kbps connection), Some places in South Africa now you can get up to 4mbps, but at a price. I really envy your 16kbps connection.
Anyway, I posted this some time ago, as a way to try make it easier on yourself for your live shows :
Hi Dave.
I have been watching your previous live shows, and seen that you are using a Webcam and Mic for the Ustream Feed, and another camera and mic for the Video Blog recording. I have seen that you have to realign both of them when you are changing views, and also that the amount of cables, etc must be horrendous.
I do not know much about how the Ustream system works, but perhaps you could simplify things (and improve quality) as follows :
Get a USB Composite Capture device/
You can then hook the Composite Video and Audio outputs of your camera into your computer that you use for the stream, and set the stream to use the Capture Driver instead of the webcam.
This will let you still Record the HD video, as well as SD video being sent out to Ustream with the Same Camera. By eliminating the webcam and its microphone, you will make your setup less complicated, and will only have say a set of RCA cables from camera to pc.
(If your computer and Camera have firewire or similar, perhaps you could use a firewire cable and avoid the above usb adaptor, but I do not know if this method will work, ie the camera passing signal to the pc whilst it (the camera) is recording)
You will also know that what you see in the viewfinder is exactly what the Live Stream and the Video Blog is Showing.
Peter