REVIEW: 1BEYOND STREAMMACHINE Featuring the Matrox VS4 HD-SDI Capture Card and Telestream Wirecast Pro

Church Production by Mike Sessler

With more churches looking to expand their presence online, technical directors are spending more time trying to come up with robust, reliable and easy-to-use solutions for streaming events, classes and weekend services. While there exist quite a few high-end solutions that combine hardware, software and content delivery, many churches don’t have the budget for those. That leaves TDs typically building homegrown solutions that may or may not perform well week in and week out.

Recognizing this need, Matrox and Telestream have teamed up to produce an all-in-one solution, the Telestream Wirecast and Matrox VS4 Turnkey Solution. It’s a bit of a mouthful, but the system has the capabilities to justify the long name. You can buy one of these systems through a certified systems builder—for this review, we looked at a system from Boston-based 1Beyond—and all components are designed to work together and deliver great results.

ROBUST HARDWARE SUPPORT
At the heart of the system is the Matrox VS4 four-input video capture card. It will ingest up to four streams of SDI (with eight channels of embedded audio each), in SD or HD in the most common flavors. If for some reason four channels of video isn’t enough, you can add a second VS4 card to boost the input count to eight.

This is an interesting concept. Most of the time, churches will either broadcast the in-house video feed to the stream—which is typically cut for IMAG—or invest in a larger 2 ME switcher or perhaps a second switcher for cutting the live stream. With this solution, you could actually take four to eight video inputs, creating a separate stream mix without additional video hardware. Rather than compromising the IMAG or stream switch, this system gives you the ability to customize the mix for each venue. read more...

Check out these items featured in this post and available to BUY NOW at Videoguys.com.
	Matrox VS4 Quad HD capture and ISO Recording Card for Telestream Wirecast $1,495.00			Telestream Wirecast Pro (Win) $950.00