Capturing the screen as a DV signal over Firewire from Udart (Vibeke Bertelsen) on Vimeo.
Udart aka Vibeke Bertelsen writes with a nice hack for video on the Mac: using the ability of FireWire to stream DV, she routes video output of one computer into another. That could make for nice multi-computer processing capabilities. The basic ingredients: the FireWire SDK plus Quartz Composer.
My tutorial is a hack for making a quick screen cast from one Mac to another – without the need for any extra hardware apart from a Firewire cable.
This way the owners of two Macs will be able to create a digital video mixer on the fly using the screen capture of one computer as a video source in a VJ app on the other computer.
Furthermore the tutorial introduces two small Apple demo applications that I have not heard mention of elsewhere: VirtualDV which makes your Mac ‘pretend’ to be a DV device and QuartzComposerLiveDV which transmits a DV signal of the contents in a Quartz Composer file.
Full details on his site:
The 5$ video mixer – how to do a DV screen cast through Firewire
Okay, maybe not $5 mixer seeing as you need an entire Mac, but still a potentially nice solution!
Now, I’m guessing the Mac visualist ninjas and developers out there will have more to add to this solution, so I’m just going to remain silent and hear what you have to say. But I can absolutely think of some nice capabilities of this. Incidentally, is there anything to stop the use of a Windows or Linux PC in the mix, since the basic underlying capability is in FireWire and DV, not the Mac per se? (Perhaps at the receiving end, if not the broadcast end?)