DV & Live streaming webcam solution

[verlorenengel]

Hello forumers,

Just a question for those adept with video and the mac/osx. I'm about to plunge and buy a canon minidv camera (http://www.canon.com.au/products/cameras/cameras_video/xm1.html for those interested).

Aside from video editing and attempting 'movie creation' with FCP3 etc, I'd like to be able to set the camera up to stream video or if not at least take images from the camera every 30 seconds or so to act like a webcam.

Is this possible?

I've tried it using an old analogue camera we own and if I leave the analogue camera on view, without a tape in, it'll work for about 30secs before the thing shuts off automatically! I guess its some kind of power saving feature.
So I'm a little worried the new camera setup will do the same thing?

My sisters have the analogue system setup for their animations as they use it to capture each frame of the animation they're doing.

How well would a dv/firewire camera work for what I want to do (streaming video camera / webcam / video editing) with OSX, what else would I need to buy etc?

I guess tell me everything, I'm hopeless at asking questions because I never ask 'all' of what I want to know... must be a bug in my firmware


Thanks!

 

[serpicolugnut]

There are a few programs that will allow any firewire DV cam act as a web cam. I'm currently using CoolCam from Evological, and from what I've tried, it's the best. I think it's about a $20 program. A simliar program is Oculus, but in my testing, it wasn't nearly as complete or as robust as CoolCam

It only does single frame uploads at either certain intervals, or when motion is detected. There are solutions that will stream video, but I'm not sure there is anything available right now for OS X. Apparently, Quicktime 6 will feature a "broadcast" feature, that will allow you to stream video from a QuickTime device to the net with little trouble. Who knows when QT6 will actually ship though (rumor has it will be shipping by WWDC).

If you want to video conference with it, you'll need to use iSpQ Video Chat. Unfortunately, iSpQ doesn't interface with MS Netmeeting, so the person you VC with will need iSpQ as well (runs on X, 9, and Windows). It's $40.