Wirecast 3 Offers Great Promises for Webcast Delivery
The newest version of Wirecast provides great promise for those delivering Live Webcasts. Wirecast 3 is now available and allows some key features which I think will be interesting to many.
Wirecast works with HDV
Wirecast now works seamlessly with HDV cameras. "If you sport a new widescreen HDV camera and want to webcast with it, Wirecast is the only solution available to you on any platform," says Simon Clarke, President of Technology at Vara. "The quality an HDV camera delivers to Wirecast at 720p or 1080i is simply amazing. Wirecast passes that high definition quality directly to your chosen encoding format, resulting in crisper, cleaner webcasts."
Broadcast a Mac or PC Desktop with Desktop Presenter
A major new feature of Wirecast is Desktop Presenter - a small application for either Mac or Windows that you can put on any locally networked PC. Desktop Presenter streams the computer's desktop to Wirecast. Wirecast incorporates that desktop into the final broadcast.
This opens the door for broadcasting PowerPoint and Keynote Presentations, a feature that is dear to the heart of many interested in webcasting. To be able to easily integrate slides using Keynote within a webcast sounds very exciting for those using QuickTime. Currently most of the high end webcasts use Windows Media and Real Media and this opens up an exciting door for those who are streaming QuickTime content.
"Although you can broadcast anything from your desktop, Desktop Presenter was conceived to be used with Keynote or PowerPoint," says Paul Carnine, President of Products at Vara Software. "A speaker shows up, installs this small utility, and Wirecast can then broadcast their presentation integrated with a video of them delivering it. Perfect for a Lecture Hall or Boardroom."
Embedded Darwin Streaming Server
By popular demand, Darwin Streaming Server has been built right into Wirecast. This is the same industry standard codebase that powers QuickTime Streaming Server.
This means your viewers can directly connect to the machine running Wirecast to watch your webcast. When you want to scale the webcast up, you can still broadcast to a remote QuickTime Streaming Server.
Improved Chroma Key
Wirecast has always had very high quality chroma key capability with very low configuration requirements. This translates to excellent keys without a lot of fuss.
Wirecast 3 builds on this by adding a dynamic spill suppression algorithm which automatically increases the quality of your output. In addition, this new algorithm has allowed the ability to decrease computation required leaving more time available for encoding.
Stream Hinting for QuickTime
Also by request, Wirecast can now automatically hint QuickTime movies created by Wirecast. This allows you to upload your broadcasts to a QuickTime Streaming Server for streaming "Video On Demand" playback without any further time-consuming processing.
Get more details about Wirecast 3 for webcasting with HDV, PowerPoint, Keynote and using Chroma Key
