Tutorial: Configuring ViewCast Osprey 820e for a Live-Switched Wirecast Webcast

9. Choose your source in Wirecast

Now that you've identified your source, you can input it into Wirecast as you would any audio source (Figure 9, below).

Figure 9. Choosing your source in Wirecast.

10. Do the same in another program, like Flash Media Live Encoder

One of the coolest features of the 820e is SimulStream, which allows you to send an incoming stream to two different devices (Figure 10, below). In addition to encoding in Wirecast, I'm also sending the same inputs to the Adobe FMLE. If you need to serve the same video to multiple audiences-say, Windows Media to some via Expression Encoder, and Flash to others via FMLE--you can do that using a single board. I tried this with the Blackmagic Intensity Pro card, and got a "card busy" error message.

Figure 10. Using SimulStream to process the same audio/video feeds in Adobe FMLE. Freshly shaven, haircut scheduled. Man, that HDMI is a clean signal.

Osprey 820e vs. Intensity Pro

To be fair, at $200, the Intensity Pro costs a fraction of the price of the 820e. If you're seeking maximum encoding density in a workstation, however, SimulStream and dual channels on a single card are a powerful combination. The 820e also offers a greater variety of inputs like VGA, and a much more powerful set of utilities, including the Proc Amp controls shown above, and other features like the ability to extract and pass through closed captions or insert a watermark over the video. No video outputs, though, which the Intensity Pro does offer.

I experienced some minor irritations with the 820e, such having to reconfigure the video input every time I loaded a program. But once I got up and running, my tests proceeded smoothly. Be advised, however, that the 820e requires a much more powerful workstation than the Intensity Pro, which I'll cover when I return to discuss how the two cards perform on a single-CPU HP Z400 and a dual-CPU HP Z600.