Review: Producing Webcasts with Telestream Wirecast and the Matrox VS4

My Conclusions

As mentioned at the beginning, I’ve never run Wirecast with a powerful capture card handling most of the input/encoding/previewing load, and the results were impressive. It really was a new experience that, in my view, catapulted Wirecast into the TriCaster/Livestream Studio class of product when it came to responsiveness. I’m going to write a higher-level look at how the systems compare in a different article, but Telestream and Matrox appear to have accomplished their positioning statement, which is “the Wirecast and VS4 value proposition gives 80% of streaming professionals 100% of the features they need, at an unprecedented price.”

Though you can obviously buy the components separately and assemble a Wirecast/VS4 system on an existing computer, I really like the concept of the turnkey systems. You get guaranteed performance, the stability of a system running a clean install and one finger to point if and when things go wrong. The 1 Beyond systems were impressive bits of integration engineering, and if I was going out on a mission-critical webcast, I’d prefer to use a system like these rather than a computer that was running my video editor and a desktop encoder a few days before.