We are rapidly moving towards the start of our new Master’s programme Music, Communication & Technology. This is a unique programme in that it is split between two universities (in Oslo and Trondheim), 500 kilometres apart. We are working on setting up a permanent high-quality, low-latency connection that will be used as the basis for our communication. But in addition to this permanent setup we need solutions for quick and easy communication. We have been (and will be) testing a lot of different software and hardware solutions, and in a series of blog posts I will describe some of the pros and cons of these.
Today I have been testing the Blackmagic Web Presenter. This is a small box with two video inputs (one HDMI and one SDI), and two audio inputs (one XLR and one stereo RCA). The box functions as a very basic video/audio mixer, but the most interesting thing is that it shows up as a normal web camera on the computer (even in Ubuntu, without drivers!). This means that it can be used in most communication platforms, including Skype, Teams, Hangouts, Appear.in, Zoom, etc., and be the centerpiece of slightly more advanced communication.
My main interest in testing it now was to see if I could connect a regular camera (Canon XF105) and a document camera (Lumens DC193) to the device. As you can see in the video below, this worked flawlessly, and I was able to do a quick recording using the built-in video recorder (Cheese) in Ubuntu.
So to the verdict:
Positive:
- No-frills setup, even on Ubuntu!
- Very positive that it scales the video correctly. My camera was running 1080i and the document camera 780p, and the scaling worked flawlessly (you need the same inputs for video transition effects to work, though, but not really a problem for my usage).
- Hardware encoding makes it easy to connect also to fairly moderate PCs.
- Nice price tag (~$500).
Negative:
- Most people have HDMI devices, but SDI is rare. We have a lot of SDI stuff, so it works fine for our use.
- No phantom power for the XLR. This is perhaps the biggest problem, I think. You can use a dynamic microphone, but I would have preferred a condenser. Now I ended up connecting a wireless lavalier microphone, with a line-level XLR connection in the receiver. It is also possible to use a mixer, but the whole point of this box is to have a small, portable and easy set up.
- 720p output is ok for many things we will use it for, but is not particularly future-proof.
- It has a fan. It makes a little more noise than when my laptop fan kicks in, but is not noticeable if it is moved one meter away.
Not perfect, but for its usage I think it works very nicely. For meetings and teaching where it is necessary to have a little more than just a plain web camera, I think it does it job nicely.