How To Stream Video From A Camera With No Firewire Port

Many of us have digital camcorders around. And, it is increasingly popular these days to live stream up to the Internet using services like Ustream or Justin.tv. How do we merge the two together?

The easiest option is to use a regular webcam, either connected via USB or built-in (as with most laptops). But, what if you want higher quality?

The lens on almost any camcorder is going to be of higher quality than the typical webcam. Better glass quality and higher apertures mean the camcorders will produce better imagery and better low-light performance. You don’t need an expensive camcorder, either. As I said, almost any camcorder is going to produce better quality video than a webcam.

So, how can we use our camcorder as a webcam?

If you have an older MiniDV camcorder (the kind that uses the little mini tapes), then chances are it has built in Firewire. In this case, you can plug the camera into your computer using a Firewire cable and, in most cases, it will then be able to deliver a live streaming video signal to the computer. Anything the camera sees will be delivered to your computer in real-time, and you’ll be able to select the camera as a webcam.

However, most newer camcorders won’t do this. They use a Flash-based memory storage and they don’t have built-in Firewire.

So, are we screwed?

No, we just switch to HDMI. Most of these more modern cameras will have the ability to deliver a live video signal over HDMI. The way you can test this is to plug the HDMI cable from your camcorder directly into your TV. You should be able to see the camera’s output on your TV just fine.

So, the question is… how do you get an HDMI signal into your computer?

Well, on most computers, there is no built-in way to do it. So, you’ll need a hardware add-on to be able to capture this footage.

One such option is the BlackMagic Intensity, from Black Magic Design. This device allows you to capture HDMI output on your computer. It comes in 3 flavors:

• A PCI-Express model, the Intensity Pro. This model is an expansion card, so you can fit it into any tower PC or Mac.
• Intensity Shuttle, which comes in both USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt models.It can take HDMI input as well as S-VIDEO input.
• Intensity Extreme, which is solely for HDMI input and only comes in Thunderbolt.

So, for example, I have a Canon Vixia HF100 camcorder. It only connects to the computer using USB, and when mounted that way it basically acts like a glorified USB drive. That’s it. The camera has zero ability to live stream. But, it CAN stream over the HDMI cable.

So, bring in something like the Intensity Extreme (which works great for me since my iMac has a Thunderbolt connection built in). Plug the camera into the Intensity and that allows me to capture the uncompressed, raw high-def footage from the camera directly into the computer. The Intensity will take care of down-sizing the stream as necessary (since we can’t truly broadcast a high-def signal over UStream).

Now, you can use your more modern camcorder as a webcam. :)