Hi David,
Tools that might be interesting for your project:
- vidblaster --> production software www.vidblaster.com
- iris2iris --> teleprompter technology combined with webcams www.iris2iris.com
I think the latency will be your technical issue. The video stream is coming out off production software has a general latency of 2 to 3 seconds. This latency is too big to have a conversation within skype. It would be interesting to know if there is an skype add-on which give you your video production functionalities.
This is the studio in webcast mode, where the egg-carton foam behind is used to enhance the sound recorded. There’s not much room for picture taking in this space, so this is taken from the door.
When the editors here at ZDNet and I put together our plan for DIY-IT, one of our key goals was to take you through some of the projects I’ve been working on. One of the most exciting has been a project I’ve been working on since about March, building a broadcast-quality video studio for Skype in a 10×9 foot space.
In this article, I’m going to outline the project’s basic goals and objectives, and in subsequent articles I’ll take you through many of the sub-projects that were necessary to put it all together.
Like most DIY-IT projects of mine, this is a work in progress. I’m adding, tweaking, changing, and improving as I go, and I’ll share that with you as well.
How it got started
I’ve been a renter all my life. However, as housing prices here in Central Florida became more and more affordable, my wife and I decided last February that the time had come to buy a house.
As I’ve discussed before, part of being a “professional expert” is the need to have multiple streams of professional income. To do that, and also to be a successful book author, you need to promote yourself and, essentially, turn your name into your brand. Over the past five years, I’ve done hundreds of radio interviews, many network TV interviews, and, now, for CBS Interactive, I do a lot of webcasts and lectures.
See also: And now for something completely different. Welcome to DIY-IT!
In the old rental house, I had my office in a loft that was over the living room and front entryway. That loft office was where I did my interviews and webcasts. It was adequate, but not great. If someone had to leave or enter the house, the front door was right below me (and it creaked). If I had to do a video interview (where I was the interviewee), light was almost impossible to control, and what you could see on camera behind me was less than fully professional. Sometimes you could see the hallway, sometimes my computer desk, sometimes I had a divider up to try to hide it all. It was tolerable, but far from great.
Even so, I preferred doing video interviews from home. Miami is a very long three-hour drive away, New York City is a very long three-hour flight away, and either of those choices would take me out of my productive writing loft for longer than I’d like.
Back to the house story.
When we decided to buy a home, my wife took on the task of hunting for houses during the work day, while I was working on projects with deadlines. Shortly after she started, she found the house we’d eventually buy. When she came home that day, after almost instantly knowing it was “the one,” she also told me it had a nice space for a studio.
I’d been unhappy with my office-as-studio space in our old, rented home, but I never really thought I’d have the option to carve out a dedicated studio space. But, as it turns out, the house we bought has a 125-inch by 95-inch room (that’s about 10 feet by about 9 feet) that is perfect for a studio.
I think it was probably initially intended as a baby’s room or a child’s bedroom, but since we don’t have kids, I immediately accepted the challenge of turning it into a studio for both broadcast-quality audio and video.
