"What do I need to use HDV cameras?"

To use HDV sources with Wireast, you'll need to buy a Wirecast 3 license and an HDV Pack. HDV cameras will not work with older versions of Wirecast, nor the Videocue application.

Please make sure you have selected the same operating system version as your existing Wirecast license when purchasing HDV. This means the Mac OS X HDV Pack will not work with the Windows version of Wirecast for example.

We encourage you to test out your HDV camera with Wirecast before purchasing. You can evaluate HDV camera performance in Wirecast without purchasing the HDV upgrade, the output will just be watermarked.

Please be aware that HDV decoding requires significant system resources. As such we recommend that, on the Mac, you use at least a dual processor G5 system or dual core Intel CPU. On the Windows side, we recommend a modern graphics card and a dual processor (or core) system.

If you find that HDV is consuming too many system resources, here are some ways to reduce the load :

• Try switching the 'Aspect Ratio' from '1080 HDV' to '720 HDV'. This will reduce the burden on the graphics card, and may make transitions and other effects smoother. You can switch to this regardless of whether your camera supports 720p mode, since it will just reduce the processing resolution.
• Switch the 'Capture Device Size' to 'Reduced'. This will halve the amount of data being processed in exchange for slightly lower quality. We recommend experimenting with this settings to determine if the final results are acceptable.
• Using both of the above methods will bring down the processing requirements significantly. As always, we recommend experimenting with your own setup to find the best results.

When working with HDV sources, you may find there is up to two seconds of delay from the video first being captured by the camera, to it showing up in Wirecast. This is a hardware limitation on some of the first generation of HDV cameras and cannot be corrected by Wirecast. You can compensate for this by only trusting the video and audio you are seeing in Wirecast, and using the Wirecast Preview as the source for all your live cues.