Help...Newby question!!!

Can anyone advise me on the best switcher to purchase? I've joined this forum because I am about to purchase a couple of Black Magic ATEM switchers. I'm only inputting one HD camera into each switcher and require the following functions:

Remove the background using Chroma Key
Insert a stored animated background
Put some titles over the top of the video footage

I've been advised to go for the ATEM 1 but after seeing an ATEM Television Studio demonstration on youtube the ATEM 1 seems a little bit over the top for what I require. The difference in price is about 40% cheaper too so if I'm buying 2 units I need to get this right. Any advice would be great.

Also do you get the Express Media software when you purchase a switcher or do you have to buy it separate?

Thanks

The TVS does not have any ability to "store" an animated background. That feature is only available on the 1ME (or 2ME) and is limited to 2 clips of 180 frames (or any combination of frames to each clip up to 1 clip with 360 frames). So... depending on the video standard you use that will determine how long each clip can be in seconds.

There are other ways to handle this. You could display an animated background as an input to the TVS (by playing it out from a laptop or other device) and key your camera over the top of that.. but it's still possibly a little more cumbersome to handle it that way.

The titles can be achieved with either 1ME or TVS using the Media Pool to upload graphics with an alpha background.

I've never done chroma keying with the ATEM... I'll let someone else respond to that.

EDIT: Media Express is free - installed as part of the driver set you download for the ATEM.

Hope that helps.

Thankyou

You can do what you want with the TVS.

Just use a separate input (via a laptop, Media Player, etc) as the animated background.

With what you want to use it for, I've done with ease on the TVS.

Just to confirm, the animation cannot be played from the DVD drive on the same laptop that controls the switch?

If this is the case are you able to recommend a suitable player device that would work well with the switch? Our camera operators work alone and are constantly mobile with their equipent so need to be as streamlined as possible and a small device (as apposed to another laptop) that can store and play selected animations would be ideal. (The animations are wide screen MP4 format.)

Thanks again

Yes, you can use the same computer, as long as it can handle it.

Heck, I've controlled the TVS, captured the H.264 stream, and used it to play a video as an input all at the same time on one laptop.

When you hook the computers HDMI output to the TVS, it's basically going to see the TVS as a monitor. Make sure to use it as an extended display, not in clone mode.

Thankyou