Review of Telestream Wirecast Gear 110 Live Streaming Production System
By Jim Bask
Computers are usually the weakest link in the live production world, because they are the most likely to fail. I have always been a diehard switcher console advocate, but the Wirecast Gear may make me a convert. It’s a solid turnkey system built from the ground up and optimized to run Wirecast.
Telestream has been an industry leader in the field of streaming for some time. One of the interesting things about the company’s software is that it’s pretty much hardware-agnostic; with the right capture card, almost any camera or device could be utilized. Wirecast is also robust enough that with the proper hardware, it could handle all the live production, as well.
However, if you have ever built a computer from scratch, you know the pains of getting hardware that plays well together, getting it all integrated, and ensuring that it meets the system specs for the applications you are going to be running. It’s a real pain to get all of that done right. It’s even worse once you get into the video capture side of the build. The number of video cards on the market is enough to give even the most seasoned pro decision paralysis, which is why Wirecast has introduced Wirecast Gear. It’s a turnkey system built from the ground up and optimized to run Wirecast.
What it does
Wirecast Gear is designed to be a streaming production tool. It comes with preset outputs for all the standard streaming companies, plus a few I didn’t expect, like Facebook Live and YouTube. It will also locally record the program output as either an MOV, MP4, or Windows Media format. As an additional feature, Wirecast 7 Pro can also record a local ISO. This isolated input record can be any video input coming through the capture card. There is almost no limitation on the input type beyond the capture card because Wirecast 7 will take inputs from anywhere, including screen capture, webstream, and Twitter feeds.
For this review, I used the Wirecast Gear 110, which features four HDMI inputs for video sources. It also has Wirecast 7 Pro installed, reported to be the most feature-rich streaming software on the market. From the user standpoint, the software is easy to use; just select your shot and transition it to live. You can also utilize layers to add graphics or custom picture-in-picture layouts. This means you can set up custom looks well ahead of time and then easily apply them to your show live. One of the first things that caught my attention when testing this feature was how seamlessly it worked. When selecting a shot containing multiple cameras, the Wirecast Gear automatically scales and positions the picture-in-picture smoothly from the previous location to the next location. This is something you typically only see on very large production switchers…[continue reading on Churchproduction.com]