Wirecast 3 ships

Vara Software today began shipping Wirecast 3, a TV Studio for a Mac or Windows system designed to work seamlessly with HDV cameras. "If you sport a new widescreen HDV camera and want to webcast with it, Wirecast is the only solution available to you on any platform," said Simon Clarke, President of Technology at Vara. "The quality an HDV camera delivers to Wirecast at 720p or 1080i is simply amazing. Wirecast passes that high definition quality directly to your chosen encoding format, resulting in crisper, cleaner webcasts." The software features "Desktop Presenter," a small application for Mac or Windows systems that streams the computer's desktop to Wirecast, which incorporates that desktop in the final broadcast.Wirecast 3 is available for $450, though using an HDV Camera in HDV mode adds $100 to the price. Upgrades are available for existing Wirecast users for $180.

Wirecast 3 offers built-in Darwin Streaming Server, requires no configuration on systems with Bonjour -- which includes all modern Macs -- and adds a dynamic spill suppression algorithm that automatically increases output quality. The update can also automatically hint QuickTime movies created by Wirecast, allowing users to upload broadcasts to a QuickTime Streaming Server for streaming "video on demand" playback without further processing.



Wirecast for Windows offers OLE-based scripting, with examples in Visual
Basic, Perl, and C#. Wirecast for Mac OS X, however, already offers this functionality through AppleScript.

by MacNN Staff