Review: BoinxTV a fine, fun videocast creation tool
Posted by Dennis Sellers 
Dec 3, 2008 at 6:06pm
Before the Apple TV debuted, it was often called the “iTV” by those who prognosticated its coming. But now the true “iTV” is here, but it’s called BoinxTV, and it makes creating simple videocasts a breeze.
In fact, it’s one of those products that makes a perfect companion piece to Apple’s iLife suite (just as FileMaker Inc’s Bento could easily be a component of iWork.) Boinx Software, from Boinx Software, is a live‐production software for video podcasters that turns any recent Mac into a simple TV studio. In other words, it’s an audiovisual mixing application for recording video podcasts, sports events, concerts, interviews, sermons, lectures, seminars and more using just your Mac and up to three cameras per layer.
Its interface allows a single person to operate BoinxTV during the recording session. A very nice feature is that Boinx has included some pre-designed templates to get you started. Launch the software and you can choose from a variety of predefined templates, such as templates for a newscast, sports show, tech broadcast, etc. Of course, you can also create your own.
After you select your template, the main window opens. There’ll you’ll see all the components of the current selected layer (more on that in a moment) and can preview your work. On the right hand side there’s a window that shows the live video as it will be recorded.
BoinxTV uses various inputs like video cameras, microphones, and pre‐recorded material such as movies and sound clips. Those inputs can be used in any number of “layers” (akin to those in products such as Photoshop) that can be stacked on top of each other, toggled on and off and dynamically controlled. Almost everything in Boinx TV is a layer. Multiple layers—for example a ticker tape, a station logo, lower thirds and others—can easily be placed on top of a video source.
BoinxTV ships with more than 30 layers (video switcher, RSS crawler, lower third, interview setup, and others), and can be extended by custom layers designed with Apple’s Quartz Composer software, which comes free with Mac OS X. For the most part, Boinx TV is very user-friendly and easy to learn. I’m not sure if experienced broadcasters will feel this way, but podcasters and iLife users will be up and running, er, broadcasting, very quickly.
With the Live Recording Interactive controls, you can change aspects of every layer—for example a movie, a title, the caption of a lower third—on the fly while a show is being recorded. The movie can either be encoded directly to a QuickTime movie for later post‐processing (e.g. with Apple Podcast Producer) or be played fullscreen on a dedicated monitor. BoinxTV save sits recordings to disk, but you can do live broadcasting via the video-out port. There are keyboard commands and keyboard shortcuts for just about everything.
An Interview Layer allows you to open up two source place holders. For a second source you could choose another camera (different from the one you’re using for the live video, mentioned earlier) or a media file. You can view both sources side by side.
BoinxTV also offers advanced chroma keying makes BoinxTV with green screens and lighting rigs. If an interviewer is being filmed in front of a solid color screen (such as green) you can
filter the video source. At first you should narrow the selection down to the color you want to keep. Then you can refine the results by adjusting the lighting setting. Once completed, you’ll have a black background for your subject. You can add a new background, such as a World News layer, Weather Map layer, etc. This part isn’t that easy. It takes a bit of patience and some trial and error to get good results. But when you do, they can be eye-catching and fun.
I’ve long been a fan of Boinx products, but this may be their best title yet. It’s very Mac-like, easy to learn for the features it packs and is lots of fun. And that makes for an app I can recommend wholeheartedly. Don’t get me wrong: you’‘re not going to be doing broadcasts on World News Tonight and the quality of your videocasts will depend on your equipment and the time you put into it. But for creating very good video podcasts, this is the tool.
BoinxTV is available immediately for download. In demo mode, BoinxTV can be used for five days. The single license of BoinxTV is available for US$499 at the Boinx Kagi Store (boinx.com/kagi). The BoinxTV Sponsored Edition for US$199 (single license) requires a credit for BoinxTV in every video created with BoinxTV. For education and volume licensing (multi‐seat) of BoinxTV, contact sales@boinx.com
BoinxTV requires a Power Mac G5 or Intel based Mac with discrete graphics running Mac OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”). Full system requirements and more information on BoinxTV can be found here.
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Contributor
Dennis Sellers
Dennis has been a newspaper editor/reporter (seven years) and teacher (seven years). He has over 4,000 magazine, newspaper and online articles to his credit. He has also covered the Mac and tech industries for over a decade for such online publications as MacCentral, MacMinute and now MacsimumNews.
