Question / Help Low budget, multi camera school broadcasting setup

[kjhinds]

This year I took over the broadcasting class at my middle school. Previously, they had three 480i standard def cameras to do their morning broadcast to the school's 20inch CRT televisions in each classroom. So far, by reallocating some computer hardware around, I managed to pull out a 2010 iMac with an i3 processor, bought a few cheap sd video capture cards and lav mics with my own money, and hooked it all up to start streaming through youtube live. Now the classes on campus can see the broadcast through the apple TVs hooked up to the projectors in all the rooms. Teachers and students have already said it is a huge step up from the smaller screens. Obviously the resolution still isn't good, so that's where my ask for help comes in.

There are grants available for up to $1,500 that I can apply for and probably get. I'm looking for the best way to allocate that budget, if I were to be awarded the grant. I know I need a new PC. The one I have barely handles the 3 low-res cameras. I also want to replace the current cameras we have. Right now what I'm looking at is just getting a 3 webcams that I can put on the existing tripods and a desktop with something like an i5 processor. I don't need professional quality picture or sound, we aren't monetizing a live stream or channel or anything. Really even just getting the feed to 720p would blow the minds of the staff and students with how poor quality it was before. But I'm unsure of exactly what things to try to purchase.

Will an i5, 2.1 GHz processor be enough? The district has a "pre approved" desktop/monitor that can be purchased for $1017 (includes $180 worth of BS service and support fees the district requires for any new computer purchase, so the base price is $830) Since this is through a school, the purchase orders can't be for places like Craig's list or eBay, unfortunately. I can get away with Amazon, but they don't really like it too much and really prefer orders just from their "list". Assuming that will do, what cameras/webcams would be a good value to purchase 3 of (possibly 4) that I could get with the remaining ~$500 with possibly some left over for additional video production supplies?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

 

[Narcogen]

As both a Mac user and enthusiast, it pains me to say.. see if you can see your way to switching this function to Windows.

Any reasonably good desktop with an Nvidia card that supports the NVENC hardware encoder is going to be miles better than what you have. Apple no longer makes or sells such a machine, and the Mac version of OBS can't make use of the NVENC encoder anyway.

If your machine's Intel GPU supports QuickSync, you should see an option for "Apple VT Hardware Encoder" as a choice in the streaming and recording settings. Try that and see if it addresses your problem. If the other machine you're considering also has that support, it might work for you. Without more specific information it's hard to say; on MacOS I generally just use x264 encoding and throw as much CPU at it as I can.

Lastly, if you do want to stay on MacOS for this task, or IT policies mean you have to, get the best processor you can afford. An i5 is considered the bare minimum, 2.1 Ghz is considered slow.

 

[kjhinds]

Thanks for the response. The PC I'm looking at from the district is a Windows machine. But it has integrated video, not a separate card, so maybe I'll need to look around for another PC and try to convince the district of the need. Thanks again.