pootwaddle

Hello everyone. My group is a group of Fire Safety Educators We are a very small group and we travel from elementary school to elementary school (all the elementary schools in our city) and teach the students fire safety like having 2 ways out, stop drop and roll, call 9-1-1 in an emergency, etc. And I think that we can use CCTV to help us in our education programs. We want to use CCTV to "broadcast" an image on a whiteboard to a hi-def TV on stage, "live" in real-time. We are wanting to look like an old-time Television broadcast, complete with some snow and a vintage test pattern at the beginning, then "tune in" our whiteboard. I would like to broadcast in black and white, if possible. If we can go direct from camera to the TV that would be great (cheapest option since we don't really have much of a budget) My plan is to build a bracket to hold the camera at a given distance from the whiteboard (it is only 11 x 14 inches in size) along with some lighting to try to keep the lighting even. Please help me with some suggestions for cameras and other equipment to set this up with as little "fuss" as possible since we have to set it up each morning in less than an hour, and take it down after the program as quickly as possible as well. Am I completely crazy to think this may work? Thanks for reading this, and any suggestions you may have. We have just a couple months to build and implement this. Bryan

Thanks for the ideas. I will definitely check the frame rate. What we are attempting is a live-action 2d puppet. The image on the "whiteboard" will actually move and our puppeteer will voice the interactions with the characters onstage with the Television. Rather than a pre=recorded "show" this character on the tv will be able to speak directly to people on stage. I would hate to go through a network switch and PC if I don't have to. However, I see the coolness of the special effects processing that a PC would bring to the table. I guess we can see as we rehearse. We would have to find the PC since our only PC is currently used during the program for sound effects and other music. This was done in the 70's using a process called aniforms. here's a link to some information about that process... http://www.mindspring.com/~barneysarmy/aniforms.html Thanks again. I feel this is putting me closer to the right process!!

Very interesting idea - almost exactly what I need. I need to do some searching to see if the document camera will feed directly into the HDTV or if there is an adapter that will make it work. The document cameras I see so far all are usb, presumably to a computer. At least you have given me a good starting point for searches. Thank you!!