StudioTech 26: A little bit of magic – The Television Studio

StudioTech 26: A little bit of magic – The Television Studio

Since it was announced earlier this year the Blackmagic Design Television Studio ($995 / £650) has appealed to many as a entry level 6 channel video switcher. It has now been shipping for a couple of months and Blackmagic have provided us a loan unit to look at and share our thoughts with you.

We have been using a big brother of the Television Studio, the ATEM 1, since it was first available earlier in this year. Like the ATEM 1 the Television Studio appears to be a very well made unit in a 1U rack mount case. While designed ot be mounted in a rack it can easily be used without a rack.

During our testing we found one problem: the HDMI cameras we use are connected to the studio rack by 10 metre cables, when plugging these into the Television Studio we did not get any video. Reducing the cable length fixed the problem. So if you are going to be using long HDMI cable lengths you may need to experiment with high quality cables or use HDMI to SDI converters and use the SDI inputs.

The Television Studio strips audio from all sources so you need to mix the audio separately and then feed the mix back into the unit if you are going to use the H264 encoder to record your combined audio and video. Be aware that there is no analogue audio input just an AES/EBU BNC connector so you need to have a suitable source for your audio. You may need to add delay to your audio to get perfect lip sync, as a minimum you would expect a couple of frames delay in the video but it could be more depending on your camera sources.

The bottom line – this is a great entry switcher at a very attractive price which includes an H264 encoder. The unit will be ideal in many solutions including video podcasting, churches and professional video projects.

Thanks to Blackmagic for the loan of this unit.