Need help with simultaneous live broadcasting and recording to disk.

[jbaugh]

Twice a week I manage the live broadcasting of services for my small church. I am using the newest generation Mac Mini with quad core i7 processor and an internal 7200 RPM start up drive and 8GB RAM.

I've been doing simultaneous live broadcasting and recording of the services to hard drive. I would like to record using the AppleProRes 422 (LT) encoding to make it easier to edit with FCPX. Unfortunately with my current set up this doesn't work well. The resulting movie has serious problems with dropped frames and distorted audio. It seems the problem is due to the fact that I am recording the high data rate movie to the same internal hard drive that is doing the encoding, running the system (Lion) and everything else.

Someone has suggested that I record the AppleProRes movie to an external FW800 drive. The problem is that the Mac Mini has only one FW port and that is connected to the camcorder. One possibility is to daisy chain the camcorder to the hard drive to the computer. But I am concerned about how that might affect video capture. Another much more expensive option would be to get a Thunderbolt hard drive and attach it to the mini's Thunderbolt port.

How much will data throughput be adversely affected by daisy chaining the FW400 camcorder to the FW800 hard drive (using a FW400 to FW800 cable) and the hard drive to the FW800 port of the mini?
Thanks.
John

[johns0]

Thread moved to the mac forum where you can get more help.

[edDV]

Start by explaining what you want to do. What is your source and how are you streaming?

I fail to see why ProRes422 has anything to do with a live stream.