The Digital Consultant

We video chat a fair bit in our household. Both sets of my son's Grandparents live interstate but through Skype we can have "virtual visits" at least once a week. Super nice. As the "Little Ticket" (as he is known) has become more mobile however the issue of keeping him in front of a webcam so he can interact with his Grandparents becomes a bit of a logistical challenge. Enter CamTwist. It was a pick of the week by Liana Lehua on MacBreak Weekly back in May so I tried it and it's absolutely wild! You can add special effects to your video chats, stream the desktop, still images, slideshows but most importantly for me you can use multiple video inputs. In my minds eye I see you all nodding and smiling politely. Let me explain... So I have the MacBook with built-in camera and my old Panasonic MX-1 DV camera plugged into the Firewire port. I fire up CamTwist highlight "webcam" as my video source and click the Select button (Cam Twist Step 1). I then get an option of which video input I would like to use. I then go back to Step 1, highlight "webcam" again but this time click PIP (for picture-in-picture). Over in the settings section (Cam Twist Step 2) You can adjust the size and placement of the PIP as well as the inputs. There is a very convenient button that switches the two sources. Once you have things just the way you like them you can save it all as a preset for next time. So I have the DV camera providing a wide shot of the living room for when the "Little Ticket" gets busy and the MacBook webcam for upclose and personal. Absolutely totally sweet. It's like having a TriCaster on the desktop. All for the sum total cost of $0. WebcamMax is suggested for the Windows platform but it will sting you for $49.95. We chose Skype because it provides the best cross platform video solution at the moment doing a fairly good job of maintaining a picture even on the most average broadband connection.