switcher and breakout box?

[daddog]

I am looking at interviewing some family members and will be using two Sony HDR CX550's. I chatted with someone that briefly explained how I could do want I wanted to do using a 'switcher' to a 'breakout box' to my lap top. He suggested using a Dazzel and then purchase a break out box.

Simply put I want to interview someone and have it record directly to my laptop. While the interview is taking place both cameras would be running. I would simply be watching the laptop screen that would display both camera views. I would switch between the views on my laptop. When the interview is over I would be done with just about all the editing since I would have been switching between the views during the recording. This would save my having to place two clips in Video Studio and edit them from there.

Does this make any sense? Does anyone know how to go about setting this up? Could someone suggest what switcher and breakout box I should purchase and what software I would use so I can start looking into this process?

Thanks in advance!

[BrianCee]

but if you have a switcher in the set up that is only going to send one camera output at a time to your laptop - how are you going to watch both cameras at the same time on your laptop - surely you need two inputs on your laptop to get two pictures - and some sort of software (and I don't know what at a consumer level) which lets you edit "on the fly". Probably the nearest you could get would be to have two monitors in front of you (one from each camera) - then feed into the switcher which you manually operate to feed the single output into your laptop for recording by VS or whatever.

The whole idea sounds flawed to me - trying to edit an interview live is a recipe for disaster - you do not know who will speak or move until the do so and may well miss a vital piece of action. From your question it sounds like you are only going to record the 'edited' video, so you can't go back and find the bit you missed. For instance , while doing something similar a couple of years back a straight laced granny who had never done a thing out of character in her life suddendly stuck her tongue out at a particular question - I would have been mortified if I hadn't caught that because I wasn't recording from the camera on her at the time.

Surely it is much better to record 'in camera' and then edit the two recordings later when you can carefully choose the edit points - even TV companies do very little editing "on the fly" much preferring to edit after the event..

[skier-hughes]

As Brian has said it would be much easier at your level to record both cameras and then edit.
Othewise you need a mixing desk with two inputs, two outputs to your two monitors.
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