The built-in editor includes a number of nice tools and features, but it’s no substitute for a more full-featured program such as Adobe Premier or Apple’s Final Cut Studio. You can also use overlays to add a network bug that sits permanently onscreen, similar to how ESPN keeps its logo onscreen all the time. New overlays can be created in Photoshop and imported, but we did not test that feature. That list can be saved for later recall-after a system crash or show event, for example. The overlays can be built in advance from a library of styles and then queued up in a list.
The TriCaster includes a handy Overlay feature, which let us pop up lower-third graphics identifying our editors and the Frag Dolls, along with displaying full screen title images. We recorded two hours of the live event, switching from team to team and from game to game. We connected up three video cameras and two game consoles to the video inputs to capture each team, along with the games being played-including Halo 2 and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. In our first test, we captured a video-game bake-off between editors from our Ziff Davis Media gaming group and the Fragdolls-a group of young women who are professional gamers. Here at ExtremeTech, we’ve been toying with the idea of producing live video, so we put the TriCaster through its paces, and were mostly happy with its performance. Although you can use it to edit video, the TriCaster excels at mixing live video events for streaming over the internet or recording for later playback.