I guess it has been almost a year ago that Mac Heist 3 took place (I think it started in January and ended in March) and it is a great bundle of apps for a very low price. If you have a Mac, make sure to visit the Mac Heist site and sign up for the newsletter…  you don’t want to to miss out on the great deal.

Anyway, this is really not about Mac Heist…   it kind of is in a round about way. In the bundle of great applications that was in Mac Heist 3, there was a great tool called BoinxTV. With this application, you can make broadcast quality video transitions and effects that will rival multi-million dollar studios. This software is somewhat expensive with a sponsor edition costing $199 and a full version costing $499. Back to Mac Heist for a moment to let you know what a deal I got, I paid $37 for 13 applications, with one of them being BoinxTV.

I don’t know about your financial situation, but $499 is not in the budget for a hobby item, let alone $199. So where does the common hobbyist go to find an affordable solution to video production? Well, while looking through the documentation on the Boinx site about streaming to the internet (link), I found a pretty good solution with CamTwist.

This is a very cool application with a very cool price point…  free. You can do just about anything that a big production studio can do right on you Mac.  I am using is with a 3 year old MacBook Pro and it works very well. In the above picture, you can see a guy named Benjamin Higginbotha who does an excellent podcast call Space Vidcast, and he does some great screencasts of how to use CamTwist Studio.

I played around with the application for a few hours last night and I was totally blown away. I kept asking myself, how could you give this away for free. I will be producing a show over the next couple of days and I will use CamTwist for video switching and effects. It can make an amateur look like a pro.