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.