Conduit Live

Motion picture quality now playing live

Conduit Live is a standalone Mac OS X application that's available as part of the Conduit Suite.

It is the "swiss army knife" of a compositor's toolkit: a lightweight application that launches fast and renders faster. Conduit Live has the same feature set as the other Conduit products, including true realtime effects with multiple video tracks and an ergonomic and flexible node-based user interface.

But that's not all — Conduit Live is a professional-grade video capture and live performance tool that works with live video streams even at HD resolutions.

Multi-source capture

Conduit Live can capture video from any capture device that has a QuickTime driver (*). This includes both consumer devices like iSight and FireWire DV as well as professional capture cards such as AJA Kona and BlackMagic DeckLink. There's no limitation on the resolution of the video feed. Thanks to Conduit's uniquely powerful GPU rendering capabilities, complex effects and composites can be rendered in realtime even with 1080 HD sources.

Capture is not limited to a single source either: Conduit supports up to 8 simultaneous capture device connections. There's no limitation on resolution or frame rate, so mixing NTSC, PAL and HD sources is possible.

Recording to disk offers a unique non-destructive mode. In this mode Conduit Live records the original video streams exactly as they were captured, and stores the effects separately as a .conduit file and a capture log that can be used to reconstruct the rendering in any of the Conduit products. This recording mode offers excellent performance, fidelity and flexibility, as the rendering can be finetuned later.

Video monitoring

Conduit Live has an industry-standard set of realtime video scopes (Luma, Y'CbCr Parade, RGB Parade and Chroma Vectorscope) that can be used to monitor any incoming feeds or the rendered output.

Live performance

The realtime rendering power of Conduit Live makes it a great platform for high-quality video performances and other live video deployments. For the first time ever, the same toolset that is used for high-quality film visual effects can be also used for realtime video. Floating-point color, HDR, advanced keyers and color spaces — it's all at your disposal without compromises.

For advanced live applications, Conduit Live supports two simultaneous full-screen video outputs. Both outputs are shown as nodes in the Conduit Editor, so you can easily pipe anything to either screen.

For more comfortable live use, the sliders and color pickers in Conduit can be driven with an external MIDI controller device.

We've placed a serious emphasis on stability to ensure that Conduit Live is up to the demands of large-scale video performance. The Finnish National Theatre is pleased with the results:

“Tuntematon sotilas (The Unknown Soldier) is the hottest play in Finland right now. Hailed by Finland's leading newspaper as the cultural event of the decade and instantly sold out for the entire season, this clever and engaging modernization of a national classic appeals to a whole new generation of theatre-goers and makes innovative use of modern technology. Live video is in a central role, as many scenes are conceived entirely around it. If the video crashed, 800 spectators would be left with nothing to watch.

All the video material goes through Conduit Live. This software does everything — color correction, compositing, multiple video inputs, multiple hi-res outputs — with impeccable stability.”

(The Finnish National Theatre uses Conduit Live equipped with Stage Tools.)