Coming from the world of televison, a production switcher is something that is extremely expensive. A decent low end model will cost often in to the low $20,000s. Luckily for us, we can use a software solution that produces great results. Wirecast is a software-based switcher that out of the box will shock any person from the television industry, and impress anyone else. The software runs on literally any machine (Mac or Windows, or Paralells, I'd guess...) and has a built in chromakeyer (green/blue screen compositing tool,) built in titler and will play back any video source Quicktime or VFW can handle. Download and play with the demo, it's totally worth the $400 easy. I know it sounds hyperbolic, but I've never used a peice of software that has so much potential. That being said, the interface is a little clunky if you're used to TV switchers, but If they refine the interface to fall more inline with tradition, I'd have no problem recommending the software to any small multi-cam environment.

The latest version adds support for a built in streaming server, instead of streaming to Darwin, and then having Darwin stream out to the interwebs. They also support HDV cameras, and will deinterlace 1080i (and 480i for that matter.) The result of the stream can be output to another monitor, another video out source, streamed live or recorded as a video file locally. In the limited testing I've done, I've found Wirecast most limited by hard drive bandwidth available. Wirecast + solid state storage = switching bliss on the cheap.

[Thanks, Lars N]