The TriCaster Duo is NewTek's latest offering in their line
of all-in-one production units The Duo has similar features to the original TriCaster but leaves out the video editor and has slightly different A/V connections.<br><p>The Duo is
housed in a simple silver box that's a little smaller and lighter than the original TriCaster with all of the A/V connections on the
front. On the back you will find the monitor, mouse and keyboard connectors and four USB2 ports. <br></p><p>Like the TriCaster and the TriCaster Pro the Duo is a three input video
switcher. The front panel boasts RCA jacks for composite video and the conventional 4-pin
mini-din jacks for s-video input. and for audio input a pair of
RCAs for line level audio. There are also two 1/8" mini jacks for microphones. <br></p><p>The video outputs are RCA composite and a mini-din s-video; both usable simultaneously. Along with a stereo pair of RCAs and a headphone jack for audio. <br></p><p>The
user interface is almost identical to the TriCaster 100. In order to reach the low price point NewTek has left out the video editor found in the larger TriCaster models.<br></p><p>The TriCaster Duo ships
with 250 different DVEs including a large number of wipes, fades
curls and trajectories. The DVEs are loaded into a single bank of ten on the
interface putting your favorites only a mouse click away. You also
get a large selection of professionally designed title templates that you
can use as a base for overlays and other graphic screens.</p><p>NewTek also includes a
full blown CG just like the other TriCasters and the VT[5]. With the CG
you can create title templates from scratch and import graphics done in
another program like Photoshop to easily build custom pages.<br></p><p>Using the Overlay control panel you can use Title
Templates, the picture viewer or NewTek's external CG editor Live Text
as a source to key graphics and text over your video.</p><p>The Duo can either record your production
to the hard drive as a high quality MPEG file or stream it live using
the Windows Media Codec but not both at once. The unit has about 200GB free on
the hard drive which should be good for more than 16 hours of video.</p><p>The Duo ships with XP Home rather than Pro,
this will only be an issue for corporate buyers who try to connect to a
network that has domain controllers as XP Home can't connect to a domain.</p><p>There
is no firewire port so if you want to capture video for use in the DDR
you must use either the composite or s-video connectors. Again not
really a big deal but it would be a nice feature to have.</p><p>The
bottom line is the TriCaster Duo is a good value for the money and has
all the features you need for basic video production and webcasting.
You should carefully evaluate your needs to be sure you get the right
TriCaster for your particular situation but if your on a tight budget,
don't need Virtual Sets or an editor the Duo might be just the thing.</p><p>The educational version of the Duo also ships with a copy of NewTek's video curriculum. I<br></p>
