Live Camera View of condutor for school musical

[Puss_In_Boots]

This year I am the director of my high schools show and we have been talking about putting the band in the band room during the show and pushing the sound out into the auditorium. The problem we are having is the cast on stage needs to see the conductor. So a show I saw on broadway recently had TV's Mounted to the balcony and a live feed to a camera pointed at the conductor who was in a different part of the theatre. Does anyone have any ideas on a cheap way to replicate this? Like can I do video over Ethernet? I don't think HDMI can go the 300 ft we will need it to go. If it can then I think I have it figured out but I would prefer a cheaper option that's easy to set up every year.

[Sauron]

You can use an IP camera such as this one. Just connect it to your local network and you'll be able to stream the feed on a computer.

[Zagna]

gofanco 1080p HDMI Extender Over TCP/IP Kit

That looks like it can transmit via LAN.

[MatthewAscough]

I do this exact thing a lot at different places I've worked and you're always best off avoiding IP and using as little processing as possible (don't want everyone on stage seeing the conductor a second later than they should).

You won't need a high quality stream for it (just need to be able to make out what the conductor's doing) so what we have is a relatively cheap CCTV camera going into a 16x16 video matrix via composite which then gets distributed to screens across the venue via standard composite cable.

 

Best option for you will likely be a cheap CCTV style camera or even and old video camera and a pair of composite to cat5 convertor boxes (or even just one long composite cable depending on length and quality required). That way you'll have minimum processing thus minimum latency and you'll be avoiding any problems brought in by trying to run IP based equipment over a school network which could have all sort of VLANs and port/protocol blockings set up.