Mult-Camera Capture

[Bob Bonniol]

In general, when you are just going unswitched to record (referred to as “iso”) you do it in a device per camera scenario. There are several applications on PC for making a windows box into an out and out high level DDR. This allows for up to uncompressed capture. But this begs the question: why are you skipping tape ? That’s the oldest form of “iso” and it works well. Conversely you could iso direct to high end decks as well.

Then, yes, you probably could capture live with an NLE, but that depends a great deal on how robust your system config is.

But let me stress this: I mentioned one device per camera. Unless you plan on encoding and storing the live videos in a codec consistent with internet delivery or mobile devices.. And then you’d have to have an app that reads and encodes all inputs simultaneous.

Can’t help you there…

In my expperience it’s a computer per camera.

Bob

MODE Studios
http://www.modestudios.com
Contributing Editor, Entertainment Design Magazine
Art of the Edit Forum Leader
Live & Stage Event Forum Leader
HD Forum Leader

[Thomas Leong]

Possible direct to a pc, but with DV only, far as I know: 3 streams

Personally, I’ve done it with 2 streams uisng my DVStorm2 card and a firewire card. 3 was a bit beyond my system then.

Thomas Leong

[Thomas Leong]

Possible direct to a pc, but with DV only, far as I know: 3 streams

Personally, I’ve done it with 2 streams uisng my DVStorm2 card and a firewire card. 3 was a bit beyond my system then.

Thomas Leong

[Thomas Leong]

Possible direct to a pc, but with DV only, far as I know: 3 streams

Personally, I’ve done it with 2 streams uisng my DVStorm2 card and a firewire card. 3 was a bit beyond my system then.

Thomas Leong

[Tyler Groom]

So exactly how do you have it set up? What are you running from the cameras. i.e. firewire, composite, etc… What are you using this for?

[Thomas Leong]

Feeds were Firewire and composite from a DV camera and a satellite TV cable box. The free DVCapture utility from Canopus allows you to specify your inputs for each source : Firewire, composite, or S-Video.

I did it as a test to see how many streams my non-RAID 1.6GHz P4 with a Canopus DvStorm2 capture card and a cheap 3rd party Firewire card fared with the Canopus DVCapture utility. This was a few years ago.

However, some other Canopus DVStorm2 users appear to have successfully captured wedding recordings from 3 cameras at site.

Thomas

PS Apologies for the previous multiple posts, but the Cow site replied that I had to change my user name to post, neglecting to inform me that the post had been accepted. So I changed my user name be inserting a space between names.

[Tyler Groom]

So what if the distance will be too far to capture using firewire. How would I capture two feeds without using firewire?

[Thomas Leong]

Add a Firewire Booster/Repeater. Gefen has them.

Thomas

[Andy Stinton]

Okay call me dumb … Pause for multiple answers:) But what is the matter with good old fashioned tape? Everything I have read here has too many variables in it to insure success.

Hard drive storage for future editing does not save any real time.

Andy Stinton
Corporate Video
Live & Stage Events
Business Practices

[Thomas Leong]

“…what is the matter with good old fashioned tape?”

Perhaps for near fail-safe security where one has no second chance to record an event, I agree tape is safer than writing to hard-disk live, other things being equal (clogged recording heads, tape drop-outs, etc). But for those events where second chances are available, direct to disk does save substantial tape-to-disk transfer time almost equal to the duration of the recording session itself, assuming of course that any later editing is via NLE and not linear tape-based machines. Obviously, for added security, if the cameras have built-in tape recording mechanisms, these can be used as backups.

To each his own, and Tyler’s original post requested direct-to-disk capture for 3 cams in his studio.

Thomas