small field production solution
updated 11 years, 11 months ago 6 Members · 7
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We run a small TV studio for the Cleveland ISD community. We record the football games and are looking for a way to do live switching to record to a hard drive(fire store,etc..) we are currently looking into maybe a small switcher, a mxo2 and recording right onto a mac laptop.
we do have a tricaster studio, however we are looking for something more portable.
do any of you know of a better way to go about this, or maybe a solution to not having to take a monitor, two keyboards and mouse with us everywhere we need to take the tricaster?
Hi Johnie; thanks for your question.
I would recommend using the Sony AWSG500 Anycast switcher system for your field productions. The Anycast can be used in a variety of different ways to suit your needs. You can have an analogue, HDSDI or SDI output, you can stream over the internet directly from the Anycast, or you can record directly to an external hard drive, suck as a LaCie drive, through the Anycast’s firewire port. Also, the Anycast has various different input options available as well. You can take in a composite, s-video, SDI, HDSDI, and VGA for seamless computer integration (graphics, opening sequences, etc.) The Anycast also has a built in audio mixer for simple audio control and transitions.
I have used the Anycast on few small corporate shows, and it performed better then I had anticipated. I appreciate that it has an LCD monitor that folds up like a laptop computer and its small design (a little larger then a briefcase).
Take a look at the website: https://pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/product-AWSG500/
I hope this helps; and best of luck with your productions in the future!
Thanks,
NIkolas
Television Engineering Technologist
Ontario CanadaWe are looking into something less costly, this is not within our budget this year. altho, the reviews on this product or extremly good. thanks for your help… maybe next year i guess.
You could always use a small, analog switcher and feed the output of it into a suitable analog to digital converter box or a card and then record it on a computer. Just feed your mixed audio into the audio input and the switcher output into the video input, capture to s hard drive connected to the computer and you will be good to go. Of course, you will always have the chance that the computer could crash during your program, but it’s s fairly inexpensive solution. You probably have the equipment to do it right now.
Tom
The local access cable kids in my town tried using a Slingbox as a poor man’s microwave hop to cover the state fair parade. They took a toaster or small panasonic switcher into the field, camped out along the parade route in the front yard of a friend with broadband access, and ran slingbox back to their cable head-end.
Did it work? Partly. The picture part worked after we saw an hour’s worth of on-air fiddling with the slingbox’s control panels. We never did get the audio. No way to tell what part of the signal chain broke there, but I’m guessing it was in the way the cable head-end pre-patched the anticipated feed; short-staffed on a weekend, they were probably running a skeleton crew and heavily automated. Not the best setup to deal with the vagueries of a live incoming feed.
But I gotta hand it to the kids for creativity and for trying, as no other TV station in the market bothered to cover the thing for more than 5 minutes. This is one of the things that makes access TV great and needed.
If it doesn’t have to be strictly live, you could feed a laptop from the firewire output of one of the cameras and FTP chunks back to the station. These would not be live but would have awesome video quality, compared to live stream, and you could run live celphone audio from a reporter under it for the interactive discussions between reporter and anchors.
Hi Nikolas,
I recently purchased a Sony Anycast and I like the unit but, I cannot get my Windows PC to assign a drive letter to the external hard drive I recorded to.
How do get .avi’s on and off my external hard drive formatted for the Sony Anycast? Im using an Iomega firewire drive.
I also downloaded a program called “Ext2 Volume Manager” that lets my Windows PC read Linux formatted drives. I manually assigned a drive letter in “DefineDosDevice” mode only (it wouldnt work in automatic mode) but, when I tried to access the drive, Windows asks me if I want to format it and I dont of course.
You mentioned you used a Lacie drive. Is that what I need to purchase? Do I need a program like “Ext2 Volume Manager”? What exactly do I need to do to get the hard drive working?
Is it stable when transferring files in your experience?
Thank you very much, I have been trying for weeks to find an answer and I cant get new contracts until I do.
Check out Mobile Studios’ new ultraportable PortaCast Director Pak featuring the Panasonic AV-HS400A switcher.
https://www.mobilestudios.com/products.asp?cat=64
Rich Rubin
Mobile Studios, Inc.
Boca Raton, Florida
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