[Adhithya Ravishankar]

[Alex Gerulaitis] “I don’t believe ME (Media Express) demands any significant amounts of memory – you may be able to capture multiple streams even with 4GB. Video capture and playback in general, unlike editing, don’t demand a lot of memory and I don’t remember ME having a large memory signature.”
I had actually looked at the required hardware specifications for the Decklink Quad, which handles 4 HD video streams and it required just 4GB of RAM, so you probably are right on that regard.

[Alex Gerulaitis] “(uncompressed, intra-frame compression like ProRes, DNxHD, DVCProHD)”
Are those codecs offered on the Windows version of Blackmagic MediaExpress? I know ProRes isn’t because it’s Apple’s, but what about DNxHD or DVCProHD? And, do you know how good MJPEG is, because that’s the one I hear most about?

[Alex Gerulaitis] “so a RAID0 with 3-4 decent dives will handle two streams easily, assuming the computer isn’t choking on anything else.”
I think so too, and thanks for your double confirmation. I hope that the i7 won’t choke on handling it. It should be able to handle 8 threads on the 4 cores, so if MediaExpress is max 3 threads for each instance and the video itself is a thread, then that leaves 1 core to handle anything else.

Also, I will be changing from the Western Digital Velociraptor 10K RPM hard drives at 250GB to the 7200RPM 1TB Barracuda from Seagate. There’s only a 10MB/s drop according to some benchmarks, a $10 decrease in price, and 4x the space.

Thanks for your help. I hope that this will be enough for my friend.

[Adhithya Ravishankar]

[Alex Gerulaitis] “Have you tried that? That’d be interesting if it’s possible.”

No, I have not tried that, since I have never played around with MediaExpress for multiple streams, but I have heard on one of the threads I saw while looking for info for this problem.

https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/124/874233

However, it is the hardware specs and not software that I am more worried about. Can today’s computers handle 3 HD or even SD streams, without having to split it among multiple computers. I know the Macbook Pro can handle one HD stream, and I think the MacPro can handle multiple, but that was not for capture and storage. That was just for media processing, and outputting it. I feel that today’s beefy systems can handle it but I want double confirmation from someone. If 32GB of RAM, 10000RPM hard drives, an Ivy-Bridge top of the line quad core, and the third-best graphics card one can get is not enough, I don’t know what is then.

[Adhithya Ravishankar]

Yes, simultaneously. I was thinking MediaExpress that Blackmagic provides. If one opens multiple instances, you can capture multiple streams. Not sure if there is anything else in Windows that can capture multiple streams like Premiere Pro, Avid, or some other capture software. I do know that there is software for Macs that allow multiple captures like Softron or Tools on Air. Not sure about anything similar for Windows.