[David Gardener]

Thank you everyone for all the help.

I agree that this requires an engineer. I’m talking to people at the moment and getting quotes but I also wanted to have a good idea myself of what we require so that I can communicate this to the engineer and understand their suggestions.

As for digibetas I’m now looking at setting up a powerful central ingest station that can take in digibeta through a J30 player as well as ingesting the live streams from our two studios into a RAID. This central station would be linked to substations where the editing would be performed. My worry is whether we can find a computer capable of simultaneously ingesting from Digibeta and our studios. This computer may also be used to create our final output material – which I have recently found out to be in MPEG 2 – for broadcast.

This central station would be responsible for taking in the footage from the studios. As such we would skip out the P2s in the studio environment and record straight to RAID HDD for short to medium term storage whilst we edit. In the studio it seems to make sense to record straight on HDD as the price per GB for HDD is a great deal cheaper than the P2s at the moment. We will still use P2s for field shooting, probably combined with the Firestore 100 or MacBooks with Duel systems adapters and large external HDDs for dumping the data.

For the studios, I’ve been looking at getting a MacPro with internal RAID and Xsan and using this as the primary ingest station. I’ve also been looking at external RAIDs which I’ve been told are more reliable and capable of higher speeds. That said the Mac RAID can apparently take in data at 3GB/s. Even if we were recording on three cameras per studio (at a very max of 100Mbps) this seems to mean the MacPro would be capable of taking in all this data (600Mbps?).

I also wanted to get a Panasonic HS300 vision mixers in each studio so the 2/3 cameras in each studio feed into the vision mixer and the resulting feed only is put into the RAID. The reason for this is to give our production director’s control over the first phase of editing. I know I can feed all the streams into FCP and then use multicam editing to cut between them but it seems to me that a vision mixer would be simpler for our directors to use and they wouldn’t need to learn to use FCP. The use of an vision mixer for the first step in editing would also have the effect of decreasing the data stream from the studios to the RAID.

Can a MacPro internal RAID take these levels of datastream. I want the system to have a large redundancy even if we were using the system for all of its functions simultaneously (ie accepting streams form Studio 1 and 2, ingesting digibeta and mastering into MPEG2). I’ve been looking at the top of the range MacPro Xeons with 16GB of RAM and the largest RAID possible but this still seems like too much data for a single computer to process.

Does anyone have any thoughts about using P2 cameras but recording straight to HDD? I also looked into just getting tape based DVCPRO HD cameras but they appear to be more expensive than P2 based DVCPRO HD recorders… is this correct?

Many thanks all.

Kyle

[David Gardener]

I’ve been around the broadcast dealers looking for a digibeta recorder and player but have only been able to find the J10 Betacam player (for $9000). This means I’l have to order in a Digibeta recorder and they are already very expensive. Is it possible to avoid putting the programme back onto Digibeta?

I know it is plausible to copy from a digibeta master onto a HD for tapeless editing/dubbing/broadcasting and archiving but I’d prefer to keep a physical copy of each of these tapes. Are there any alternatives to rerecording the edited programmes onto digibeta? This would mean I could avoid buying a digibeta recorder (which I shall only be using for the duplication of these tapes) and instead use a recorder that is also being used for production – ie. a DVCAM recorder or even an XDCAM recorder. Would this lead to a massive deterioration of quality from the original digibeta?

Thank you

[David Gardener]

The country uses PAL for its TV broadcasts. We’ll be getting content from the US primarily so I assume this will be in Digibeta NTSC. I will ask for PAL versions but if they are not available is there a way to convert the format, preferably through FCP or another software solution rather than through an expensive piece of hardware?

Many thanks