[Robert Rittenhouse]

“If they’re shooting on a DV camera, they can capture video & audio through firewire. Beta SP? You need that AJA card, not to mention a tiny audio board and other associated hardware.”

I don’t actually deal with any of the engineering gear but only the machine itself. I believe they just have a silver AJA box sitting there.

So you’re playing news stories on a flash video player? The encode to mp4 will take time. Ouch. But I guess the newsroom’s already used to the delay.

For our website we have to encode these videos to a format that it accepts. One of those formats is mp4. We still need to tweak it to help out with motion. Basically now they are having to capture from tape on a TV tuner card. Save that file and run it through a 3rd party converter to spit out the file they need. If we can get them using a preset in compressor I think we will be OK. We tried to get the server to do the mp4 compression after they upload it but its just not possible in this short time frame.

They are actually only doing this to short clips of video that are associated with a news or sports story that is posted to the website.

Gotcha. You’ll STILL need a lot of storage, probably something in a RAID 5 configuration. How much do you plan to have in each bay? If I were you, I wouldn’t look at anything less than 2TB. Really. If it’s common storage on, say, 4G Ethernet, 8TB would be good.

The engineering department are trying to handle this buy purchasing some 6TB NAS devices to store their video on. With our station the reporters actually have to import and edit their own video and they are their own editor before everything goes up on the web. I think our station is ran very different than the optimal environment but its what we have.

Thanks for the replies.

[Robert Rittenhouse]

Well they are shooting to tape and importing that in through some AJA interface. It will then be output to mpeg4 (m4v) with out specific settings for the web. The file that is spit out is uploaded through our web interface to it can be played through our flash video player.

Currently they use a TV tuner card to capture the video played out through a deck over svideo. What a mess.

It wasn’t my choice to use FCP in the newsroom but it was our previous Cheif Engineer’s wise idea. He also thought it would be smart to buy iMac’s and run Parallels on top of the mac’s so they could run the Avid iNews client in Windows. He had the impractical thought that they could use the machine to edit their video and work on stories at the *same time*!

Now we have like 3 FCP licenses and that’s what we were instructed to use.

I basically want to make it as easy as I can for the reporters to export to the appropriate format. They shouldn’t be “touching” the settings but you know how that goes!!!

A little more background: A reporter and a photog go out and shoot their video that they are taking to one camera (to tape). They bring it back and import it into whatever system we have available. At this time is is the ATI TV Tuner card system until we can get FCP straightened out.

Robert Rittenhouse
WHIZ Media Group (WHIZ-TV)
Zanesville, Ohio