Tuesday, March 03, 2009

New technology - commodity hardware

AJA FS1 is a 1u gadget that sells itself as an everything-everything format/standards converter. At only a grand and a half there is no way it can compete with a broadcast-quality convertor from the likes of Snell & Wilcox but for most uses (A-D conversion etc) it looks superb. I had a few minutes to play with it and the really cute feature is that all of the functionality is available over a web interface. I think it's a good competitor to the Leith X75.

BBC Ingex is an open-source project to allow multi-cameras ingest to Avid & FCP codecs on commodity hardware. It runs under OpenSUSE 10.3 (and this because it needs the XFS file system). It can capture four streams of SD or two streams of HD in mildly compressed (typ. 2:1) for the online and 20:1 for the offline. For multi-camera studio shoots it seems like and excellent idea. Anyhow - we have a DVS box (the hardware of a Pronto with two Centurus cards) running it in the workshop and are trying to get familiar enough with it to re-install from scratch (including configuring the XFS RAID) and compiling the source - they are promising an RPM package!

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