Can this be done... If so, how????

B

Body Flight

Active member
I have a video system that I am looking to upgrade. My current system has 3 (smaller) Panasonic video cameras (GS-500) hooked up to two different stacks of DVD recorders... one camera feeds a stack of 4 DVD burners, and the other two go through a switcher to feed a stack of 5 DVD burners. All connections and cables are firewire from cameras through the distribution amps to the DVD units. I use this system to record the live feed to DVDs which I sell. (I own an indoor skydiving facility and sell a lot of DVD's of people's flight sessions.)

Basically, I want to upgrade my existing system to be more friendly to record DVD's after the flight sessions are done. (If we miss a DVD, I have to pull the master DVD with all the day's footage, find the correct flight session, and record it from one player to another one real-time.

I am looking for a system where I can record the footage from two 'channels' - one camera for one channel, and 2 through a switcher for the other channel. I would like the footage from both channels to be captured directly to a hard drive at the same time. Further, I need to be able to keep recording while I access / burn the recorded footage to multiple DVD's. The burning of DVD's needs to be relatively quick... (The typical session will be a half hour of footage, and sometimes it can be up to 2 hours.) I would also like the ability to search the footage, network the footage to 3 to 5 computers, and record selected time sessions. As a bonus, it would customize each DVD with a menu and the customers name on it.

I am aware that this will need a TON of storage... and I have a good eSATA solution for that. I am aware of DVD copy towers, but don't know if they can do what I want them to (burn selected footage to DVD.) Are there systems out there that will encode video footage in real time to MPEG-2 for DVD's? I've thought about DVR's, but I'm not sure if they will do what I need them to. Is this whole thought process going to be too expensive to complete? I do have a reasonable budget for this... but I will have to make a final assessment before I pull the trigger on it.

I do not have a good understanding of what format the raw footage is, or how to convert it to MPEG-2 format in real time. I don't understand how this mystery unit will handle two separate video signals at the same time. I don't know what I need for data transfer speeds to handle the two signals.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I should proceed?

Thanks for any and all input!! (Sorry for the long read!)
 
Body Flight said:
I don't understand how this mystery unit will handle two separate video signals at the same time. I don't know what I need for data transfer speeds to handle the two signals.
Click to expand...
The pieces of the puzzle that you're looking for are an MPEG hardware encoder and a DVD duplicator. You could set up 2 systems to handle the multiple streams, a Gigabit network, network storage, etc. The financial feasibility of this falls apart rather quickly - I can't imagine the profits for flight vids being high enough to justify the huge expense.

Encoder (one example)
http://www.digital-rapids.com/Products/Expertise1_EncTrans.aspx
Duplicator (one example)
http://www.rimage.com/products_detail_objectname_pr_8100N.html
 
Thanks for the direction / info milksac! I thought this would be expensive, but not quite so impressive! I do sell a good number of DVD's, and that business can support a good investment in this process.

Does the DVD duplicator communicate with the encoder for the data to burn? Can standard leaders (menus, etc...) be added to the beginning of the DVD's in front of the newly captured and burned footage?

Are there any other components / pieces of the puzzle / that are missing? I was already thinking of the gigabit network, RAID 10 storage (how much storage would be necessary for saving 60 to 80 hours of footage per week?)

In the searches I have done tonight for MPEG-2 encoders, I have found some software solutions... are these totally inadequate, or worth investigating?

Are there less expensive options out there? (Would any DVD duplicator tower work, or are there specific features to the one listed that make it superior? Thanks for your patience and info!!!!
 
Bump...

I'm still trying to figure this one out. does anyone out there have any experience with this? I'm thinking a computer based option would be mroe affordable... are they also more problemmatic?

Thanks for any & all comments and suggestions!
 
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