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What to put in an HD "fly-pack"

5 replies [Last post]
Fri, 01/25/2008 - 15:13
JStrain
User offline. Last seen 15 years 2 weeks ago. Offline
Joined: 25 Jan 2008

Just discovered Editsuite forums recently. I've been learning a whole lot.

Here's my situation... I work for a Rental and Staging company (formerly known as an A/V company). Our specialty is corporate A/V. We do very little entertainment or sports. We mainly do corporate events large and small. We have quite a fleet of Sony DXC-D30/35 cameras. And double-wide racks with a switcher on the left and CCUs on the right...nice and cozy. Two racks have Grass Valley 110s, one has a GV 110 component, and our biggie has an Echolab MVS SDI switcher with Triax CCUs. They have all treated us very well.

So, you can see we don't need big honking switching capability. And we hardly ever do "live TV" other than I-MAG...putting the guy at the lectern up on the big screen along with his PowerPoint. If it's an important event, everything is ISOed and slicked up in post. A production truck is a nice dream for us. But our niche is to roll everything into a ballroom or auditorium, and Mission Control lives behind the pipe-n-drape, or in the back hallway.

Sounds pretty Old School, and it is. We do have the latest in High-Res, though. We have a Folsom/Barco Encore system that can rival many broadcast switchers in some aspects, but it's made for big screen presentations. It can output four (or more) blended outputs to four (or more) projectors for stunning High-Res multi-layer widescreen goodness. But it wasn't made for true video production.

The writing is on the wall. We will need to get into true HD soon. Since we're a rental company, I'm leaning toward multi-format equipment. SD, 720P, 1080i, 1080p, 24fps, the works. This makes the equipment more expensive, but it covers more bets.

For a switcher, I really don't think we need a Kalypso or Kahuna...not even their smallest configurations. And after reading these forums, I now know what people think about the Kayak. But I don't want a goofy prosumer switcher, either. Ross makes interesting switchers. And I really like the looks of the For-A Hanabi switchers. Any other options?

The two top camera candidates are the Grass Valley LDK-8000 WorldCam, and the Sony HDC-1550. Both are or can be Triax cameras. I personally prefer Triax. It's big, thick, heavy, and can fight back. Although fiberoptic is much more sexy, I don't think it'll hold up to rental abuse well. Or heavily laden food cart wheels on carpet. Any other opinions? Any other cameras to consider?

Of course, most clients want to be handed a DVD at the end of the day. Hah! And I guess in the future, it'll be BluRay. But what HD professional physical media do people want these days? HDCAM? DVCPRO HD? Hard drives?

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Sat, 01/26/2008 - 19:19
#1
kschneider
User offline. Last seen 4 years 4 weeks ago. Offline
Joined: 18 Aug 2005
Have you talked to anyone at LMG or PRG? They do a lot of rental and staging with a number of HD flight packs. They call them an "HD Truck-In-A-Box". Cheers, -= Ken =-
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Sat, 01/26/2008 - 08:49
#2
Anonymous
[quote="EIC-Jeff"]Seriously reconsider this thought process. The military uses fiber optic cable all over the place....because IT IS very robust. You have no cable length issues, no signal loss, you loose a stage of conversion in the process, etc. The ONLY reason that we use HD cameras over triax is existing installation base. I can pull into virtually any sports venue in the country and find triax. Only in the last five years have venues started putting in fiber.[/quote] Agreed. Go fiber. There's no issue with durability these days.
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Sat, 01/26/2008 - 08:32
#3
EIC-Jeff
User offline. Last seen 13 years 10 weeks ago. Offline
Joined: 19 Oct 2007
Seriously reconsider this thought process. The military uses fiber optic cable all over the place....because IT IS very robust. You have no cable length issues, no signal loss, you loose a stage of conversion in the process, etc. The ONLY reason that we use HD cameras over triax is existing installation base. I can pull into virtually any sports venue in the country and find triax. Only in the last five years have venues started putting in fiber. I use LDK6000s on a daily basis. I'd trade an appendage to swap them for Sony's. [quote="JStrain"]Just discovered Editsuite forums recently. I've been learning a whole lot. The two top camera candidates are the Grass Valley LDK-8000 WorldCam, and the Sony HDC-1550. Both are or can be Triax cameras. I personally prefer Triax. It's big, thick, heavy, and can fight back. Although fiberoptic is much more sexy, I don't think it'll hold up to rental abuse well. Or heavily laden food cart wheels on carpet. Any other opinions? Any other cameras to consider?[/quote]
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Sat, 01/26/2008 - 00:55
#4
JStrain
User offline. Last seen 15 years 2 weeks ago. Offline
Joined: 25 Jan 2008
Sahonen, For DVD playback, we use a few choices. We have a whole rental fleet of Panasonic consumer DVD players. They are solid, surprisingly well built, and play almost anything when they are in good health. The next step up is the Denon DN-V310. They are very nice professional DVD players that can cue and play DVD chapters rather easily without any On Screen Displays. Then there are the Pioneer PRV-LX1s...the Hummers of DVD burner/players. They are big, strong and expensive, but a bitch to drive. Then there are the Grass Valley Turbos. They are computers dressed up as hard drive video recorder/players...complete with a big rubber jog/shuttle/cueing knob on the front. You can import .vob files into them. Or you can laboriously play a DVD player into them when the import fails. Either way, it's nice, with reliable trimmable cueable pushbutton playback off of hard drives...if you have time to import.
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Fri, 01/25/2008 - 18:44
#5
sahonen
User offline. Last seen 15 years 2 weeks ago. Offline
Joined: 18 Aug 2005
Ross and Snell&Wilcox both offer multi-format gear that's worth looking at, though if you're switching cameras with presentation (i.e. Powerpoint or video playback) feeds you'll need to pay attention to DVI/VGA/whatever format conversion. If you can get a machine with an NVidia Quadro card for your presentation feeds that would be best. On a side note, do you know of any good pro-grade DVD playback gear? DVDs seem to be the defacto video playback standard for these sorts of things and I hate it because they're impossible to cue properly. I'll typically dub to a tape...If they hand me the DVD sooner than just moments before they walk on stage. As for recording formats, I haven't really seen any specific format becoming "standard" other than the fact that most of the formats I'm starting to see more of are tapeless. If you can figure out some way to hand your client a hard drive at the end of the day they will probably be able to work with it.
- Stephan Ahonen
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