[quote="Mike Cumbo"]Right now the EVS can't record a signal as good as say SR or D5 HD, so why compromise the final product? The EVS XFile is still too slow to backup even one machine for an entire two hour show. I would hate to think of trying to backup/copy ten machines with two hours+ of material.[/quote] Sure it would take forever to transfer all 2+ hours from 10 cameras but who said you had to send all 2+ hours. This is how its done for all of our OB's. We are completely tapless within our studio and OB's included getting material to and from. EVS operators clip up anything that is exciting or needs to be archived, the Xfile is placed in auto-backup mode so anything that is clipped and keyworded automaticly gets backedup. The Xfile harddrive is then taken back to the studio where the contents are transcoded to the Avid DNx codec and sent to the ISIS for editing and also sent to the archive, which currently has 2 petabytes of storage available. As for being able to send data directly to and EVS this can already be done from a XDCAM or a P2 using Xstore or an Xfile with MediaXchange. [quote="sahonen"]Of course you don't see much ENG shooting on shows with EVS either, since you can get a triax hookup ANYWHERE in these venues nowadays.[/quote] You obviously weren't at the Olympics. Everything was recorded on EVS at the IBC and there was a truck load of ENG crews roaming around. This has been my experience at a lot of major sporting events. ESPN record all of the tennis grand slams on EVS only backing up everything to Xfile. There tapes bunkers are a real sight to behold. They are large amounts of ENG crews.

No need to apologize for disagreeing! I've had a different experience here in Minneapolis, we don't attract a lot of big shows to our games so shortage of triax isn't typically an issue. ESPN will come in occasionally for MLB or NBA (not so much this year for NBA, heh) but that's about it... Our NHL arena is LOADED with triax (they actually planned ahead when they built it, imagine that!) so finding the space to physically fit the cameras is actually more of an issue than cabling. Back when I was working utility for MLB we'd do ENG in the home locker room for postgame and I'd have to sprint it back to the truck to get it on the air, but I understand there's a piece of triax running there now. It's a shame, the exercise was good for me!

[quote="sahonen"]Of course you don't see much ENG shooting on shows with EVS either, since you can get a triax hookup ANYWHERE in these venues nowadays.[/quote] Sorry to disagree, but I see a lot of ENG shooting in sports. The buildings are so difficult to deal with, and house cable is often maxed out with 2 or 3 or 4 shows going on, and of course the cable (when it's there) is a "safety hazard" even when it's not, that ENG is the way to go a lot of the time. So clients bring in whatever format they use and we integrate it into the truck, or they have us provide it. Unless you have the huge crew and staff, it's often the most efficient way to go. mg

[quote="sahonen"]Actually I just came up with an interesting idea... What if we make a tapeless medium that uses the same data format as EVS, and stick a firewire port in the EVS... Instead of having to play the footage into the EVS through the router (so 90s!) it just comes in through firewire. I can't imagine nobody has thought of this yet...[/quote] The EVS X-File has or had a Firewire port on it. Yes, it was for an external HD but the box had one. (Not sure if the newest models still have them.) Why not adapt this port so that a shooter who has a camera can just connect to the X-File and the data is transferred over like a melt drive? [quote="sahonen"]Of course you don't see much ENG shooting on shows with EVS either, since you can get a triax hookup ANYWHERE in these venues nowadays.[/quote] MASN has a shooter roam around Baltimore's Inner Harbor area to get footage. No triax there. It is real nice when YES is in town as well. Both shows shoot 1080i and use HDCAM, so scenics can be shared.

[quote="sahonen"]Actually I just came up with an interesting idea... What if we make a tapeless medium that uses the same data format as EVS, and stick a firewire port in the EVS... Instead of having to play the footage into the EVS through the router (so 90s!) it just comes in through firewire. I can't imagine nobody has thought of this yet... Of course you don't see much ENG shooting on shows with EVS either, since you can get a triax hookup ANYWHERE in these venues nowadays.[/quote] I like it.

I'm not so sure about RAM actually costing pennies to manufacture... While it's not exactly a secret that professional broadcast products suffer from a "broadcast markup," margins on things like RAM have to be driven down through market competition and economies of scale. The only company I can see that really marks up their hardware is Apple, and that's just because there's no competition in the Apple hardware market... You're not allowed to run MacOS on non-Apple hardware, so if you really need a Mac you're stuck paying their obscene hardware prices. GVG is in something of a similar situation as Apple... GVG doesn't make all that many Kalypsos, they're the only company that does make them (important since it's something of a defacto standard in the sports industry), and the clients that buy them have lots of money, so of course GVG can put insane margins on them and still get business. In fact due to their low volume they may have to put big margins on them to pay the bills. When you're selling a thousand units a year as opposed to a million, your margins have to be higher for the same net revenue. Even in a more centralized production model, take-away media still has a use in ENG applications. Corporate shooters, freelancers and stringers all need a way to hand something over to their client at the end of the day. Even on a sports production, say you send somebody out to get beauty shots and B-roll for billboards and bumps, you need a way to get that footage into your EVS so you can roll it in. In the current crop of HD trucks, that means finding the only actual tape deck in the entire truck stuck in some obscure corner of the "tape" room. Actually I just came up with an interesting idea... What if we make a tapeless medium that uses the same data format as EVS, and stick a firewire port in the EVS... Instead of having to play the footage into the EVS through the router (so 90s!) it just comes in through firewire. I can't imagine nobody has thought of this yet... Of course you don't see much ENG shooting on shows with EVS either, since you can get a triax hookup ANYWHERE in these venues nowadays.

[quote="sahonen"]Bob, are you talking about actual RAM or are you confusing RAM with Flash?[/quote] You're absolutely right - I'm actually thinking about flash memory. However, devices such as the Kayak RAM Recorder use RAM with battery-backed-up technology. The older GVG switchers held their ENG & Effects in what amounted to RAM that was maintained by a simple capacitor which held enough power to keep the files backed up for the weekend. It's true that RAM is fairly expensive - at least to us consumers. I contend that the $200 SDRAM card that you'd buy for your computer cost pennies (or maybe dollars) to actually manufacture...in the same way that those $350,000 switchers that we use actually cost about $60K-$100K or less to manufacture. WE may not have access to the manufacturer's cost of a product, but the "big boys" do. My 1st 1GB flash card cost me about $400 when it 1st came out. The 8GB cards that I routinely store my shows on originally also cost me about $400 each. My latest 32GB drives cost well under $200 each, and the latest 64GB card that I saw suprisingly cost about $400-$600. So I agree with you that prices tend to fall as the memory increases. That's why I'm offering that as the technology increases to store & retrieve data more quickly on RAM/SDRAM/Flash/whatever, and as the prices come down as the technology moves on, I can easily see some sort of solid memory device becoming the next "take-away" media. But that assumes (based on the original question) that you really need "take-away" media. Station groups are now experimenting with Centralcasting, where one facility becomes the central broadcasting point for multiple stations...all of the "satellite" stations feed their traffic cams & beauty cams into the one hub; the hub creates a newscast that goes back out to all of the satellite stations, and adds the "local" stuff to the newscast so that the viewer doesn't even realize that their news feed is actually coming from hundreds of miles away. If you take that concept to the area of production, there's nothing that says that the recording has to be done at the venue (and this has actually been proposed for many years). Imagine a central facility that was nothing but a boat-load of servers - productions could be done hundreds or thousands of miles away and the line cut/ISO's fed & recorded into this "server farm" - as long as the "local" operator had control of the device, it wouldn't matter to them if the electronics were within arm's reach or not. In the same fashion, edit facilities wouldn't need their own machines...they'd just tap in to this "server farm" - with both control & data capability, the "machines" would appear to the users at both the production and post-production facilities to just be part of the package (NBC virtually did this with a lot of the Atlanta Olympics - many of the machines [and operators] were in New York but integrated into many of the Atlanta originations as if the machines were actually in Atlanta). Thus, you really would never actually need "take-away" media - the Producers/Editors could access the data from any facility - including on their home computers. Again, the idea of these "server farms" have been bouncing around the halls of manufacturers for years - I could easily see things heading that direction.

[quote="sahonen"]I'm actually surprised that nobody's come out with a hard drive based ENG format, the cost of hard disk space is very competitive with the cost of professional tape media.[/quote] Avid HAD the Camcutter back in '95 or so but hard drive technology and costs prevented it from taking hold. I think each drive was over $1,000 and held something like 32 minutes. HD's may be cost competitive to tape but what happens when a drive is dropped or can it be left in a car and cooked or frozen and still work? As for write speeds, I could see a DDR with a card slot and you write to HD first and then spool it off to the removable media. Wait, that sounds like the original Sony SX tape machine I heard about back maybe 12 years ago.... A VTR that had a hard drive and tape transport that you could record to the drive and then dump to tape for walk away convenience.

[quote="Mike Cumbo"]Bob, as someone else point out, the list for a 32GB P2 card is around $1,600. Your guess of 600GB is 18.75 times the size of a 32Gb drive. I can see the capacity getting increased in the next few years but the cost might choke the budget people.[/quote] Prices tend to fall at about the same rate that capacity increases. When P2 was first introduced the 8GB cards were the largest you could get and they were about $1k. If we do start seeing 512GB-1TB flash cards in a decade or so I'm willing to bet the price will be fairly equivalent to what we're seeing today. Of course by then we'll be broadcasting in Even Higher Definition and those cards will record for about 10 minutes each. That said, the cards can be as big as we ever want them to be but they'll still be useless if the write speeds don't improve. This is an area where tape and hard drives have a huge advantage. I'm actually surprised that nobody's come out with a hard drive based ENG format, the cost of hard disk space is very competitive with the cost of professional tape media.

Bob, are you talking about actual RAM or are you confusing RAM with Flash? You talk about thumb drives in the same paragraph which makes me think the latter, if not then my apologies. The deal with RAM is that it's many many times more expensive even than Flash, and it must be kept constantly powered or your data disappears. That would be pretty bad news, you would need to put cards on like a charger or something to keep juice flowing through them after you take them out of your deck/camera. The main hurdle for flash memory at the moment is bandwidth... Yes, you can get a thumb drive with the same capacity as a P2 card for about 10% of the cost, but I doubt that the thumb drive could handle the data rates that HD recording requires. Think about how long it took you to write those animation frames onto your thumb drive, and remember that you have to be able to do that in real time if you're actually recording with it. Flash has very good read performance, better than hard disk in many cases, but terrible write performance. To get around this, a P2 card is actually a RAID of several SD cards. I don't know how much of the cost of a P2 card is due to actual complexity and how much is just "broadcast markup", but there is still a definite reason that professional flash storage is more expensive than the consumer stuff.

Bob, as someone else point out, the list for a 32GB P2 card is around $1,600. Your guess of 600GB is 18.75 times the size of a 32Gb drive. I can see the capacity getting increased in the next few years but the cost might choke the budget people. How much is that 64 minute HDCAM tape? Another thing is can the server write to the removable media while you are recording the show or will OT be incurred as the show is dumped to the removable media? (One online source shows HDCAM tape at $50 for a single tape, less if you buy bulk. HDCAM SR is almost $100.) Anyone know the life expectancy of a USB thumb drive? When stored I mean.

Because I work on shows owned by SONY, it's a pretty safe bet that unless SONY comes out with a new tapeless format, we won't be seeing it on anything on our lot... But if I had to offer a guess I'd suggest that because RAM memory is getting cheaper, somebody has probably GOT to be already working on an SDRAM-style large memory array. I could see this as a potential medium - although certainly not in the NEAR future...possibly within the next 5 years. As I mentioned in another posting, I bought two 32GB thumb drives for maybe $130 each on Amazon.com - the "big boys" who do equipment development just HAVE to have access to larger, cheaper products than I do: products that, with a little tweaking, could be used in place of what we rely on today, and could still be portable and re-writeable. I think our largest HDXDCAM disk holds a little over an hour of material - for 1000 frames of animations (which is why I need the big thumb drives), I'm using up just under 5GB of thumb drive storage. So if 5GB gets me 33 sec. of video, and if I loosely round that up to 10GB per minute (to make room for audio), then (if my math is right) I'd need a RAM device that could store 600GB per hour to replace my current HDXDCAM. I could see that happening in 5 years. I don't know of anybody who's working on this yet, but it strikes me as being a feasible future alternative to tape and other long-term archival storage. So when the patent comes out for this, just remember...you heard it here first!

[quote="Bob Ennis"]We record one of our shows on HDXDCAM: it's portable...you can walk away with the disk & ingest its contents into your non-linear editor. Once it's in the NL editor, it's all disk-based anyway. The NL editor masters to HDCAM, which is what feeds the satellite. On the other show, we record onto HDCAM; that show is edited linearly, and so it also masters to HDCAM.[/quote] I am starting to see XDCAM more often these days as well ? I agree it certainly provides portability. Bob if you were to take a peek at your crystal ball do you think there might be a tapeless format that is likely to replace HDCAM on your shows say in the next five years?

We record one of our shows on HDXDCAM: it's portable...you can walk away with the disk & ingest its contents into your non-linear editor. Once it's in the NL editor, it's all disk-based anyway. The NL editor masters to HDCAM, which is what feeds the satellite. On the other show, we record onto HDCAM; that show is edited linearly, and so it also masters to HDCAM.

For any big entertainment shows in the U.S. you're going to have the All Mobile Video's and NEP's of the world that will let you ISO and Master to whatever format you want for a price. I think at this point the tapeless world is still a ways off. Though I do see potential in EVS improving and further integrating their products to work with Avid and other editors for an eventual tapeless world in entertainment.

[quote="RollItTakeIt"]http://www.pocket-lint.co.uk/news/news.phtml/17399/18423/samsung-blu-ray-5-years-left.phtml[/quote] That is probably some of the worst technology journalism I've ever seen. Why can't somebody hire me as a science and technology reporter? Never mind my lack of a journalism degree, having one hasn't done a lot of these so-called reporters any good. "...Griffith says the [Blu-Ray] format will be a winner, although not for long. Instead Samsung is putting its faith in its OLED technology." So you're saying a storage technology is going to be replaced by a display technology. Brilliant!

[quote="sahonen"][quote="RollItTakeIt"]Blu-ray recorders.[/quote] Blu-ray is in the same boat as DVD... It uses inter-frame compression and low bitrates which make it useless as a master format, especially for further editing. Sony's XDCAM is actually basically a Blu-Ray disk only without the Blu-Ray features like menus and DRM etc... It uses MPEG-2, which is actually less efficient than the codecs in Blu-Ray... Not sure what Sony was thinking there. The bitrate is higher than over-the-air HD (which also uses MPEG-2), but probably still not high enough for heavy post work. Maybe good enough for local news.[/quote] Well it's all moot anyway... "I think it [Blu-ray] has 5 years left, I certainly wouldn't give it 10", Andy Griffiths, director of consumer electronics at Samsung UK...

[quote="RollItTakeIt"]Blu-ray recorders.[/quote] Blu-ray is in the same boat as DVD... It uses inter-frame compression and low bitrates which make it useless as a master format, especially for further editing. Sony's XDCAM is actually basically a Blu-Ray disk only without the Blu-Ray features like menus and DRM etc... It uses MPEG-2, which is actually less efficient than the codecs in Blu-Ray... Not sure what Sony was thinking there. The bitrate is higher than over-the-air HD (which also uses MPEG-2), but probably still not high enough for heavy post work. Maybe good enough for local news.

Blu-ray recorders.

The problem with most of these next-gen video storage media is that they cost ridiculous amounts of money. A 32GB P2 card good about about half an hour of HD video runs $1600. That's about a dollar a second. You can't just hand that over to a client! I think P2/flash will only ever see widespread use in places where the footage, and hence the cards, stay in-house. Local news, event videographers, stuff like that. For footage you have to deliver to someone I don't think you can beat tape, though hard disk is looking better all the time. Pity there aren't really any HDD-based formats for ENG.

My definition of a remote truck is a portable container that is equipped the way a client wants. As long as the truck company can get what you want, there is no issue. Right now the EVS can't record a signal as good as say SR or D5 HD, so why compromise the final product? The EVS XFile is still too slow to backup even one machine for an entire two hour show. I would hate to think of trying to backup/copy ten machines with two hours+ of material. Will tape die, I don't know. Right now we are in that point in time where for sports it is a dying medium but for interchange or the ease of transport it still is viable.

Starting from 1996, I have probably been on of the first in my country to use video servers to replace tapes for instant replays. I have seen a lot of evolution in what I still consider, at least in Europe, a rather conservative industry. Anyway, whenever it happens to do music shows or studio productions, I still see boxes of tapes. Tape is soemthing physical the producer wants to take away, and there is no better medium I can think, and probably the cheaper too, considering it is usually an uncompressed media suitable for ingesting their footage later. In sport production, what I give out is usually a dump of interesting clips, while the PGM is recorded by the broadcaster, in his facility. In this case, I record on tape just a single copy (for the team press office, I think). If I have to guess about the future, I would say that one day you will take away a box of P2 memory cards, or whatever solid state technology will prevail.