Interesting article...

Low-cost high tech: BBC tries out Open Source-based tapeless recording

Ra-ey

I've been following Ingex for a while now - it's very interesting to me. I often end up cutting down studio recorded shows - sometimes we can take the line-feed from the vision switcher directly into an Avid for ingest to Unity, but more often we end up capturing from a Digibeta linecut tape, as well as pulling bits off Iso tapes as we need them. The ability to have direct recording of a line cut and three iso feeds would be brilliant!

The Ingex Sourceforge page has lots of info.

The BBC have used Ingex in two very specific ways - the first is as a multi-input direct to file recorder, used for studio shows exactly as I've described above. The second is as part of their tapeless archive project. Where they capture footage from archive formats, record various metadata and write the resulting MXF files into indexed data-tapes. It includes the software to manage that data tape library, as well as performing partial restores of video by timecode (pretty exciting if you're into that sort of thing).

I intend to build one when I can, but I can't get work to fund it, and the cost of the DVS cards they're using is prohibitive for me. I am looking to acquire a Decklink card and see if I can create a capture driver for it (the video stream part of the code is modular, and Decklink, Bluefish4:4:4 and AJA all have Linux SDKs, if I could get some hardware).

The BBC have done quite a lot of open development, which is brilliant.

A more practical (i.e. working, rentable) solution at the moment is to use an EVS - this can record at the studio and then be accessed via an Avid (simplified a little) or even have the Avid connected and be accessed during recording (used on major sports events all the time). 

The tool Media Harmony is also a very interesting solution. A VFS to Samba which allow You to share Avid media files on a Samba-server (Linux-server emulation a Windows fileserver).

This is a software I have asked for.

Media Harmony does work - I know people who have tried it. However you still lack the bin locking that Unity offers, meaning multi-editor work has to be more disciplined.

Sycophant:

The BBC have used Ingex... as part of their tapeless archive project. Where they capture footage from archive formats, record various metadata and write the resulting MXF files into indexed data-tapes. It includes the software to manage that data tape library, as well as performing partial restores of video by timecode (pretty exciting if you're into that sort of thing).

Dylan,

I didn't know that.  That is pretty exciting.  We are always looking for an intelligent way of archiving.

Thanks for the heads up!

Ra-ey

"Ingex encodes data with ffmpeg and writes to MXF files. The BBC contracted an Open Source developer to build a DVCPro-HD codec for ffmpeg. According to Stuart Cunningham, one of the team's software developers quoted in a computerworld.uk article on the system, this resulted in better performance than most hardware-based decoders can deliver."

I'm becoming quite a fan of Open-Source tools and methodologies, and I'm over the moon to see that FFmpeg is used in this case study. The fact someone coded a DVCProHD codec for FFmpeg is a testament to the brilliance of open-source thinking and development - Don't have it? Code it yourself (or pay a developer to do so).

I can but hope that the BBC will also look at the current DNxHD implementation in FFmpeg and add a small number of features I would personally like to see:

1. Specific options/flags for specifying 8-bit or 10-bit processing.
2. Specific options to designate source colour space and destination colour space(s).

Sycophant:

Media Harmony does work - I know people who have tried it. However you still lack the bin locking that Unity offers, meaning multi-editor work has to be more disciplined.

Do You know in which way it does not work? BBC claims it works in their white papers.

I understant it is not a replacement for Unity, but until Avid can offer a colaboration solution for small productions companies and not only for the big guys, it is a step forward, if it work.

Media Harmony only address the ability for multiple edit stations to share media without conflicting media databases, it does this by hiding each client's media database from other clients.

What it doesn't address is bin ownership on a shared project. In a Unity environment a lock file is created for the first client to open any given bin, which means no other clients can write to it until the 'owner' closes it. No such ownership is enforced in Media Harmony.

So yeah, it's a tick on the shared media front, but not really a solution for multiple client project collaboration (although with strict rules it will work fine).

malefunktion:

I can but hope that the BBC will also look at the current DNxHD implementation in FFmpeg and add a small number of features I would personally like to see:

 

1. Specific options/flags for specifying 8-bit or 10-bit processing.
2. Specific options to designate source colour space and destination colour space(s).

If you haven't already, you should get involved in the FFMpeg mailing list - the main developer is very active there, and a few BBC techs as well.

Sycophant:

If you haven't already, you should get involved in the FFMpeg mailing list - the main developer is very active there, and a few BBC techs as well.

I never thought of that. Doh.

Upon reading some archived mail logs it does appear that work is underway on resolving the colourspace issues I saw when conducting my own FFmpeg DNxHD tests.

The new FFmpeg builds have these additional options which I think look very hopeful (though I haven't found any documentation as to what values can be used with them):

-colorspace
-color_range

If I could only find the values to pass to each of these options (something like -colorspace YUV, or -colorspace ITU601 etc...) then I think I may never have to rely on the painfully slow process of transcoding via the Quicktime backend ever again. FFmpeg in my testing was much quicker across multiple CPU cores.

FFMpeg is indeed quick. Current builds can also write MXF, though I've not had much luck - it's not well documented and I've not asked any questions yet. However another BBC sponsored tool (also driven by Ingex I think) is FreeMXF which can actually write MXF that Avid will natively support (so with that and FFMpeg you could write media directly into Avid's MediaFiles directory) - again though, documentation is a little obscure.

Sycophant:

FFMpeg is indeed quick. Current builds can also write MXF, though I've not had much luck - it's not well documented and I've not asked any questions yet. However another BBC sponsored tool (also driven by Ingex I think) is FreeMXF which can actually write MXF that Avid will natively support (so with that and FFMpeg you could write media directly into Avid's MediaFiles directory) - again though, documentation is a little obscure.

Dylan, thanks for the link.  Very interesting.  Not sure yet how we'd use it, but god to know it's out there.

And, malefucktion, if you ever get a workflow locked down, would be great to read it.

Ra-ey

Media Harmony was only designed for Media Shareing and not Project Sharing. In actually fact it has not gone forward in development as it is no longer really required. With some clever directory naming (Media Directory Names) and path mapping you can achieve the Media Harmony effect with a simple NAS.

S

Having rolled out a number of Ingex systems on commercial jobs and installed them into OB trucks I can certainly verify that the Ingex system is very robust and a credit to the BBC R&D guys.

The DVS cards have proven to be very reliable which is important on one take only studio shows however I think the community would benefit enormously if drivers were available for the more cost effective cards. Be interesting as in the past as certain manufactors who charge for SDKs have shunned working with opensource projects in the past as the opensource code in a way can be used to reversce engineer the SDK.