Grass Valley T2

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T2 List price: £8700.00+VAT

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Product Review

Technology Guides

Guide to Video Recorders

This guide covers recorders designed for the studio, desktop and location shoots. It does not look at field or camera-mounted solutions such as the Blackmagic Design Hyperdeck Shuttle or Datavideo DN-60A.

External recorders, what's the point?

1. Recording live productions from the switcher
2. Recording feeds from studio or remote cameras
3. Recording very long shots, lasting several hours
4. Creating digital recordings from analogue cameras
5. Embedding audio into camera feeds

Connectors

Recorders are available with a variety of inputs, from S-Video, composite video and firewire to HDMI and HD-SDI. While it is useful (and slightly less messy) for recorders to connect using the same connection as the source, low-cost signal converters can overcome any analogue / digital or HDMI / SDI miss-match.
Arguably more important than connections are three key factors: the data rate, the recording format, and the digital media used to record onto.

Format

In a perfect world, recorders would capture in a format that is:

1. High quality
2. Edit-friendly
3. Broadcast-ready
4. Easily optimised for streaming
5. Good for archiving

Needless to say, no single format answers to all these requirements. Even at the BBC's brand new facilities at Salford, content in post production is available to editors as ProRes 422 while archives are AVC Intra100. Content streamed over the internet it tends to be encoded to H.264; over broadcast masts as MPEG-TS.

So format capture compromises are inevitable. Our current recorders use the following codecs:

Conclusions

• ProRes is deservedly popular. However, if the workgroup is a mixed OS environment (Windows, Linux and Apple), ProRes has limitations.
• Where all editors exclusively use Avid, DNxHD is a solid option
• AVC-Intra is a great HD choice: 're-wrapping' for FCP is very fast; native editing in EDIUS, Premiere, and Avid
• M2T is a safe choice but should be transcoded if rendering multiple generations.
• Recording in, or transcoding to the new HQX is a great choice for multi-OS workgroups

Data Rate

In order to manage storage costs, maintain editing speed and yet deliver quality content, there has to be a compromise. Recording an HDTV programme at 300Mb/s, for example, makes little sense unless the programme is likely to be displayed on the big screen with lots of grading, compositing or chroma key.

On a 240GB hard drive, around 4 hours of 100Mb/s content can be recorded. Uncompressed, the same drive can capture approximately 25 minutes. For most technicians, space may not be the big issue; handling the large files in post production will be more of an issue, especially if transcoding into an intermediate format is needed.

Media

Recorders capture to a variety of media

Notes

• Certain memory card-based recorders feature the ability to offload content directly to external hard disks giving greatly increased capacity at low cost.
• SSD advisory: SSD is relatively new technology. It is very fast but needs periodic optimization to maintain performance. It is also currently expensive at between 4-6 times more costly than 2.5" spinning drives.

The Products

Panasonic | Datavideo | Grass Valley | Blackmagic Design | VITEC

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