CompuServe Thread

COMPLETION ANNOUNCEMENT Sterling Video Auckland NewZealand now have installed the first and only MediaFlex Broadcast Studio Pal NonLinear system in the world. The system includes three A4000s Networked together using Quicknet Cards and Envoy. Two of the A4000s are used as Dedicated Video recorder/Players to maintain a high buss speed, whilst the the third is used for sound and graphics. The two DVRs have Applied Magic Elite Digitizing boards anf the audio is with Studio 16 AD516. The Real time video channels feed into a Sony DFS500 DVE with total control from the Broadcast Studio screen. Ie there is no rendering of transitions – they are real time from two sources into hardware DVEs. The storage is via a rack of removable units each with a 2GB Baracuda giving 14GB total space. The Elite Cards have YUV, YC and Composite in and out and these are fed from a Sony BVW50 SPBetacam deck. And the final productions are put back YUV onto that same deck-Only one Machine is required now!. The main screen is 21 inch and fed via Picasso. A Warp engine in one of the A4000s speeds up a lot of the processes. The software is Brilliant! It has features way beyond many top systems.- Like for instance "Purge" which when the drives are full and you have finished editing existing material, will go through, rearange files and dump out all the trimmed out video- a hugely difficult procedure if you know any thing about chopping up beginning and ends of files, renaming to original etc. This give us much more space on the drives which is always a restriction if you are Jpeging at a high quality. It does also have "Rerecord" which can make a whole new Master from the stored EDL – it simply tells you which tape to put in and the rest is fully automatic! This also allows one to first record at high compression with lots of material, then do the rerecord at a low compression of only the finished EDL. The editing is done on several different screen layouts. – A text screen where logging is done and the lines of text can be select with the mouse and dragged and dropped. 2/ a Time line which can be zoomed in and out of.This has the Two Video channels and the four stereo audio channels, and the DVEs which automaticly appear with any overlap on the video channels. There is a GFX channel for the graphics which can be created with Montage24! and Lightwave – Awesome graphics! 3/ the other editing screen is "Storyboard" where clips are presented like slides on a light box. The clips can be shuffled with mouse and is brilliant for getting overall pictures of where a production is going – Especially when you have clients watching as you often do now that changes can be made instanty and multiple different versions quickly made and displayed. Of course at any time you can click on a clips text title or timeline bar and press play and it is instantly playing.The same in the Storyboard mode. Gone are the days of shuttling. You can go from one end of a 90 minute program to the other in a split second – It's hard to grasp the fact that you are only moving access references! There are many feature too many to describe here- Like AutoShotListing – In 2seconds the program will whip through a reel looking for any scene changes(variable sensitivity) and log it with timecode at each end of each clip. You simply then add descriptions – even part of that is "click on user defined options"- smart eh! With the 060 boards currently being released with the Fast Wide SCSI, Scom's Amiga clone so close now, things are bright on the Amiga Broadcast front despite what ever happens to Commodore. Sterling Video were forced to hire the original programers from MediaFlex in Perth to come over and complete the High end version at considerable cost – Nine months worth. However the end result Right now I am in producion at SP Betacam quality with awesome pictures -so fast.! Eat your Hearts out.!