Comment on "Why are TV Cameras still huge and expensive?"

ladicius@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

• Maximilious@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I haven't watched the video but I have to imagine they are lugging around a portable computer to some extent. RAID SSDs for storage of native 4K footage because pyrotechnics are expensive and no one wants to film that shit twice because the camera crapped out. But I could be wrong.

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  • gazter@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    There’s a lot more to it than that, but yes. At least in my world, RAID isn’t really used for ingest, it’s just not fast enough- A single camera at 4k will bring a gigabit network to its knees. IP networking is making it’s way into the events space, but it’s not straightforward, and generally isn’t used for critical recording or archival, just for pushing content to screens. For recording it is usually done in camera, and this is directly piped over dedicated cabling to back of house where a recording station is set up. This cabling will either be SMPTE or SDI.

    The most data I’ve recorded for a live event was on a show for a Tech Company You’ve Heard Of.

    We had 8 cameras in the main room. This room ran for most of the day, can’t recall how long but let’s call it 8 hours, allowing time for lunch and turnarounds and such. This show ran for three days. We kept to good practice, and had a main and backup recording of each camera feed. They wanted ProRes 444 HQ, I managed to convince them that 422 would be sufficient. Even so, at 4k, that’s about half a terabyte per hour.

    We could only get 2 terabyte SSDs in the quantity needed in time.

    So that’s 2 recordings of 8 cameras at half a terabyte an hour, giving 8 terabytes per hour, for 8 hours, giving 64 terabytes a day, for three days, giving just under 200 terabytes for the main room alone.

    Do you know how tall a stack of a hundred SSDs is? I do…

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