Ingex Studio - Multi-camera Tapeless Recording
Ingex Studio is a commodity PC based multi-camera capture, transcode and MXF wrapping system. Studio SDI sources are first captured using SDI I/O cards in a commodity PC. The uncompressed video is transcoded in real-time using software codecs and then wrapped in MXF and made available immediately for editing by MXF-based editors such as Avid Media Composer.
Hardware requirements
The Ingex developers have used the DVS Centaurus II SDI I/O boards to develop and test the Ingex software. The SDI hardware capture software is isolated to the dvs_sdi.c source file so adding support for other capture hardware would require replacing this source file with one supporting the new hardware. A simulated hardware capture program can be used to test Ingex Studio without requiring any special SDI capture hardware, by running the testgen process instead of dvs_sdi.
The PC hardware required depends greatly upon how many channels will be captured and how many software transcodes will be run together in real-time. The following table can be used as a rough guide, but extensive testing will be necessary to prove real-time capability and overall reliability.
| Real-time transcodes | CPUs | Memory
|
|---|
| 4 x DVCPRO50, 4 x 20:1 JPEG | 4 cores, e.g. Intel Core2 QX6700 | 4GB DDR2 667MHz
|
System configuration
We have found xfs to be the most efficient filesystem when writing multiple streams of video to disk. A bechmarking tool is available here to help compare filesystems and disk configurations.
Installing Ingex Studio
The authors of Ingex develop and test using openSUSE 10.2 and later. Therefore the quickest way to install Ingex Studio is to install the binary rpms below.
The source code is also available from cvs and the following dependencies are needed to build from source code.
- libjpeg and FFmpeg codec libraries (use this patch by Dan Maas to add DVCPRO-HD codec support to FFmpeg)
- ace-tao CORBA libraries
- postgresql, libpqxx and libodbc++ for database access
