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.
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.cpp 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 dvs_dummy 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 |
We have found xfs to be the most efficient filesystem when writing multiple streams of video to disk. A benchmarking tool disk_rw_benchmark.c is available to help compare filesystems and disk configurations.
The authors of Ingex develop and test using openSUSE. The software currently needs to be built from source code. This is available from cvs or as release packages (out of date now) for download.
Instructions on how to build and install the Ingex Studio software are in the file below.
Instructions on how to configure the Ingex Studio software are in the file below.
Instructions for using the Ingex Studio software are in the file below.
The following dependencies (not part of opensuse) are needed for the build.