Broadcast: HD Video Ingest

I recently saw this application at a customer’s site and had the chance to take it for a test drive. Pretty sweet if you ask me.

So if you find yourself in a production broadcast environment and you need to ingest some content off digibeta using your £20,000 Sony VTR but instead of also occupying an Avid Editing suite or forking out £20,000+ for an Amberfin iCR have a look at Miura from BlueLucy Media.

Their slick application makes use of the Decklink HD Extreme PCIe Capture Card to ingest (capture) HD video to a variety of formats (MPEG2, MPEG4, MXF OP1a, IMX50). The great thing about this app is that it can also create a low resolution proxy version at the same time (WMV, Flash, H.264, etc…).

Software and bundled Decklink HD capture card costs £4700 – an amazing price considering the alternatives. They recommend a medium to high spec quad core Xeon HP workstation for capturing HD content which they estimate at costing another £2000-3000 (but I believe at today’s prices – Dec 2009 – you could pick up a good workstation to do the job for under £1000.)