Scopebox multicam recording - How?
 

The web site is a bit short on details. I do a lot of 3 camera lecture shoots using DVCProHD cameras. I would like to use the HD-SDI outs, and record each camera's output. Can Scopebox handle that on one Mac? What video interface would be needed? How powerful a Mac? Is there a detailed case study or white paper that goes through the nitty gritty details of using the product's record to disk capabilities? Thanks.

At this point, you'd need three separate macs to do that, as none of the HD-SDI board manufacturers can do multiple boards per system in quite the way you want. You'd also run out of CPU and probably disk bandwidth on even a mac pro.

One alternative would be to capture via Telestream Pipeline HDs. These attach to your network, and take care of the prores (or whatever) encoding in hardware. ScopeBox supports monitoring and recording from pipelines. That reduces the cpu overhead, and the disk overhead (though you'd still need a decent raid array to write 3 streams of prores). A Mac Pro would be fine, potentially a MacBook Pro, though I don't think we've ever done quite that many streams on a mbp.

-Colin

Thanks for the quick reply! Pipeline HDs are new to me -- I'll go check them out. One more quick question -- the DVCProHD cameras (AG-HPX300) have firewire out as well as well, that Firestores, etc., can use. The cameras are generally too far apart to consider linking by FW, but if I did give it a try, can the Scopebox product detect and record 3 cameras, assuming the Mac can handle it? (DVCProHD = 100mps, X 3 = 300mps. Data-wise, doesn't seem too heavy for FW800...) Thanks!

I'm actually not sure about the HPX300. We did a ton of testing with HVX-200s back when they were the new hotness, and found that they tended not to play nicely with other devices on the FW bus. So, if you wanted multiple on one computer, you had to add additional FW busses via Expresscard adapters or PCI-E cards. It's possible the HPX-300 does a better job, but unfortunately we haven't had access to a fleet of them to test with.

If you get in touch via our support address (dmsupport@divergentmedia.com) we could see about getting you a time-limited trial key (instead of a feature-limited key) to test everything with. Or, if you happen to be in the bay area or minnesota, we could see about meeting up.

(edit, just noticed you're in tokyo. I suppose that'd be a bit of a commute)

Thanks again for the quick answer! You must be a night owl! I will request the time trial as suggested and give it a shot. Will try to remember to post results back here for the next person who searches for this info...