HD-SDI with RAID
 

Just have a short question. I just would like to know how many hard drive do you need to record uncompressed HD-SDI 4:2:2 direct to computer and which card is the best for that kind of shooting. the AJA KonaLH or the BlackMagic DeckLink HD Pro PCIe™, Thank you, Guillaume

You probably need at least 5 SATA HD's in a RAID O config. Go to www.barefeats.com and read some of the reviews of self-configs. Also good to partition the capture scratch to the fastest portion of the HD. Again, read that site for info on how to do this.

If you are using a Mac then you can use the bitjazz codec for lossless compression around 2:1. This doesn't seem like much compression but it cuts the needed bandwidth for the harddrives in half meaning you may be able to get even decent results from a good 2 drive raid. If you are shooting green/blue screen then you may get even better compression due to redundant solid color pixels covering most of the screen.

On Decklink products you can capture to the bitjazz codec live in realtime. FCP however cannot playback and edit the codec in realtime which is a small drawback.

For strict compositing in Shake or Combustion this is a great workflow.

Fascinating, Thomas. Thank you for the info. I never heard of bitjazz before. Cool.