Video capture through a network - what speed required?

compusolver
Member

I haven't tried this yet, but I'm wanting to be able to capture video through a second computer while editing on the first. It has to "land" on the first computer's harddrive, therefore it must go through the network.

My network speed is only 100, which doesn't sound fast enough for capture. I see that they now have 1000 and even 2000 speeds available that that I would need to add a switch and a couple of faster network cards.

Is anyone doing this? What equipment and speeds are you using?

Posted 5 years ago #
On a Roll
Member

100 Mbps ain't gonna cut it. I've tried. You can just barely watch compressed formats without first buffering, and if you're going to try live capture, that's not even an option.

You know, one cheaper option would be to install a removable drive bay in each computer. You could dump the video onto the removable drive, pull it, and plop it right onto the new machine. No mess, no hassle. You might need to reboot on certain systems, but if you upgraded to a system with a hot-swappable drive, that would solve that issue.

Why in heaven's name would you want to do this, anyway?

Posted 5 years ago #
compusolver
Member

Yeah, I've thought about drive swapping. A fast network would be more convenient.

Why? I've got five editing jobs waiting for me. Average is six tapes. That's nearly six hours of capture time and tying up the editing computer. If I could capture through another computer, I could edit one project while capturing another.

Posted 5 years ago #
On a Roll
Member

Eh, I suppose that's a plenty good reason. I'm not backed up at all right now, and spending a full day dumping video to my PC can be a drag.

I've tried dumping video onto my pc through my home network, with disasterous results. Then again, I only have a 100 mbps connection.

Tooling around on Google, I found out some helpful info you might apreciate. Apparently for "near broadcast" cameras like the VX-2100 or GL-2, to make sure tou've got enough bandwidth, you need to make sure you can facilitate at least 20 MB per second for video dumping. Translated into bits, it comes to a hair less than 170 Mbps, about twice the speed of my home network.

I'd say, from the math side of this, you should be more thanfine with a 1000 Mbps setup, assuming your computers have the Ram and processing power to handle this.

If you do upgrade your network, don't forget that if you've got regular Cat-5 networking cable, you should upgrade your cables to Cat-5e for better signal and stability on those freaky fast connections. Plus, your internal cards and hub/router need to be replaced.

If you go this route, let me know how it works. I've got an old P4 in my basement that I experiment with Linux on which I could easily turn into a video machine.

Posted 5 years ago #
TimOBrien
Member

External Firewire Drive and firewire cards on all computers.

Dump to the firewire drive and take it to any computer to edit.

Posted 5 years ago #
compusolver
Member

Thanks a million for all the good ideas!

I think I'm going to give the firewire drive a try. But I'll copy the files to the video drive before editing, freeing up the firewire drive for the next project to be captured.

But I'd still like to hear from anyone who's tried capturing over a 1 or 2 gig network.

Posted 5 years ago #
videolab
Member

What do you mean by capture over the network? Do you mean to set a drive on another computer as the capture scratch disk or are you wanting to instantly be able to edit as you are in the process of capturing? The real problem will not be available speed but the way that the ethernet standard works. If something else (e.g. anything on the network) tries to access the network at the same time that the computer is trying to send a frame through the network to the other computer the other device could be given priority and the frame could be dropped. Ethernet is fine for playing video (Gigabit not 100MB) but is simply not reliable enough for capturing video. It probably would work just fine most of the time but you could end up dropping frames often. What we do is capture on our editing system and transfer the files over our gigabit network to the graphics workstations. It works great. We just went from the old 100MB to the gigabit and it sped up the file transfers quite nicely. But not as much as I expected. Its not 10 times as fast by any stretch of the imagination. I plan on upgrading my network at home soon now that my mac has gigabit.

Posted 5 years ago #
compusolver
Member

To answer the question, I'm wanting to capture video to my editing computer, but from another computer (so I can continue editing on a previous project).

I'm barely keeping my head above water, editing two weddings a week and we're training another couple to do weddings, so I'll sometimes be having to do three a week. If I can save this capture time (everyone shooting 3 cams, so it averages five to six tapes), it will help a lot.

I think I'm going to go the firewire, external drive route, but also upgrade our network. We only have four computers on the network, with usually only three actively running programs. One does web development, one is doing video editing and capture and the other does scheduling and accounting.

Posted 5 years ago #
kfox
Member

Comp:

I spoke to the folks who built our system a few weeks ago about adding a firewire drive for more storage on our system. Their tech said this was fine as long as it was used ONLY for storage. We run PP1.5, but he said that any video editor needs an internal drive for editing. He said that firewire was not fast enough to move the data. We use a 250G external Western Digital for storage. This works great, but it does take some time to move the video files back and forth to the editor.
Actually, it sounds like "on a roll" is, well, on a roll with the hot-swap drive idea.

Whatever works, keep us posted. I'd be curious to see if the firewire idea actually works. Same for the high speed netowrk!

Best,

kfox

Posted 5 years ago #
compusolver
Member

They misinformed you. I'm using an external harddrive (SATA 150 speed) with firewire connection and I'm able to capture, edit, encode, render, etc., just fine. My enclosure (Coolmax) also allows direct SATA connections, so I could have even more speed if I needed it.

Posted 5 years ago #
kfox
Member

Thanks Comp.

Always good to hear what works and what doesn't from the folks who actually USE the gear!

Best,

kfox

Posted 5 years ago #