Wired

People have been asking about the merging of video and networks and how they all tie together. It seems everyone knows the age of moving around video with dedicated video cables is coming to an end. And why not……. You already have everyone tied together with Ethernet cables. Why not use your already established network infrastructure for the video data?

First off, if you are moving around uncompressed HD video, your network will not be fast enough for realtime streaming. Even gigabit will not be fast enough for uncompressed HD. But how many of you are actually working with uncompressed HD? Not many, if my polling is accurate. On the other hand, if you are doing work in DV or with standard def material, you can easily use a network as a transfer or a streaming pipeline from computer-to-computer or from server-to-computer.

Our test results show that the best performing network for video is a simple gigabit Ethernet network. If you have not made the jump to gigabit, you should do so immediately. The price for gigabit switches and routers is dropping rapidly and most of your existing wiring should work fine with gigabit.

On our DV editing stations, we store all our video material on an asset server. We can render directly to the server without any problems. We can also playback from the server without any stutters or dropouts. Having all our video assets on one central server makes it easy to work with and backup. No longer are we searching for that one movie or that one video or audio clip for a project. Everything is on one central server, therefore it makes our workflow much simpler.

With our MasonIP decoder, we can access all our mpeg assets along with all our DVD assets over the network. This allows us to preview and decode our mpeg files anywhere on the network by just accessing the asset server with the MasonIP remote.

Networking everything is coming along faster than anyone realized. Just recently a company announced a complete all-in-one network server chip the size of a grain of rice. And at less than $1, you know this is going to be built into everything you own or even wear. Just amazing.

So you should take a look at your office workflow and see how much of it is networked. Then start the migration to an all data networked video workflow. It’s going to happen so you better be prepared.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 18th, 2006 at 9:35 pm and is filed under Marks Corner Table. You can skip to the end and leave a response.