How to manage ingest – from single stream to multiple ISO
Consumer expectations for engaging video content are higher than ever. Audiences want to enjoy a wide variety of entertainment and, because they’re exposed to endless choice, it is becoming harder than ever to hold their attention.
More and more broadcasters are choosing to utilize multicam production, which can be a powerful way to create more visually engaging content than just using a single camera. Multiple angles help to immerse audiences in the action, as well as providing more editing options when it comes to post-production.
But managing ingest of footage produced by a multicam production can be an intensive process, especially as many production teams now shoot in demanding high resolutions, such as 4K and increasingly even 8K. This means ingest workflows need to be robust enough to process what could potentially total thousands of hours of high-quality footage. With all these media assets coming from multiple ISO camera inputs, it’s important to make sure ingest workflows are as efficient as possible.
On top of this, to satisfy demand, media organizations have to ensure that production is flexible and delivered to tight schedules. These challenging requirements are amplified when sharing content between teams that are increasingly moving towards remote workflows.
In this blog, we’ll discuss three different ingest processes and explore the advantages and limitations of each for managing ingest, from single stream to multiple ISO.
On-site hardware-based ingest
The traditional way of managing ingest using on-site hardware, comes with many benefits. The ability to seamlessly record ultra, high-quality footage straight to a hard-drive and easily scale from a single stream to a multicam setup. But there are two key problems with this option.
First is the cost. The hardware needed to record vast amounts of footage comes with high upfront costs and doesn’t give you the ability to scale beyond the hardware’s capabilities without purchasing more hardware, meaning you’ll often have to pay for more than you need just to be safe. Second is its limited flexibility. If you’re recording at a single location, you can set the hardware up and easily get it to your on-site editors. But what if you have a remote production where the film crew and editors aren’t on the same site? Then you must get the hardware, not only to the filming location but then over to the post-production team, wasting valuable time.
Cloud-based Transfer Ingest
Alternatively, you could record all your footage to an on-site hard drive and upload your media to a cloud-based transfer service. That way your editors can access it from wherever they might be located.
The cloud offers the flexibility to move content to wherever it’s needed. The process is both easy and cost-efficient, as you only pay for what you need, making it an ideal alternative to hardware-based ingest. Ultimately this reduces the logistical challenge and the cost of getting content to editors quickly. But it still takes time to upload ingested footage to a cloud transfer service before editors can access it. So although uploading a single stream might be fast enough, uploading hours of high-resolution footage from multiple ISOs to the cloud all at once is time consuming. These upload delays impact the post-production schedule, as editors wait for the content to come through.
Record Straight to the Cloud
Imagine having the best parts of on-site hardware and the cloud without the drawbacks, and ensuring immediate access for your editing team. Does being able to upload multiple high-quality streams to cloud storage simultaneously sound good? It is possible to avoid the costs and logistical challenges associated with hardware-based systems and the lengthy upload times of regular cloud solutions.
That’s exactly what Capture2Cloud does. Capture2Cloud eliminates the need to setup and transport large amounts of hardware between locations. It allows you to upload as many streams as you need to an AWS cloud instance of Cinedeck, using just an encoder. This helps to simplify editing workflows, by moving footage straight from the camera to the server, and directly into storage. This reduces the complexity of the ingest process and saves precious time during post-production.
Recording straight to the cloud means your editors don’t need to wait for a hard drive to reach them, or for a cloud-based file transfer to finish uploading, before they can get to work. Instead, they can get started on editing the full-quality content straight away – all within the cloud.
With Capture2Cloud you can efficiently manage ingest with scalability, ranging from single to multiple ISO streams. By capturing content straight to cloud storage for editing and distribution, you can ensure maximum efficiency without sacrificing quality. Find out more about Capture2Cloud here.