Traditional multi-camera production is performed with on-premises recorders and editing systems, requiring fixed cost equipment investment, and lacking the flexibility of the cloud. Grass Valley AMPP, together with Amazon FSx for Windows File Server, lets you carry out efficient “live to tape” multi-camera workflows where your editors can perform their job from any location using virtual infrastructure with pay-as-you-go pricing. Your content gets to the cloud faster, where it is straightforward to analyze with AI, share with partners, and archive reliably.
Introduction
In a live to tape video workflow, you shoot and switch a multi-camera production live and record the switcher’s program output (known as a line cut). After the shoot, you can edit the line cut recording before distribution. If you also record each of the individual cameras (known as ISOs, short for isolated cameras), you can enhance the line cut by inserting select clips from cameras other than the one the director chose at the time of the live program shooting. This ensures that the end result is always of high quality, though most production effort was done during the shoot. Live to tape saves you time compared with editing the entire program from just the ISO recordings after shooting.
Today, of course, live to tape does not use “tape”, but instead uses more modern storage methods. To provide the most flexible and cost-effective workflow, you can encode the live video streams and send the compressed flows to the cloud, where editors finish the program on cloud edit workstations. Content is thus received in the cloud faster than if the show was recorded on premises, edited on premises, and only then sent to the cloud afterwards as a file transfer. You only pay for cloud edit workstations used during the time of the editing process instead of having dedicated on-premises workstations, which are idle most of the time. Your editors can connect to the cloud editing workstations from any location with an Internet connection.
For example, your workflow may require five ISO cameras and the line cut, with a resolution of 3840×2160 with 4:2:2 10-bit sampling at 29.97 frames per second. ProRes 422 HQ is the desired file format for your video editing application. The data rate for ProRes at this resolution and frame rate for a single channel of video is 884 Mbps. For the six simultaneous recordings, the total data rate is 5.3 Gbps. While that data rate is possible to establish between on premises and the cloud, the high cost of that connection might be unacceptable.
