2008/6/13 Michael Mauch michael.mauch@gmx.de:
Hanno Zulla wrote:
are there known users of vdr within TV or radio operators?
I worked a couple of years for the ndr and ard as engineer and video editor. And i use vdr. But I've never seen a vdr at work. I don't know, how long the archived records have to be kept, but several programmes are archived for quite a long time. I personally copied tagesschau (german news cast) and zdf fernsehgarten (you don't want to know) episodes from the 70ies / 80ies to new media. Older material usually is on 1" B-Format tape, newer material either BetaSP od DigiBeta. The braodcast signal is archived on DigiBeta also, using Barco satellite tuners. I don't know, what they use for DVB-H, but i was told there wasn't a reference receiver on the market so they went cheap.
I don't see any advantages using vdr. Archived material might be used in future productions, so you'll definitely want to record the best signal, you can get. Furthermore, archived material might be needed to reproduce the signal as close as it was, to determine where a distorted signal came from.
I worked at tagesschau during the switch from tape based to non-linear editing. The use 4 Quantel SQ servers (double redundant) totalling up to 300 hours storage (MPEG2 compressed). I don't have figures for disk space or data rate, but if anyone's interested, i can ask a former colleague. About a hundred editing clients (a lot of sqEdit, some sqEdit+, some PaintBoxes,...) have and need instant access to all material. The system has 24 input channels and 12 (not sure on that) output channels. It is used for tagesschau/tagestehmen/nachtmagzin and for eins plus, which evolves slowly into a 24/7 news channel.
So, i reckon, for broadcast demands, vdr isn't "big iron" enough and doesn't have the interface capabilities needed. And nobody really wants to use a broadcasted signal again.
The only use i see would be for automated recording and converting for web archives like zdf's mediathek (which btw is great). With the ndr's setup although, it would be easier to just add a scheduled task to the Ingester and let the internal engine encode the video to the desired format.
regards, Peter Marquardt