(& Technical Standards For Production)
The Ingex system brings the huge advantages of tapeless production to multicamera programme making. Controlled from the production gallery, the system records all the studio feeds and stores them directly to disk.
Using an industry standard file format, these recordings can be transferred seamlessly to post-production, completely avoiding the time-consuming process of digitising from tape. Based on open-source software, the Ingex system is available to anyone in the industry.
The Ingex recorder is essentially a high-end, off-the-shelf PC fitted with dual-channel SDI and HD-SDI capture cards. With three terabytes of internal storage, each Ingex recorder can cope with the recording schedule of a busy production for several days.
A range of recording formats – uncompressed, DV, JPEG, IMX, VC3, or DVCPro-HD – can be set for a particular production. The Ingex recorder software captures the incoming video and audio feeds and creates MXF (Material Exchange Format) files in real time, simultaneously creating a high resolution media file and a low resolution browse file for each shot. Adding a file server to the system provides safe storage for back-up copies.
In use, rushes can go to edit almost immediately. Multiple streams can be viewed simultaneously or checked individually for quality. The ‘Director’s Cut’ feature records the vision mixer data, which can then be included in the editing process.
The revolutionary Ingex system brings with it enormous savings in terms of time and costs, not least because it removes the need for digitisation, one of the truly tedious stages of production. Moreover, because the system is based mostly on off-the-shelf technology, the cost of the recorder hardware has been reduced dramatically, from around €100,000 to about €10,000.
A simple schematic showing the key elements of the tapeless production system.
Technical Standards For Production
This project was established with the aim of developing technical standards for file-based production workflows. Over several years, we have led industry efforts in the development of the MXF and AAF file formats (Material Exchange Format and Advanced Authoring Format respectively). The main goal of our current work is to build on these standards in the light of user testing and experience.
As the project develops we plan to develop application-specific usage guidelines and research new system and application programming interfaces. We are also working to standardise time reference signals for tapeless working. (The project works closely with the Automated Tapeless Production project in order to validate developing standards in real applications and to generate new requirements for standardisation.)
The principal benefit of our work in this area will be the adoption of internationally accepted standards and working practices for future tapeless TV production. The adoption of these open standards will lead inevitably a reduction in costs by ensuring interoperability between production systems.
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