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Building The Broadcast Box
Mortin writes "The folks at Icrontic have a neat article up titled "The Broadcast Box." They unleashed a room full of designers to build an affordable system, and this 24-page article shows what they came up with, along with benchmarks, design specs, and cost analysis."
Is the BB going to have DRM built in? Because if the RIAA and MPAA decide to use the DMCA, these guys might be SOL. YMMV, but IMHO these guys are basically FUBARed.
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It worked for me, here is the text of the article.
Introduction
The power to create. Creative souls toil away inside the walls of the design department or I the dark confines of an edit suite in a television station. As the production manager I often see the graphic designers leaning back in their chairs staring at their monitors. When questioned I usually get the response..."rendering". I'm often told there's a need for a second or third computer so they can do other work while one system is busy rendering. In the broadcast environment rendering usually means 1-4 hour waits for finished elements. If waiting for one system to finish a piece for use in commercial or promotion it can be hell when there are deadlines to meet. Time is money. Waiting is frustration. Hardware should not dictate creativity.
People often assume that I work with immensely powerful computing power in the television production world. Sometimes I do and those computers can come with price tags that the computer itself couldn't work out. Professional 2D/3D workstations are thought of as expensive and in today's market of shrinking profit margins the saying that you have to spend money to make money takes a back seat come capital request time.
So we here at Icrontic set out to build a bigger, better, badder workstation on a home PC budget.
The question of "what is the best" is not easily answered. Determining what is the best for your needs and expectations is a matter of knowing what your demands are and learning how to fulfill them. What is expected from the PC workstation? Do you want fast renders? Do you want to easily manipulate complex 3D scenes or drawings? Do you need the fastest processor, biggest video card, the most RAM or the fastest hard drives?
Can you do more for less?
That's what every manager wants to hear especially when assembling the yearly departmental budget. I'm in a unique position in my professional life and it allows a look at this problem from many sides; financial, user and builder. I wear one hat as the department manager. I wear a second hat as an active writer/producer/director who works daily with the department on television commercial projects. I wear a third hat as PR manager and a hardware reviewer for Icrontic. It means that I have no one to complain to but myself when it comes to the equipment not being fast enough. It also leaves me frustrated that the IT people dictate that I have to buy overpriced workstations when I know I can build two or even three systems for the same price.
So I unleashed a room full of designers on an affordable system we put together. (The image reminded me of a commercial, now a decade or three old, that features a gorilla doing his best to destroy a piece of luggage.) The designers are rooted in the MAC world and if a PC is required it has to be the hugely expensive and well-known order off the web workstations. (I'm not going to point fingers) Even the art director's personal home system is a three to four thousand USD dual 1.7 GHz Xeon workstation with an nVidia Quadro card.
Did we do it?
Simple answer? There isn't one. What looks good on paper may not perform well in reality. Benchmarks give some information but not the complete experience. More isn't necessarily better.
The best is a matter of debate but the smart consumer knows a lot about what they expect, a little about how it may work together and enough to choose the right combination of hardware. The following pages are just that; a guide to determine your expectations, answers to how it all works and a little bit of knowledge to make the right choices. Armed with this information you can more easily navigate the world of what's best for you through the ever-changing landscape of computer technology.
Well, in spite of being inable to read the site, I hope the box is a nice one for a reasonable price.
We have been at the point where a desktop computer could create broadcast-quality video for some time, but a box capable of streaming live broadcast quality would be nice.
Apple has some bits about CNN dot com doing on-location work on a PowerBook G3, and a recent story about a guy proposing using a movie made in iMovie in a theatre. I imagine the Broadcast Box is probably not a Macintosh, but a dual 1 GHz G4 would probably do quite well also.
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As a professional editor, I've seen the industry's focus shift radically over the past ten years. When I got out of college, broadcast and post houses all wanted the same thing: single-use boxes with live output for on-air or linear editing. However, as uncompressed non-linear editing made disk-based editing an online option, the needs of broadcast and post diverged. Or did they?
I train compositors on occasion at TV stations and I'm constantly surprised how many render-heavy tools they use in spite of the time constraints. It seems they want [need] the same capabilities and tool sets a post house might need, but with the ability to make quick changes and themed templates.
Today, people ask for [demand actully] collaborative tools. Even one-man-band outfits are becomming frustrated with turnkey systems with proprietary file formats and incompatible toolsets.
Manifesto: Editors demand open systems with portable project files, open media formats.
I work on an sgi Octane right now, but once we go HD, we're looking at something as simple and cheap as a beefy Final Cut Pro system. Right now we have an Avid offline and a Jaleo online which takl to each other with 1970's era EDLs. Even all-Avid facilities don't yet have the kind of transperancy and portability that we really need.
With a low powered FCP offline and a more powerful setup in the other room, you can swap whole projects back and forth [theoretically] with no information loss.
Of course, we'll just hack the splash screen in ResEdit so our high-fallutin' clients don't notice the drop in prestige...