External Preview Monitors Required and RS8

[adam kirk]

Hi,

I lecture in Media Production in the UK at Selby College If any one could answer these questions I'd be most grateful.

1) Is the toaster very picky on hardware, were gunna follow the "recommended machine" in the literature on the web to the letter.

2) Do you need separate external monitors to preview all the camera inputs at the same time. If so can you loop the signal through the Sx-8 or do we need to use a signal splitter on each input so that one feed can do into the SX 8 and the other to a camera monitor that the vision mixer can see.

4) We'd like students to be able to perform different roles in the gallery. By using the RS-8 is it possible that while live switching is going on another student could be preparing a graphic in the background by using the keyboard and mouse.

5) Do more SCSI drives allow more DDR to be recording / playing at the same time. Will 4 drives allow more DDRs to be working at the same time.


Thanks,

Adam Kirk

[vanguard]

I'll attempt to answer your questions...

1. It appears that the toaster IS picky about its hardware. I followed the NewTek recomended specs and ours works flawlessly.

2. Yes you do. The Bob does not loop currently, and what we do is put a BNC T on the input and un-terminate that input in the Bob, and it acts as a loop through. This is not the "Best" way to do this, but it saves having a DA on each input... (Which would be a "better" wat to do it)
We also use loop-through monitors where available.

3. This question was skipped.... Perhaps this is why I have had so much trouble with Lucas electrics in my British cars... Perhaps I'm a looney...

4. I cannot speak with any tangable knowledge on this, since I have none with a zero experience with the RS-8

5. I use a Medea RTRX 5/480 RAID array. I can run more DDRs than I could ever use. (simultaneously anyways) The quantity of the drives are not the issue as much as the data throughput. A RAID will protect your data, and give reasonable throughput.

I hope this helps Adam!

[chriscj]

Hi,

we used a bank of Marshal LCD racks and simply pass the signal through these and then into the toaster. For iso cameras or other needs (slow-mo, etc. we run those on DA's.

Yes, for most tasks you can indeed have the RS8 swtiching and someone else doing graphics. There may be one or two issues with this, but there is a key that determins who has priortiy (is it caps-lock?) which would obviously mean that hte person typing captions couldn't use this key.

The VT's drives are RAID 0, which means that the data is split over the drives, not that one DDR is coming from one drive and another from another. Since you're only outputting dual stream, ok theoretically three if you're using a DSK as well, there would never be a need for more than 3 DDRs to be playing at the same time. We did an election broadcast and have probably 5 or 6 DDRs up, but that was for easy of finding the captions and graphics more than anything else.

Take care,
Chris Cooke-Johnson
Creative Junction
Barbados