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Amazon is a household name and now that name is becoming more common in webhosting circles.

Why is this important for ministries who use media? = cheap and reliable web storage.

All of the media that you create needs to get into the hands of those that you are trying to reach. Downloadable video and audio has been littering our hard drive for years now. If you want your message to hit the masses - then you have to make it available to them. One common method is to place your media (audio or video) on your website for download. A subscribed download of your media- is called a podcast. Every time your files are downloaded, someone has to pay for the bandwidth. It’s like cell phone minutes - you think you’ve having fun on the phone - until you get the bill at the end of the month and realize that you used up all of your minutes and the overage charges are killing you.

Amazon’s web services devision has a solution for mass download storage. Amazon’s S3 (simple storage solutions) is not for everyone, but it is providing us (DTS) a very cheap alternative for podcast hosting. For a few years we have been using our streaming provider (Akamia) to host our podcasts. Bandwidth for streaming is not cheap, and as a result - as our podcast has grown in popularity so have our bandwidth charges.

Bandwidth is charged by the amount of data that is transferred. For example, if your MP3 is 10 Megabytes in size, you will be charged for every time it is downloaded. If it is downloaded 100 times then you would be charged for 1000 Megabytes (which is equivalent to 1 Gigabyte).

Our streaming provider charged a flat fee of $1.29 per Gigabyte.

Amazon charges $0.18 per Gigabyte! (once you hit 10 Terabytes it drops to $0.16 - and then to $0.13 at 50 Terabytes)

Now let’s imagine that you have a very popular podcast and consume 1 Terabyte of bandwidth each month. On the old provider it would cost you $1290. On Amazon the same bandwidth would cost you only $180!

Now Amazone S3 is not for everyone. But for raw download, the price is untouchable.

http://aws.amazon.com/

I've been writing quite a bit about storage over the past couple of years going all the way back to this first roll your own raid article to a more recent review of an 8-drive array from Dulce Systems with more general storage articles (check all of the out on www.dv.com).

Currently waiting for publication is a review of the 3Ware Sidecar.

This time I wanted to build an ultimate raid. But just what does an editor need? Well, what I needed was a single workstation unit with lots of capacity, with redundancy and with the speed to handle capture and playback of 10 bit uncompressed HD. 2K capabilities would be a nice bonus but I really only see myself working in 2K just in technology demo rather than production at the moment.

I had built a Raid 1+0 based upon the CalDigit eSata card for my MacPro and a Sonnet card in my PowerMac G5, connecting to a 5 enclosure port-multiplier box I bought from CoolDrives.com.

The CalDigit and Sonnet cards are software based, utilizing port multiplier chips from Silicon Image but with the raid itself configured and managed through the OS (in my case, MacOS X) and SoftRaid, a superb management utility.

I wanted to go the hardware route this time, so I chose to create a solution based upon Highpoint Technology's RocketRaid 3522 card (note-- this is the Mac page, but it works as well with XP and Vista-based PC's) and and the Enhance Technology E8 MS enclosure.

The Highpoint RocketRaid card is hardware based with an onboard Intel IOP 81341 processor with 2 external mini-SAS ports, each capable of supporting 4 drives in Raid 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, 10, 50 and JBOD. It is a PCIe 8x card which works as well in a 4x PCIe slot and includes browser-based raid management. It will work with any enclosure and with SAS or SATA drives.

An added bonus with the Highpoint card is an ethernet port which allows remote access to the card to configure the raid or even initiate rebuilding remotely in the event of failure.

Hardware raid means, in brief, that all processing is performed by the card's processor taking load off the computer's processors. Hardware raid level 5 represents a good compromise between speed, capacity and redundancy. Effectively, parity is spread across all drives and the raid capacity is reduced by the size of one drive. Raid 5 allows for the failure of one drive, while raid 6 allows for two drive failures.

The Enhance E8 MS enclosure allows easy mounting and removal of drives and has two miniSAS connectors. It will accept either SAS or SATA I/II drives.

I have been testing with 8 Seagate 7200.11 1 tb drives as well as with 8 1 tb Samsung F1 drives. Stay tuned for the detailed comparison of these drives but catch a sneak preview below.

Preliminary testing is very favorable with some amazing speeds, 3-4 layers of 10 bit uncompressed HD without rendering and seemless playback of 7 layers of 10 bit uncompressed. This can be attributed not just to the quantity of fast drives but in great measure to the Highpoint card.

One problem so far-- my MacPro (early 2008) dual 3.2 will not recognize the RocketRaid card in Slot 2 (the 16x slot). In fact, it will not recognize any card in Slot 2 other than a 16x video card. I suspect there are some issues with this machine on Apple's end and I look forward to solutions from Apple. I suspect that I will obtain even faster results once the card works in the 16x slot. Hurry up and fix the incompatibility, Apple.

Meanwhile, here are some AJA System Test results for both the Seagate (first graphic) and Samsung drives.





Not bad, eh?

Oh, and the cost to create all of this: About $550 for RocketRaid 3522; $650 for Enhance E8 MS; $250 each for 1 TB Seagate or Samsung drives. Total-- around $3200. Compare that to pre-configured 8 tb turnkey systems costing over $8000.

The upside-- you save money. The downside-- assembly required (but a lot easier than your kid's bicycle), configuration required and no unified support. There remains a great deal to be said for buying a turnkey system from a storage vendor like Dulce Systems, Sonnet or CalDigit (just to name three which I have evaluated recently). Roll your own, though, does have its place in the market.

Stay tuned.. more coming on this site and eventually in print.

In the April, 2008 issue of DV Magazine I reviewed Sony's EX-1 camera.

I love the camera, warts and all, and it is high on my post-NAB purchase list. This is coming, you understand, from an unabashed user of the Panasonic HVX200 and long-GOP skeptic.

But one of the concerns that many users have raised about the EX-1 is its CMOS "rolling shutter" which effectively scans the entire image progressively rather than buffers the image as does a CCD-based device.

This rolling shutter effect can produced partially-exposed frames under certain conditions, primary among them being strobing or flash photography.

I was able to reproduce this in my testing subsequent to the article. I'm shooting at night at the Rockefeller Center ice rink using existing light (those half-inch chips really do well in low light situations). Of course, every parent needs to snap their kid doing multiple axils.

Take a look first at a single frame before the flash.







Now, the next two frames contain the flash.





Can you see the rolling shutter effect? Look at "The Concourse..." You can see that the area is normally exposed in frame 1 and brighter in frame 2. So, the flash effectively "rolled" from the bottom of the frame to the top.

But does it really make any difference in this scenario?

Take a look at a 4 second clip shot 720p24 at 60 fps for a slow-mo effect. The flash occurs about 3 seconds into the clip.




The flash is certainly visible but even when played at full HD resolution the shot still holds together.

I'll keep trying to break the rolling shutter. Stay tuned...

For the past few months I have been looking at Sony’s XDCam Ex (PMW-EX1) I find the camera intriguing because it is the first camera that I have ever seen to include 1/2″ chips at under $10K.
A closer look at the camera reveals a few features that continue to turn heads:

• Solid state memory (ie flash drives) SxS memory cards
• HDSDI output (it does include timecode and audio in the feed - take note Canon)
• Small frame size
• Full raster 1920 x 1080 (no funny math here)
• Switchable 1080i or 720p recording formats with multiple frame recording capability such as 50i, 59.94i, 50p, 59.94p and native 25P, 29.97p and 23.98P
• WOW factor because it is just cool

We saw a demo at the Dallas Final Cut Pro user group about a month ago and I was sold. I’ve been reading about it and asking a few peers that have used it and decided it would be a good fit for a gig I am working on. I have ordered two (for a client ) and will let you know how it turns out.

For more information, check out the details on Sony’s website.

We are requesting a demo unit from a local vendor so we can test it with our AJA IOHD.

I continue to champion the cause of HD for ministry. I cannot recommend anyone by an SD camera unless your budget is less than $200. In that case you shouldn’t be in video production anyway.

So you have something to say and you think the world needs to hear it? Here are the step for posting you podcast online.

1. Create your media. Podcasts are usually audio or video files. They have to be in a particular format (MP3, Mp4, etc…)
2. Find a place to put them. The world can’t download them from your personal computer. You need a place to store them where others can access and download them. Look at a Podcasting host like libsyn.com or switchpod.com
3. Create your Feed. Podcasts are a list of items for download. These lists (RSS feeds) are written in code. But no worries, you don’t have to become a code monkey in order to do this. The podcasting services (listed above) have an easy to use interface. You can upload your media, set name and descriptive information, and they will take care of the rest.
4. Promote your Podcast. Tell the world about it - because you already put in the effort. If you don’t share the love - no one will ever know.

Remember, creating a website without marketing is like tossing one copy of your business card in the Wal Mart parking lot. The likelihood that the right person will pick it up is slim. You need to tell the world about it. Email it to your friends, get it in the search engines - and if it is a podcast - get it posted in itunes.