Posted by Rick Merrill on 12/08/06 03:57

Neil Smith [MVP Digital Media] wrote:
> On Tue, 28 Nov 2006 19:40:47 -0500, Jefferis NoSpamme
> <jefferisp7@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi Folks, Got a major question here, if anyone can help, it would be
>> appreciated:
>>
>> Someone called today and wants to convert 20 hours of miniDV footage for the
>> web each month,
>>
>>From what I know of Flash, once you get files of a certain size and length
>> of time, the audio portion no longer syncs. His market will be on both Mac
>> and Windows computers. Mostly the videos are talking head stuff, no fast
>> motions. But I got concerned both with the potential file sizes and server
>> options, since they initially were interested in non-streaming servers.
>
>
> Your concerns are right but for the wrong reasons. On a web server
> delivery, the user can't in general fast forward / rewind, or skip
> backwards without having to download the content in real time.
>
> If you're talking 20 hours of work a month, that should generate
> enough revenue to pay for a streaming media server hardware and
> license (DSS is free on all platforms, WMS comes with windows server
> 2003, Rea/Helix and Flash video servers are serious $$$)
>
>
>> Here are the questions I had and was hoping someone could help me find the
>> right answers:
>> 1. The videos are in 1 hour segments. Compressed for broadband, roughly how
>> large are these miniDV files going to be? 100 megs???
>
>
> It depends : <shrugs> full screen or 320x240 ? </shrugs>
>
>
>> 2. can they be served as downloadable/flash videos, or are they still going
>> to need a streaming server [assuming there are only a max of 10 computers
>> watching at any given time and you are not taxing the non-streaming server].
>
>
> That assumption depends if the video URL is widely distributed, of
> great interest or goes viral. You should speak to your client about
> exactly the audience numbers before your server has a chance to go
> titsup, taking all you websites offline with the load ;-)
>
> And when you've got those estimates, make sure to negotiate additional
> costs per GB of delivery so they know *you* aren't going to pay for
> *their* promotional material's bandwidth - i.e. it's part of the cost
> of hosting.
>
>
>> 3. Does anyone have any idea how long it would take to compress a 1 hour
>> minidv for the web on a fast desktop? I currently use a G5 dual with Cleaner
>> 6.5 but would upgrade to a new computer...
>
>
> It will take ... precisely 1 hour per tape.
>
> Your bottleneck is transfer rather than compression on modern
> machines. AFAIK MiniDV tapes aren't designed to be "read" back faster
> than that, at least not when using a DV cam connected over firewire.
> Perhaps somebody here knows a deck to transfer the video faster than
> realtime.
....

I record to FS4 over firewire at DV25 speeds (25mbps) and the FS4 (hard
drive) can play back at 40mbps - so that's a little bit better than real
time.

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