Decklink Quad requirements

We're looking to upgrade our video recording system at my church and I need to record 3 streams of hd-sdi. I see the decklink quad says it's for developers. Will the included Media Express software not record 4 simultaneous streams? Also what kind of hard drive setup would I need? I would probably be using a mac and recording to proress 4:2:2.

Thanks

[Chris Pearse]

Hi Neil,

Media Express on it's own won't be able to capture three video streams simultaneously, but you can duplicate the application file and launch it three times, and then enable the 'continue playback in background' selection in each version's preferences. This will allow you to capture all three video inputs, but there's no way to sync these together between the applications. If you need everything in sync you would need to either develop an application, or sync everything up after capture.

In terms of disks, you'll need a RAID array of some kind. The ProRes data rate is around 20-30MB/s depending on which flavour of ProRes you use, so you'll need a RAID that can cope with three times this much, plus some headroom because HDD speeds are rarely constant.