ATEM TVS a few set up questions

Hi guys,
I have just bought an ATEM TVS and was wondering if someone can tell me how much space in gigabytes does a half hour live shoot take up if recorded a full resolution to an external drive.
Should the external drive be FireWire or is it ok to use a USB 2 drive.

I'll be using two xf305's and a c300 into my ATEM I assume I have to run them interlaced if I want to use 1080?


Sorry for the simple questions but total newbie to this.

Hi guys,
I have just bought an ATEM TVS and was wondering if someone can tell me how much space in gigabytes does a half hour live shoot take up if recorded a full resolution to an external drive.
Should the external drive be FireWire or is it ok to use a USB 2 drive.

I'll be using two xf305's and a c300 into my ATEM I assume I have to run them interlaced if I want to use 1080?


Sorry for the simple questions but total newbie to this.

You can use almost any external drive on your MAC/PC... the encoding to H.264 is done on the TVS using a hardware encoder. The compression options can be adjusted so the storage required will vary. Most any drive attached to your MAC/PC will work as the data rate is not very high compared with say an uncompressed stream. For a 1/2 hour stream... I'm not sure what that will be... but it is pretty modest (not going to be hundreds of GB). You should be able to use any drive you have.

The TVS only supports 1080 resolution in interlaced - so 1080i5994 - so yes you would need to run the cameras interlaced. I typically run all my gear at 720p5994 - as I am usually streaming in that resolution also and it just keeps things simple to have everything in that format rather than scale it down from 1080i and deinterlace.

The H.264 encoder on the TVS maxes at I believe 20Mbps. That's about 150MB per minute, or 4.39GB per 30 minutes.

Thanks much appreciated. It's a bit of a shame you can't do 1080 progressive. I can really only hope that Black magic change that in the future.
Out of interest. what if you are playing video or power point into your TVS from a pc or mac does that have to be at 720 or 1080 p or i as well.
Once again sorry for simplicity of questions

The H.264 encoder on the TVS maxes at I believe 20Mbps. That's about 150MB per minute, or 4.39GB per 30 minutes.

That's about HDV quality isn't it ? So does this mean you could use TVS for some broadcasters? It does say on the box it's broadcast quality but I just wondered which broadcasters would accept it.

...It's a bit of a shame you can't do 1080 progressive.

Well, there is a way.
The h264 encoder is able to send 1080p25 /1080p30. But the Software shipped with the TVS couldn't.
With mxlight, a third party software you're able to do so.

Out of interest. what if you are playing video or power point into your TVS from a pc or mac does that have to be at 720 or 1080 p or i as well.
Once again sorry for simplicity of questions

I'm not 100% sure, but I think all your inputs have to match the outputsettings of your tvs to be recognized.

cheers
sublan

Thanks much appreciated. It's a bit of a shame you can't do 1080 progressive. I can really only hope that Black magic change that in the future.
Out of interest. what if you are playing video or power point into your TVS from a pc or mac does that have to be at 720 or 1080 p or i as well.
Once again sorry for simplicity of questions

All inputs have to be the same, whether 1080i, 720p, or 480i. You would just set your PC or Mac to output whatever the cameras are operating at. We've used Powerpoint from a laptop with 1080i without issue. Though, until the next firmware update, the timings have to be exact (59.94Hz, not 60Hz for interlaced).

Regarding the H.264 output, we use MXLight, in which you can crank up the bitrate to 30Mbps on the TVS output. In our testing, it's broadcast quality, though we still prefer to capture in HD MJPEG, and then encode later to H.264 in Premiere Pro. If we were in a pinch, the H.264 encoder in the TVS would suffice.