Completed 11/2016
Summary
The Ingest-a-Tron 9000 is a (relatively) simple Windows Batch Scripting based tool designed to automate the ingestion, transcoding, and transfer process of images and video from a remote ingestion server to an editing workstation. This frees up resources and time on the editing workstation by offloading, primarily, the transcoding of H.265 video to H.264 onto the ingestion server. The entire process can be triggered remotely from the editing workstation once the camera is connected to the ingestion server and files are automatically copied to the editing workstation once the process is complete.
Almost the entire project is based on Open Source software including FFmpeg and FastCopy. The exception is the use of PsExec, though it can easily be adapted to use PAExec instead.
This project is no longer in use following an update to Adobe Creative Cloud which enabled H.265 support in Adobe Premier.
Detailed Video Explanation
Detailed Text Explanation
For reasons unknown, when Samsung developed the NX500 camera, they decided that the best way to encode the video coming out of their very nice camera would be in H.265 rather than the usual H.264. Which, sure, it’s technically more efficient, but it’s also so non-standard right now that none of the major editing suites supported when it when the camera came out (guess which software versions I have). Same with their format for saving RAW images: SRW. They had to give, with the camera, software to convert both of those formats into usable files. Fantastic.
This project is designed to eliminate the manual drudgery of the ingest process.
Here’s how this works:
- I connect my camera to the ingest server (my workbench computer) via USB.
- I sit at my editing workstation a fire up a local batch file via a shortcut in the start menu.
- That batch file, via PsExec, fires up a batch file on the ingestion server.
- THAT batch file then proceeds to send a message to my editing workstation via the built in Windows “msg” command to let me know that it has started.
- It then uses FastCopy to copy all the images to my editing workstation and all of the videos to a local folder to be transcoded, reporting back to my editing workstation on the start/completion of each step.
- Once all that is done, it starts, one by one, transcoding the videos from H.265 to H.264 using FFMPEG and saves them in another folder where they sit to cool for 10-15 minutes before being copied.
- It then uses FastCopy to copy all the files to my editing workstation.
In my case, all network traffic between my editing workstation and the ingest server happens over a dedicated gigabit network through a single cat5e cable ran from one computer to another. Because large file transfers over Wi-Fi on a local network is for squares and I’m no square, no matter how hip it is to be one.