Broadcast Beat Magazine 2018 NAB Show Edition | Page 60
The Evolution of Digital Video
Workflows and the Importance
of Dedicated Copying Tools
By Dan Montgomery,
President, Imagine Products
It used to be that data lived in analog form on
film and videotapes. When it came to copying
that video from one place to another for editing
or storage, the workflows were much simpler.
Quality loss was an issue, but tackling quality loss
was the biggest challenge; there weren’t nearly as
many formats to contend with as there are today.
That all started to change when people began
shooting and recording in digital formats.
About 10 years ago, when HD cameras became
more affordable, challenges and workflow prob-
lems started accelerating rapidly. Back then,
cameras were still set up to be the ingest point.
People were ingesting into the editing system
from the camera card and transcoding into that
60 • Broadcast Beat Magazine • www.broadcastbeat.com
editing system’s format, and then discarding the
original data (in its native format) to clear the card
for the next shoot. Computer and storage hadn’t
caught up with video production. Computers
couldn’t handle the massive file sizes and the
number of files associated with digitization, and
the hardware kept changing in terms of which
file formats it could accommodate. Case in point:
When Apple switched from AMD to Intel chips,
editors began to have serious difficulty reading
QuickTime files, which caused a lot of problems
for production companies. They could no longer
use their QuickTime files and had no originals to
go back to. That’s when people started to realize
it would be better to keep video from the camera
in its native format and transcode as needed for