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