In the current pandemic live streaming is becoming a much more influential communication medium. Organisations of all sizes – both large and small – need the ability to communicate efficiently and effectively. While Telestream works with most of the major broadcasters worldwide, developing enterprise-scale live production and streaming workflows, there is also a need to provide these sophisticated workflows to smaller scale users.
So, last month, we introduced a new two-channel version of our Lightspeed Live Capture system that offers a fully featured dual channel ingest solution that is ideal for workflows such as news and professional sports, which rely on remote production and editing capabilities.
Although it is the little brother of the Lightspeed Live family, Lightspeed Live Capture C2 reflects the media processing and workflow automation capabilities found in other Telestream systems. With this development, the workflows for ingest and media processing that are used for large scale events are now viable for the smaller and less complex instances.
The introduction of Capture C2 marks a strategic milepost in Telestream’s evolution of live video streaming enabling technology. It is important to understand why making this sophisticated live capture toolkit available to a large and diverse audience of users that are crying out for this technology is so important to the market.
A good starting point is to see where Capture C2 fits into the big picture at Telestream. Looking back over the development of the Lightspeed Live family, how important is this product group within the big story at Telestream?
As an ingest system, Lightspeed Live Capture is a critical part of the media supply chain for a multitude of workflows. Lightspeed live capture is a scalable multi-channel, on-premise capture solution for ingesting live, live linear or tape-based media directly into production, post production and broadcast workflows. Lightspeed Live Capture is often the front end ingest system for sophisticated orchestration workflows running on the Vantage Media Processing Platform.
Next, we need to look at the key market drivers which propel the dynamics of this product group. A key market driver for the deployment of Lightspeed Live Capture is the need for remote production, Edit @Home, capabilities. Having the ability to capture media on site and make it available for remote production workflows within a matter of seconds has become critically important to many. It means companies do not need to send massive crews and a lot of equipment to the production site. They can save the travel and shipping expenses by doing most of the work at their home base.
This is precisely what Fox Sports did for the FIFA World Cups. With the introduction of the 2-channel, model to the Lightspeed Live Capture family, these remote production workflows (i.e. Edit @Home) are now available for projects big and small.
Another key market driver is the need to capture and simultaneously create professional grade files, ready for editing, as well as proxy files. This saves a tremendous amount of time and money, reduces the crew size, and accelerates the delivery of footage for edit and archive. An example where this capability has high value is that some customers are faced with a situation where power is shut down only 10 minutes after their event. Being able to simultaneously record mezzanine video onto local storage and onto an external storage system in a variety of formats is a key functionality for this situation. It means when the event has ended, all of the necessary files have been created and stored in the right places. There’s no homework to be done, copying files, for hours and hours after the event.
Global events are not the only productions that can benefit from Edit @Home. Clearly, regional entertainment and sporting events, smaller sports productions and regional news shows – which have all of the same production requirements as the high-visibility global events – can also obtain significant benefit from this technology. However, these benefits are only within reach when the capture system is specifically designed for smaller productions when compared to FIFA World Cups and the Olympics. But the smaller capture system must still have the high-end capabilities required for professional productions regardless of size.
With Lightspeed Live Capture C2, the high-end capabilities in the Telestream Lightspeed Live Capture family is available in a two-channel version.
One of the major benefits of C2 is to capture to many types of storage, multiple at the same time. In addition to writing files to the build in 3TB of storage, C2 can at the same time write a copy to USB drives, NAS drives or cloud based object storage. Writing to the internal storage guarantees real-time performance and using “open copy” technology allows for the creation of copies as fast as the infrastructure allows.
Vantage integration for C2 raises the bar to new levels
With the development of C2, one of the key strategic decisions was to integrate Vantage. C2 is a purpose-built, two-channel capture server. It is an ideal solution for news, live events including remote production and editing, and for tape archive through Log and Capture. The system is able to meet the requirements outlined previously, and there is an option to include a version of Vantage transcoding. When used in a stand-alone application, without attachment to other Vantage systems, Lightspeed Live Capture C2 can be an all-in-one ingest and transcoding solution.
Supporting all major HD codecs, the C2 server provides powerful production tools, such as simultaneous edit-while-capture, transcode-while-capture and deliver-while-capture. Telestream’s Lightspeed Live Capture is the only capture portfolio that supports all the common formats, HDR, VTR digitising, remote production, IP input and delivery to Avid systems, without hardware changes and without compromising capacity. Without boasting, no one else is able to offer this powerful combination of professional-grade capabilities in any capture/ingest system – let alone on a two-channel server.
To put it in a nutshell, the introduction of Lightspeed Live Capture C2 means that capabilities that were typically reserved for the largest, most expensive productions are now available to projects large and small.
C2 is just one element of a far-reaching development initiative at Telestream. We will continue to enhance the Lightspeed Live Capture family of servers, so watch this space!
