So a friend came to me today looking for some advice. The company he works for runs seminars that they make into DVD's and sell to the attendees. The company has a multi-cam setup but hires out another company to actually author the DVD's. They've since decided to bring it all in-house. He's looking for a way to bring the raw stream from the switcher, record it, then burn it to a DVD and Blu-ray.

My solution for this was to run an out from the switcher to a Ki Pro, then afterwards, drop the file onto the computer, convert it to the appropriate format and burn a dvd. They already have replicators so it's an easy thing after that. My only concern is time, as far as converting the files. The seminars are usually about one hour to one and a half hours long, so how long would it take to create the appropriate mpeg-2 files? It's a 3-day event so it doesn't have to be ready directly afterwards, but a quick turnaround would be appreciated.

If you have a computer that can do realtime capture with a Blackmagic card to
cineform, you can get the cinemacraft mpeg-2 encoder up to about 3x or 4x realtime
since cineform is so fast to decode. 30 minutes for encoding there.

The speed of DVD authoring is limited by disk access so put the temp folder for
authoring on a fast disk and you might get that down to four minutes or so. You
need another six minutes to burn a master disk. If your duplication tower can take
an iso across the network then maybe a minute to transfer the iso to the tower.