I'm curious if anyone has needed to make a live HD feed from out way in the boonies. Like Mali or The Seychelle islands....places where there is no access to a satellite truck.

We're working on a bid that has that capability baked into the contract, but with almost no explanation of how often, when or where it would be needed...so not sure what technology is out there that could work for us.

Thoughts?

Bill, sounds like trouble. Make sure in the contract you sign, you have the option of accepting or not, any remote jobs, live or recorded.

Cheers.

I suppose if I were in your place, trying to figure out how to make a live shot happen from an extremely remote area with no access to a sat truck, I would look into something like this- Flyaway Mobile Satellite Internet Systems - Case Based (http://www.groundcontrol.com/flyaway-mobile.htm)

It offers turnkey satellite internet with plans giving you up to 1Mbps uplink. It should be possible to squeeze a decent looking H.264 stream into 1Mbps.

I would then use something like the H.264 pro recorder from blackmagic Blackmagic Design: H.264 Pro Recorder (http://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/h264prorecorder/) to handle the real time video encoding. Otherwise using a PC to do the video encoding for a live shot you would be introducing a bit of lag. A software package like MXlight would let you stream the H.264 stream from the encoder immediately without having to re-encode.

That should give you a workable solution for making a live shot happen just about anywhere. I'm not sure it is an ideal solution, but without access to a sat truck I'm not sure if any solution would be ideal.

Good luck!

The options available could depend on the quality that client expects. News organisations do live pieces to camera from remote regions using internet type quality, but what is acceptable from a war zone mightn't be so cool in a boardroom.

Adam:

That's an interesting system. Thanks for the link! We're trying to get some clarity on the bid parameters now, so we know exactly what capabilities they are asking for.