dhicks

I've spotted this on Amazon: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pyle-Pro-Wireless-Microphone-Lavalier-Headsets/dp/B005BSOW82 An 8-headset system operating between 174.8 MHz and 215.5 MHz - is that Band III? Would anyone know if that's legal to use in the UK? Page 60 of OFCOM's document here: http://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/binaries/spectrum/spectrum-policy-area/spectrum-management/research-guidelines-tech-info/interface-requirements/IR_2030.pdf seems to imply that you can use 173.7 MHz to 175.1 MHz, but not the whole stretch up to 215MHz.

Just came accross this thread while looking for something else. We seemed to have done okay in the run up to end-of-year, with half a dozen or so productions filmed with a random assortment of cameras (a couple of Panasonic camcorders, my Panasonic superzoom, a Sony camcorder left behind by a child and a Nikon DSLR). Each event was generally at least an hour's worth of footage, shot from at least two different angles - one or two fixed camcorders on a tripod, one hand-held. I've not had any trouble sycing the footage and sound up afterwards - everything seems to match up very nicly. I guess it's the sort of thing where the audio being a few millseconds out wouldn't really be obvious anyway, so maybe any timing drift is there but simply not significant enough to show. Also, I'm using Adobe Premier's sync-track-by-audio feature to sync tracks in the editing timeline. I don't know if it syncs at multiple points and keeps the two tracks in time - if so, it's working well.

I don't know enough about sound egineering to definatly recommend something, but I've noticed with our microphones that having them connected up to a different mixer / amplifier seems to make a difference. Would maybe adding a microphone pre-amp of some kind help? @Andrew_C might be able to give better advice than me, but just adding a small 4-channel mic mixer (£20 from Amazon, see http://www.amazon.co.uk/G105AA-Soundlab-Channel-Microphone-Mixer/dp/B0048FD0DW/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1437661999&sr=8-3&keywords=mic+amp) seemed to make our microphone more able to pick up sound.

Just to update this thread: 2 years on, and we have 2 of the Chord 4-way systems, one with handheld mics and one with headsets, that have worked very well for everything we've (sometimes literally) thrown them at. They are good, robust bits of kit, well worth the £250-odd each we spent on them. I see a 6-way version is now available: https://www.studiospares.com/Microphones/Mics-Wireless/Chord-Hu6-UHF-Combo-6-Way-CH70-System_476630.htm £400, not bad, and seem to be available in handheld / headset / combination sets. Has anyone used one of these 6-way units - are they as good as the 4-way units?

I think in your situation it sounds like you need some kind of fiber-based ring network. Each of your locations becomes a node on the ring. For an ISP, I think you pretty much have switch cabinets at regular intervals which allow you to start new copper or fiber lines off to location, but you're right in that you'd need to power each cabinet.

It could, of course, be that the original poster has an existing set of installed cameras they want to carry on using. 100 cameras is at least £10,000 worth of hardware, probably more, plus installation cost - it would probably take someone the whole summer to replace that lot, and if you're replacing existing analouge CCTV cabling with network cabling you might need a certified engineer to work on the networking. I can see how spending £5,000 on a beefy server might be a cheaper option, and maybe upgrade to IP cameras section by section in the future.

Just checked - our QNAP server (an 8-drive TS-809U model, at least 3 years old, around £1,000 when new without disks) is receiving between 2 MB/s and 4 MB/s of data. Easily handled by an array of 8 2TB WD20EARS: Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB Review (WD20EARS) | StorageReview.com - Storage Reviews

If it's any help, we're using Ubiquiti's Unifi Video as a central server and around a dozen of their PoE Unifi cameras. The software was free, the cameras were around £100 each (we already had PoE capable switches, and had planned ahead and put network points where we needed them ready for CCTV cameras, so installation was easy - you might have some more network cabling to install). Their software is running on a small Linux VM (1 virtual processor, 4GB of RAM) and is currently showing using about 10% of processor time - as discussed above, the cameras themselves encode to h.264 (720p resolution), reducing workload on the server. For storage, a dozen cameras seems to be using around 0.5TB of storage per week - times by 10 to get your number of cameras is 5TB, times by 5 for 5 weeks, and I'd say your estimate of 30TB is about right. We're using a QNAP NAS device for the actual storage, connected to the Linux VM running Ubiquiti's software via iSCSI. This was simply to use up an available device rather than by choice - a server with local storage makes sense. I'd go for RAID 6, though - larger disks have greater chance of failing when doing an array reconstruction. We're using 2TB WD Caviar Green drives, which so far have proven to be reliable and to have decent performance. Your main performance metric is probably going ot be the write capability of your RAID array - no amount of cache is really going to improve that, you'll be writing a fair bit of data to the array every hour, you simply need enough / fast enough disks to keep up. We've found the Caviar Greens to be okay for a dozen cameras, admittedly you might need to check the write performance before you scale that up by an order of magnitude.

Hmm - we're still on 6.2, we've seen a few random reboots (mostly of our Windows Domain Controllers), but we thought we'd traced that to a Windows Update issue. Is that a more likely explanation - Windows itself having an issue rather than the underlying virtualisation system? Does XenServer's performance logs indicate anything - a sudden burst of processing or network activity?

"Crash" in what way - do they suddenly reboot with no warning, or simply freeze up and not respond? What version of XenServer are you running - 6.2? Does it have the latest patches? Are XenServer Tools installed on the Windows VMs?

Do you mean an historical set of emails of some kind - either emails sent to a particular person or about a particular subject from the last, say, 5 years? Or emails sent from now on? If the latter, you could set up a mail forwarding rule in Exchange to send your emails to whatever destination you liked. If the former, you need to find some way of getting Exchange to list emails and export individual ones for you. Or are you simply wanting to do something with all emails in your Exchange server for some reason?

We currently have 12TB of local storage for our main file areas. We don't set any storage limit for pupils or staff, and yearly growth so far has been under 1TB, currently up to around 3.5TB of space used. The plan is to get our local storage mirrored to Google Drive to give us another option for editing and to provide a backup / diaster recovery option.

I read this thread last night, so I was handily able to time myself this morning. 15 minutes, which seems to be bang on the (male) average. Recently, I've found I do all my best thinking on the toilet - it might simply be because it's the place with the least distractions, you can just sit and think.

We're about to install some of those, too (3 x 55" models, 1 x 65"). They take OPS (Open Pluggable Specification) PC modules (slot-in PCs that fit in a slot on the side of the screen) - it's actually a standard, you can buy a suitible PC from various manufacturers, so there is actually some competition in the market, although they are still a bit more expensive than an equivilant desktop PC with the same specification. We're buying ours from Millgate, if that's any help.

Then the solution that jinnantonnixx suggest should be fine - one VM that every pupil can log in to with their standard AD credentials. If you do require separate environments for each user, then possibly a Linux machine hosting multiple containers might be a solution - set up a separate container for each user.

In the case of software, you don't need to purchase it - instead of employing people in each school to figure out which packages to buy, employ those people to write software to contribute to an open source project instead.

School Manager - it's Filemaker-based and doesn't seem to have a large install base, so support by third-party tools tends to be poor. I'll PM rpwillis to ask for further details.

Is that synchonising data from SIMS? We don't use SIMS, but we can probably get our MIS to export a CSV file on an hourly / daily basis, could your system automatically sync data to Google Classroom from there?

Backblaze are the people to check out - they build large-capacity file servers to run their storage business: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/petabytes-on-a-budget-how-to-build-cheap-cloud-storage/ They sell the chasis, you can build your own 45-disk 4U server, or they might do a 2.5" version now. At home, I've tried out some of their ideas at a slightly smaller scale. To plug lots and lots of harddrives in to one motherboard you can use SATA expander cards. You need to have a SATA controller on the motherboard (or, more likely, on an expansion card) that supports SATA expension - I use an ASMmedia ASM1062 SATA card in my server and five-way SATA expansion cards from Amazon. I have the harddrives sat in 5-slot "test" frames - I think I got them from Startech, but I can't seem to find the link now. If you're going to use a setup as above to test out how to create a large, distributed file system (such as with Ceph or similar) then it should work well. It might well work okay in production, too, but there are probably more efficient ways to build a multi-disk array these days. However, as a production server, something like the above attached to a multi-core processor and split up in to multiple virtual machines would work well - assign each virtual machine its own dedicated harddrive and you have the equivilant of something various companies are charging good money for (£50 - £100 per month), times however many harddrives you have attached. Edit: Just to add - if your school (or anyone) does any amount of media / video editing work, you could do worse than assign and label two harddrives per project and copy the data files over to them for storage / backups.

Air-conditioning in the server cupboard set to 18C, but I've just realised I don't have any temperature monitor set up. Temperature certainly seems okay, though - probably not 18C, but CPUs are reporting around 46C and all seems okay. Many thanks, by the way, to All Four Seasons airconditioning - they checked with us around Easter that all was okay and came out to do a 6-monthly service to make sure we were all set up for the summer. I've just had a mild panic as I remembered the large UPS we have sitting in the basement, currently powering the server cupboard and half a dozen workstations around the school. Fortunatly, all seems okay down there, too. Some of the floorspace in the server cupboard is being taken up by some bottles of wine from a couple of parents. It really would be better to have them out of the way, and we've got spare space in the rack, so I might get a 19" rack-mount wine cooler...

We've had an on-site Lightspeed Rocket device for the poast three years. Filtering performance is good, it seems to block most things you would expect and leave most sites you would want unblocked. You don't have to set the device up as your gateway, it actually filters traffic as it passes through, completly transparently. Forign language sites tend to be poorly catagorised, though, and the process of unblocking a site can be a bit fiddly. Support from Lightspeed has been excellent - they have proper, knowlagable people you can talk to and we've just had an email off them saying that their remote monitor has spotted a potential future issue with our hardware's RAID controller's battery, so they're sending us a new one. That's how support should work - the part turns up before you even know you needed it. It is a bit pricy compared with some other options, although comparable in price to Bloxx and Smoothwall.

Goodness, I didn't know that. I assume you upload a file, wait a minute or so, then a Google Doc file appears somewhere? Edit: Sorry, didn't realise there was a second page of replies - just read the rest, makes sense now. Very handy feature!

It's worth persevering with Premiere, especially if you have a Creative Cloud subscription and get the latest upgrades. Premier seems to be heading down the route of automating common tasks - the more I use it, the more I get used to the way it works and find I don't actually have to do very much to get a decent video.

We bought a bunch of cameras a year or so ago for classroom use, so teachers would always have a camera ready to hand to take pictures of work or children doing something interesting (we're a primary school, a lot of pupil record-keeping and assesement tends to be pictorial rather than written work). We had similar requirements to yours above, although we also went for wireless connectivity, which we've found very useful - the teacher takes a picture, the image transfers in a couple of seconds to a folder on the network, there's no swapping of SD cards or plugging in of cables needed. We used EyeFi SD cards for the wireless functionality. Looking again at the start of this year for another set of cameras (the rest of the teachers want one now), I found the Fujifilm FinePix XP70. It's a waterproof camera with built-in WiFi. We didn't get round to buying any yet this year, we'll probably be looking ot buy some this summer. I don't know if Fujifilm have a new model out for this year, they might as that cameras seems to have been their 20145 model.

Right, so you have a Javascript engine written to run as a Java application, is that right? The whole point of Java is that it's meant to be a cross-platform VM - you should be able to limit the access the JVM has to the local machine and/or network resources.