IanG Posted June 2, 2004 Posted June 2, 2004 I've just had a demo of the new Sony AWS-G500. Quite a neat bit of kit if you're after a video switcher/audio mixer/hard disk recorder/live production tool. It even does web streaming! Might be useful for those of you doing corporate work. I'm not sure whether I'm allowed to mention the price but the suggested figure was comparable to a few PD-150 camcorders.
Techno_Monkey Posted June 2, 2004 Posted June 2, 2004 :P Oooh how nice, I want one!!! Seems like a very neat piece of kit. Do you know when it becomes available to buy?
hdvmonkey Posted April 8, 2005 Posted April 8, 2005 Sony Anycast is great for what it is The Sony Anycast is amazing. We used it to webcast a college symphony live last week and it looked fantastic. We used three cameras and switching between them was effortless and went without a hitch. Yes, it seems expensive for this tiny little piece of equipment. But look at everything they've crammed in there — all in a case not much bigger than a laptop! It's amazing. And we rented ours from Moviola in Hollywood so we were able to try it out before plunking down too much money. The folks at Moviola are really helpful and they demo-ed it for us before we took it out. Bottom line: this science isn't perfect yet, but this system gets us a few steps closer.
Pete McCrea Posted April 8, 2005 Posted April 8, 2005 Well with a list of $19500 I think it'll be a while before it makes a regular appreance in my hire stock. Nice idea though. Edit:Now having looked at the specs, with Firewire video in, and a host of other things I need one. I'd be intrigued to see how quick it reboots when it crashes........ I can see it replacing a whole host of boxes I currently use. And once you total up the cost of scalers, switchers, vision mixers PC's etc It must come close to being a sensoble cost.
paulears Posted June 28, 2005 Posted June 28, 2005 I'm buying one for a project coming up - I'll let you know what happens
Pete McCrea Posted June 30, 2005 Posted June 30, 2005 Be interested to see what you reckon to it. Post back!
Englishpete Posted September 12, 2005 Posted September 12, 2005 Can any one recomend places that will hire this kit in the UK? I am based in the midlands.Cheers
paulears Posted September 12, 2005 Posted September 12, 2005 If anyone is going to Plasa tomorrow - there is one on total audios stand upstairs. As soon as I get mine, I'll report back. I need a slightly different input card configuration so am hanging on for the SDI interface that is just about to arrive.
Sim Posted September 12, 2005 Posted September 12, 2005 Wow, wish I could afford this, would do me dreams.
paulears Posted February 13, 2006 Posted February 13, 2006 I just thought I'd post to this old thread to say what a total pile of poo the anycast is. Things in the manual it still can't do despite 2 software upgrades - the things I wanted are coming soon, Sony say. The support for external HDDs is pathetic and now with the new upgrade, it keeps forgetting the drive is attached, and after a few minutes, unmounts it. It can't remount without rebooting - no hot swap possible. Access to the caption designer can't be done without rebooting either, so no live changes possible. Quality of image is great, though. Connecting a camera via dv firewire input also on has provision for the embedded audio, you can't use the audio input of that channel, so have to waste a line input! I would strongly advise anybody considering one to try one first - like me, you may hate it. Oh yes, chromakey as shown in version 1 and 2 of the manual still doesn't exist - it gets greyed out!
vampire Posted March 8, 2006 Posted March 8, 2006 ok, got one today, hope it won't be a disappointment, too much money involved, ** laughs out loud **...
paulears Posted March 8, 2006 Posted March 8, 2006 ok, got one today, hope it won't be a disappointment, too much money involved, ** laughs out loud **... I'm in the middle of a low key battle with Sony - they can't solve some problems and have sent them on to Japan. It is a great piece of kit - but you need to know a few things. Check what software it has installed - the latest version is on the web site. It is critical before you try and use it with external drives that you have the latest version. the file format is different and there is no way to recover old files if you start on the old one. You will be able to record on an external firewire drive two streams from the input cards. so cam 1 and 2 can be streamed straight to the drive. you can then replay them using the transport controls. The drive, after being formatted by the anycast to ext3 Linux can be read by a pc or mac if you download an ext2/3 driver. You can then load these files into an editor and you are away. What you must not do, in any shape or form is attempt to put them back onto the anycast drive - there are two folders, one for the files and one of what I'm guessing is housekeeping data. Even if you rename them, if they are different sizes the damn thing locks up AND in my casemade the entire drive unreadable. All attempts to reformat it failed after the first time - so I messed up, changed the file sizes and then anycast refused to see the drive. Re-formatting it on the pc, then doing a linux format on the anycast made it work again, but the second time I messed up it rendered the drive totally unusable. windows report a corrupt file format and won't format it. Partition magic also fails as does one other bit of non-MS formatting software. Chroma key is still not featured - that is coming sometime this yearpicture in picture does work fine.web streaming has been upgraded, but I'm not sure of the exact difference is - it worked and still does. The captioning programme still requires the software to be shut down, so spelling the MD's name wrong can't be put right while the show is on - as I found out. You are much better to do captions on a pc and then use one of the pc inputs to get it on screen. Oh yes - the audio on the input doesn't get fed to the hardrive unless you do some mixing which is a bit odd. The worst thing is the total apathy that I'm getting from the dealer and Sony themselves. They actually admitted that here in the UK they hadn't even tried the external drive features, but Japan had. So far, it has been over 3 weeks and still no contact with a solution. Perhaps we can share things if we find them out.paul
madski1Zz Posted April 4, 2006 Posted April 4, 2006 Hi there, I'm new to the forum, but I wanted to just say anyone in the US with technical questions or sales questions about the sony anycast to please feel free to call me here in Houston. I have a guy here, David, in the office that just got trained from Sony itself on the product. 713-339-4600 Thanks a bunch, and hopefully we can all see what we can get out of the Anycast. Adios for now!
sir_ragu Posted April 28, 2006 Posted April 28, 2006 What version of the software are you on? Can you recommend ext2/3 driver/software for PC.
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