EMFBC

Or how to jump the gun by 6 months, and not check for permission first

Eh What will we aim to provide?

Well, A few of us at London Hackspace have been thinking about how we could make the video side of things better. Much better. We theorize, with past examples in Student TV and Real world TV, that we can reasonably expect to provide:

HD Live streams for two stages with live graphics on the streams (i.e. Jonty - Beeeeeeees). Overflow capacity (i.e. "Ahh, stage A is full, can we get the pictures & sound to stage B?"). All talks, Q&A sessions available on demand within 2 hours of their finish. Overnight continuity service from our edited talks, and external content from licensed partners (more to follow on this later!). A Cheesy closedown clock, a la BBC style 1am goodnight, hacking forecast, and national anthem (then followed by EMF continuity service).

Too soon?

No. Everything will take a lot of planning and work... But we know what we're up-to: We have Broadcast Engineers and Network/Sysadmins.

Can I bikeshed this?

Not quite yet. Bikeshedding will be available later on, for things like controller design, software for automation, gfx control...
Chat with us, we'll usually be talking about making TV.
Yes, if your question is along the lines of "I clean up messy wikis, can I namespace this to my heart's content?"

Topology

Connectivity

EMF will likely have 2 or 3 stages, each probably 100 meters or more apart. MCC wil need to be close to either one of (or the middle one of) the stages: we'll use less cable.
This means we need quite a bit of VIDEO cable:
- Datarate is 1.486Gbps
- Any encoder introduces very bad latencies. And Will clog the network very quickly. Generally not broadcast-reliable either :(
- Fiber may be cheaper
  - Russ has a pile of fiber, will there be any spare we could borrow (lc-lc, multimode).
And networking:
- EMF-NOC will be nearby, short enough for conventional Cat5e/6.

Master control caravan (MCC)

From where we'll run the operation. We need a caravan, to be purchased/acquired at roughly T minus 8 months. Approx 4 berth size please. Budget £300 (Hipster knows an outlet of cheap caravans).

The broom Cupboard

A Camera, a set of lights, and 3 mics outside the caravan - good for interviews really. Possible collaboration with radio people?

MCR / Edit / Playout / Storage Network

We're going to get through quite a bit of data over the weekend. Something of the order of around 2 Terabytes. This will be from the captures of the stages, pre-existing content for playout, the edit process, and the final copies (also for playout).

To keep costs down, this can all be on:

One machine with a decent RAID array. It'll be getting quite hammered, have playout and edit running at the same time. - We'll need something along the lines of RAID10. Basically, redundant, and quick...
We'll also need an edit machine. Just about Anything quad(or more please!)-core with above 6GB of RAM will do the job. This'll be a dual screen thing, to make it easier.
An encode machine to compile the edits from the project files will take time. Offloading this onto a machine with as much grunt as possible, will make sure we can keep up with the events on site (a quad core phenom II 9650 will work at 4x slower than realtime, so we really need something nippy to keep up with 2 stages that run for ~ half time on average!)
One playout machine for each stage : each one will produce a key (opacity, or alpha) and a fill (visible video) to the video mixer. This will allow it to provide graphics, and handle the continuity service. With 2 decklink HD extreme 3d (or similar) units (not decklink duo!) we could consolidate these machines into just one machine. This might be a little hairy though.
Control PC(s). These will handle connection to the remote mixer(s) from our control panels in MCR, the automation / continuity. They don't need much grunt at all, but will need a few serial ports.