Re: Field Video Setup -- Newbie Questions

Associated Press has and sells exactly what you need: a laptop with specially configured software that will send thru BGAN, POTS dial-up, wifi or or broadband, whatever is handy. Moreover, you can command the software to choose to compress by time or by quality. As in, "I have to get the entire package fed in less than one hour", then the compression adapts to feed the entire chunk in that set time limit, scaling quality and frame rate as needed.

Or if you want to tell it "time's not important but quality is", it will scale up the quality and lengthen the transmission time.

Most cool of all, while this is all done as an FTP process, in a traditional FTP, if you get interrupted in the last minute of a one-hour send, you have nothing to show on the other end. With AP's system, if you get cut off, the receiving side of the FTP can play everything you sent right up to the point it was cut off... and can resume from that spot onwards if you can re-establish the connection.

Yes, you can cobble soemthing like this together on your own, I'm working on one like tjat myself, but if you can afford it, this AP system is the way to go.