The Alpha Studio is digital's alpha-based video system. It supports a fast disk system that can hold several terabytes of data, and has software for storing, playing and editing video files in several formats. The goal is a totally computer-controlled video studio,

My part in the project is to investigate the techniques and implement software for moving the video data around on the network. This isn't completely trivial, because mutli-gigabyte files are involved, and conventional tools such as ftp typically take a very long time to do the job, and can seriously interfere with other network applications.

Another problem is that, in order to get efficient playback, much of the file system is stored in a special format that was developed for video applications. The file system isn't Unix-like (or DOS-like), and so most existing tools can't access the files directly.

More to come ...