The installation for Tier Tech was designed and pre-built at the root6 SI facility in Primrose Hill and comprises two ContentAgent transcoding workstations, a CATDV asset management system and archiving management to LTO data tape from XenData.

“The source material is on a huge variety of tape formats,” said root6 Workflow Engineer David Skeggs, “Everything from VHS to Beta SP. ContentAgent will be used for automated capture from tape and transcoding to MXF. The CATDV system logs the material creating a searchable database with proxies for viewing while XenData takes care of archiving the hi-res material on LTO drives.”

The selection of ContentAgent for the task was primarily due to its ability to capture and digitise from tape and transcode in real time, a process that is easily set up using the Workflow Designer tool for infinitely repeatable use by non-technical operators.

Because parts of the core closer to the fibre axis have a higher refractive index than the parts near the cladding, light rays follow sinusoidal paths down the fibre. The advantage of the graded-index fibre compared to multimode step-index fibre is the considerable decrease in modal dispersion.

The most common refractive index profile for a graded-index fibre is very nearly parabolic. The parabolic profile results in continual refocusing of the rays in the core, and minimizes modal dispersion.

This type of fibre is normalized by the International Telecommunications Union ITU-T at recommendation G.651.1

How far can the camera control signals from any smaller Sony camera go? If you talk to Mr Sony it’s around 50m (the longest cable they sell) – but as the pictures (below) suggest it’s at least the length of a box of cat5e cable! The CCA5 cable they sell is north of £500 so I recommend you hot-foot it over to RS, the Hirose ends are part numbers 685-1166 and 685-1163 for the lady and the gentleman and by consulting my scrappy wiring notes (above) you can brew your own for a tiny fraction of the cost. You can also adapt the cable to send down existing structured cable routes (cat5e / cat6 / cat7).

The title-link is to the F23′s maintenance manual; that SR field-recorder has every Sony standard interface on it and so you can find the pinouts for whatever you might be using on your EX3 for example.

Rather splendidly the DC supply that runs back from the camera to the remote is the unregulated feed and so even if you loose a few volts down your home-brewed cable the regulator in the RM-B150 won’t care; if you want to you can even power that device locally and not worry about volts coming back from the camera.

• Much improved four-tile monitoring with four inputs that can be configured as 4 x SDi (270M, 1.48G, or 3G – yes!) or 2 x dual-link. With four discrete inputs you can display all four at once.
• An SDi o/p that can be any of the inputs OR a test output with bars or pathological signal.
• Audio loudness – and up to 16 channels via embedded groups
• Full Java control (the 5000 lacked this)

So I think this is excellent – the only thing missing is physical layer measurements. Some of the better features are paid-for upgrades (license key) but at £4.5k this represents superb value.

I shall write more when I’ve had one in to evaluate.

• In a TFT layer the polarisation of light is twisted through 90 degrees to allow the pixel to be illuminated by the virtue of the fact that the front filter is 90 degrees offset from the rear. In effect the transistor stops the light from the fluorescent (or nowadays LED) source. Since the light source is a few millimeters behind the pixel there are chromatic distortions inherent and since thin-film transistors don’t shut-off all the light when turned off there are black-level issues. These are the two best known problems with LCD monitors in film & TV grading.
• Thin-film transistors have a limit to how quickly they can be cycled – typ. 16ms at best (I know some manufacturers claim faster but it’s smoke & mirrors). OLEDs can be cycled a lot quicker for better response.
• In a TFT display the place where the colour is made (the three sub-pixel RGB transistors) is physically separate from the light source – not so with OLEDs where the illuminating LED is also the colour-maker.

So – with deeper blacks and fewer chromatic problems you’d think OLEDs were the way forward. The only thing to consider is the life-span. The blue OLED elements have an estimated life of 10k hours (around a third of the backlight of an LCD). Also – the metameristic character of OLEDs is different and so colour-management tools will need to be upgraded (I just spent £7k on a new LCD photometer!).
I thought out of the box the pictures on the BVM were very good – close to the VuTrix I’d just calibrated to illuminant-D (6504K at 80Cd/m2 for peak white). Response seemed as good with much better blacks, particularly from different angles. The monitor’s de-interlacer didn’t seem as good as I’d have expected for video-shot material but camera pans etc looked better than the VuTrix.

Newtek – updates to TriCaster, new model & control panel. The new 450 is very similar to the 850 but has only four HD inputs (against eight). The other things that I think are significant;

• 3Play – their “poor man’s EVS” has been improved. Running on what looks like a Tricaster 850 chassis it now has eight inputs and can run two outputs simultaneously. For sports slow-mo it is an excellent quick turn-around solution at the fraction of the cost of EVS.
• VTR-style control for the DDRs in Tricaster; might suite some people.
• Tricaster Extreme upgrade – allows for eight ISO records (can be either cameras or other internal/external sources, at different rasters and codecs than the main record).
• They fixed the AUX audio in embedded HD-SDi I’d been moaning about!
• The network sources (iVGA feeds) can now carry audio as well.

VidCheck- file-based QC is getting good! In fact this one looks like it needs serious consideration! I have a demo license on the way and will report back. Along with being able to test all the usual codecs etc it does full ITU.1770 audio loudness AND has numerous correction facilities; Tektronix AND Eyeheight, you might say.

• Containers: MPEG-2 TS, MPEG-2 PS, MXF, MP4, MOV, ASF, AVI, LXF, GXF, FLV, F4V
• Formats: Web, SD, HD, D-Cinema and many custom formats
• Video: MPEG-2, IMX, XDCAM, D10, HDV, DV25, DVCPro50, DVCPro100/HD, AVC/H.264, VC-1, ProRes, DNxHD/VC-3, MJPEG
• Audio: MPEG, PCM, WAV, AAC, stereo, 5.1 / 7.1 Dolby, multiple different language tracks

The really significant thing is the surprisingly reasonable entry cost and good value paid options (AVC, H264, ProRes etc). It also seems to handle multi-core computers much better, a single instance scaling to 28 cores.

AutoQue – they make broadcast monitors, who would have thunk it? They seem to be pitching them very much against the JVC DT-V24 series at the bottom end (a grand cheaper) and the VuTrix at the edit suite/grade-1 end (again, a lot cheaper). I have demo stock coming so I will write a bit more when I’ve seen them.

Other things worthy of note – Tek now have all their 3D analysis tools in the WVR/WFM-8000 series ‘scopes. I had a very informative half-hour with Lee Ballinger from Tektronix going over them.

• Distance – 100BaseT only goes 100m over cat5e but 10BaseT goes 300m; If you find yourself in that situation then an old 10BaseT hub at the far end does the job.
• Equipment reports 100BaseT but is only reliable at 10BaseT; my Squeezebox network MP3 player is running a hacked OS and works a lot more reliably at 10BaseT. I achieved this by swapping the green/white and orange cores in the network cable. This degrades the common-mode rejection performance of the cable and means the ethernet switch ramps the circuit down to 10BaseT.
• Gigabit too fast? Just make off a cable with the blue and brown pairs excluded. Gigabit needs all four pairs and if the switch only sees the Green and Orange pairs it will assume 100BaseT.

As every superhero knows it’s the second half of line 23, field one, that active content starts in a PAL signal yet come the start of field 2 line 336 starts as a full line with the corresponding half line at the end of field 2 on line 623. Consequently without a reference signal the only way to tell the difference between field one and two is by the half line at the top of field 1 (well, the broad pulses at line 3 vary but most equipment is field-locked by the time you get to that point in the scan).

We’ve been testing an ingest/archive solution at the workshop for an African state broadcaster who have a large analogue archive (SVHS and BetaSP). Capturing off the SVHS deck they’d provided for testing (a Panasonic AG-7550) we got some very strange effects. The route is this;

Analogue VT -> AJA FS/1 processor -> SDi into Content Agent uncompressed AVIthis is then compressed to 50 Mbit/s MPEG2 transport stream (I-frame only) and mux’ed into an MXF OP-1A and onto the shared storage. The file is then QC’ed on another machine with a Decklink SDi o/p running OpenCube MXF playback software. Both the input to the CA and the output of the QC are displayed on a JVC DT-V24 video monitor and Tek WVR5000 waveform.
All the clips captured off the SVHS were field-reversed by the time they got to the QC and so we assumed that there was some problem with the capture. After a lot of testing and head-scratching I discovered that the internal TBC on the Panasonic was removing the half-line at the start of field 1 and from then on the capture was marking F1 as F2 and vice-versa.

If you look at the output of the QC machine you can see the half line at the top of the frame, but the motion of the replaced video suggests the fields are reversed. In fact the fields are in the correct order but the capture card has marked them incorrectly and so by the time they are multiplexed and played out they are in the wrong order. The Tek shows the missing half-line at the start of field 1 (on input) and since there is a half line on replay it seems it must be there on field 2; hence the confusion by the capture card.

Turning off the AG-7550′s TBC and relying only on the FS/1 showed the half line return to the start of field one and the problem disappeared.

These are two traces from two separate TriSync generators – The blue trace represents a correct waveform and as every superhero will realise you’re looking at the line timing pulse. Here is the diagram from rec-709 (the spec for HD video);

It clearly shows that rise time is to be equal between the start, middle and end of the line-sync pulse. The rep from the manufacturer of the green pulse insisted that his waveform was a lot sharper – but given the ringing on it I think they just aren’t filtering it properly to comply with the rise time spec – seen here (again from rec-709) as being 4 clock cycles +/- 1.5

As video data rates increase, installation engineers must become as familiar with fibre as they are with coax. Many types of fibre and twisted-pair copper must be purchased pre-terminated.

Runs of 3Gb/s in copper require special attention to cable type if long runs are required. It may be necessary to evaluate cables with the send and receive equipment to be used as not all line-drivers and receivers are equal.

Future planning will need to carefully balance the costs of fibre versus copper to minimize costs, yet achieve the building wide networks that collaborative file-based production demands.