MurrayPro's new SD/HD cage

The reason I always liked using MurrayPro gear is that it comes from a small English company where you can talk to the designer if you need to - Tony has helped me out on numerous occasions when I've needed advice on fixing a piece of his kit or mod'ing it for some other purpose.
His cages have always been very useful - the Cage2K which has been around for the best part of ten years has the superb feature of actually labelling each page of cursors. It's so useful to see in small, discrete text shoot 16x9, protect 14x9 (or whatever).
This is his new product - I include a screenshot of the magazine advert. It launches after Christmas but I may well have an advanced one to use on an upcoming job.

MurrayPro EZMon audio amp circuit

I love small British manufacturers. One of my favourite is MurrayPro who do lots of monitoring gear - we sell a lot of their PPMs as well as timecode bits. For a dubbing rack the EZMon is hard to beat. I had one go wrong at a customer's site recently and a quick call to Tony pointed me in the right direction - IC2 on the audio amplifier card had developed noisey power rails. It's an SSM2018 audio buffer stage is is easily replacable.

Burnt in timecode on VHS feeds - I like configuring VHS bays so that on all the machines in a bay can select clean on AV1 and burnt-in on AV2 - it might save the poor old tape op an hour at the end of the shift if he doesn't have to do it in two passes. In an Avid facility I like to use a Sellman Timecode Wizzard which allows you to derive the burnt-in characters from the Avid timeline (over RS422) or indeed from VTR's remote. In FCP applications a good alternative is a MurrayPro TCR300 which makes the burnt-in from the vertical interval code. In MTV's new area I had to make analogue video and audio for the VHS stack from an SDi feed - The Crystal Vision Demon seemed like the clear choice (I love Crystal gear - great support). However, the Demon puts a big pedestal on the VBI and leaves the VITC unreadable by the TCR300. I gave Andrew at Crystal a call and he fess'ed up to the fact that they'd known for a while that the card knackers the vertical interval. He kindly lent me a better encoder - a DDAA132 - which did the trick. Apparently they're fixing it in the new version of the Demon.

MurrayPro Timecode Stamp is a fine little gadget for inserting VITC, BITC and genarating audio code from a video input. I had an application where I had to insert VITC into the black reference for an automation system to read. To disable the BITC I did this mod - see the video output stage schematic here.
First - lift pins 11 & 15 on IC1 (a DG611 video switch) so that the black 'hole' and white insert signals are stopped - short pins 6 & 7 of the same IC to ensure the black and burst goes straight through. The VITC is added later - see transistor Q1.