Eizo CG232W television monitor

I've been sent several monitors to look at over the last year that are essentially high-end computer displays that have been fitted with HD-SDi input and (with verying degrees of success) been sold as grading screens.

The first mistake that's often made is the amount of light output. The worst offender was the HP DreamColour range - peak whites at 500Cd/m2! BBC standard is to grade for TV at eighty and many film people are now setting monitors at sixty for long grading sessions. It is true that delta-E (the smallest perceivable colour difference on a standardised scale) decreases with overall illumination - at five hundred candelas per metre-squared you're nearly blinded. It might be fine for watching Toy Story but it's not what TV grading is about. I hear lots of colourist-wannabe's going on about how good a monitor looks without realising the most important thing is that a monitor is accurate - it conforms to the standard. Your TV at home should look good so you enjoy your movies etc. BUT your grading display should be brutally honest. Also - bear in mind that only about one in ten-thousand people have perfect colour memory (I don't) and so looking at a monitor for colour accuracy without a colourimetry probe (and not a £200 thing you bought for your Mac!) is pointless.

1. Whites - I'm so glad this display is kicking out a respectable sub-100Cd/m2! As mentioned we've seen several computer monitors that have been bent to look like TV displays that kick out many times more light than they should.

2. Blacks - Nothing special for an LCD - this looks like many LCD TV displays, the blacks are a bit lacking in detail. Ironically the cheap JVC DTV-20 series do blacks a bit better.

3. Interlace - the de-interlacer seems on par with the VuTrix Pro-24 - it struggles a bit with certain slow pans and zooms but seems to get captions (crawls and rolls) correct - better than the VuTrix. Some sub-frame events (fireworks going off, paparazzi camera flashes etc) upset it more than other monitors.

4. Resolution - looks fine. On a 0-15Mhz grating I can see the last section fine and there's no lacking in detail on real pictures.

5. Colour balance seems fine – next to a know good display both whites and blacks (well, 10% greys!) are v.close to D6500. It seems to track perfectly as well.

6. Backlight consistency – much better than the three VuTrix panels I’ve seen recently – as good as a Sony or eCinema DCM-23 (both >£15k panels).

I’d stress that I’ve looked at it very much as a TV monitor with my BBC / Illuminant-D eyes on. I’m not a film colour guy but TV colourimetry is my thing.

James Murdoch - yet another reason I'll avoid Sky

I could hardly have avoided the ruckus at the Edinburgh TV festival because of the large numbers of mentions of it on Twitter. James Murdoch who runs Sky has not missed an opportunity to rubbish the BBC and the state of broadcasting in the UK generally. The first thing that caught my attention was his rather tenuous link between the pseudo-state run nature of the Beeb and Creationism in the US;

Creationism penalises the poorest in our society with regressive taxes and policies - like the licence fee and digital switchover;
It promotes inefficient infrastructure in the shape of digital terrestrial television;

He doesn't spare news and current affairs either;

And now, in the all-media marketplace, it threatens significant damage to important spheres of human enterprise and endeavour - the provision of independent news, investment in professional journalism, and the innovation and growth of the creative industries.

One of the funnier tweets I saw ran something link "...you can almost see the strings being pulled by his father".

Anyway - on the subject of news - does he really suppose that Sky News (or, heaven forbid Fox News) represent anything other than biased reporting coming straight out of the executive team at News Corp.? Something you can say about BBC News is that it is accurate and relatively unbiased. One of the things you often hear leaders of political movements against tyranny in other parts of the world say is that the World Service is the news source that kept them going. I've heard Nelson Mandela and Aung San Suu Kyi say just that in interviews. Can you imagine if Sky or Fox News had the job of championing democracy in this world?

Regressive tax - The BBC offers remarkable value for money when compared to Sky and the ITV network. If you compare the £180 per annum cost of the BBC license fee with the cost of even the most modest Sky package or the £350 that the cost of ITV-based advertising places on the average family's annual grocery bill then you realise that the license fee is less of a tax than having to fund commercial TV. I have a choice if I pay the license fee - I do because I value the Beeb but I have several friends who don't have a TV in the house and so don't have to pay for the BBC but they do have to pay for commercial TV regardless.

Infrastructure - ITV couldn't make OnDigital work - they weren't willing to be in it for the long run and it took the BBC to make Freeview a success. Not everyone wants to pay north of £25 per month for a TV package and digital terrestrial makes a lot of sense. Added to this the relative poor technical quality of Sky's HD service against the superb 10mbit/sec H.264 pictures that can be delivered over DVB-T2 and you can see why I'm a bigger fan of Freeview (both technically and content-wise) than I am of Sky.

Sky has not been good for Britain - it represents the worst aspects of our society - celebrity obsession and trivialising of everything. Give me the Beeb (and particularly Radio 4) every day.

3G HD-SDi standards

Yesterday I was doing a day of training - Root6's Video101 (you can grab my slides here) was what I was doing, but the day started off with a presentation with my old pal Lee Ballinger of Tektronix. He went through SMPTE372 and the now sixty(!) transport formats it covers. A 3G payload can carry many variations of Y Cb Cr / RGB / XYZ colour, framerates etc. You can even send two 1.48G HD-SDi streams down one side of a 3G connection - this is being refered to as SMPTE 292B (an extension on the original HD-SDi spec).
One of the things I'd not realised was inter-link timing discrepancy - it can be a max. of 40nS (not long!).
Anyway - Lee's presentation will be available as a video on Root6's site when Mark pulls his finger out and edits/encodes it. Whilst there you can check out me banging on about 10-gig ethernet.

Future framerates for TV and Film

Rupert emailed me a blog entry by Stuart Maschwitz - he prefaced the message with "he is the ying to your yang" which amused me - given my love of interlaced pictures and the smooth motion they protray;

...so television engineers and home theater nerds with nothing better to do, please stop trying to find ways to make movies more like reality. As you can see from this year's cinematography Oscar winner, film is at its best when it is unmistakeably unreal.

Ignoring the guy's dislike of engineers (hey, film and TV are still both inherently technical processes) - I felt I had to respond.
This chap confuses the container from the contents - of course film makers should be able to make whatever film they like - fast motion or stuttered low-frame rates. However - is he saying that other kinds of look aren't valid? Convergence means cinemas will be re-purposed for big sporting and cultural events. Who wants to see football or operas crippled to 24P? 50P looks better than 50i and both render motion better than 25P. What other aspect of image acquisition should be subject to this 'less is more' fascism? Would he be happy with black & white film and mono audio that rolls off at 8Khz? My two favorite films of all time were shot thus and I'm very happy that modern 1080/50P displays can render them accurately.

The same argument was fashionable with vinyl audio - a CD can encapsulate faithfully everything audiophiles like about the sound of vinyl. I've tried it - I've dubbed vinyl - DAT and audiophile friends identify it as vinyl and gush about the warmth of the sound until you show them it's a digital recording.

I think we need media containers that can faithfully render whatever material the film director/TV producer wants to show. Make the container as good as it can be and then put whatever contents you like in it.

As if to vindicate me I came across this BBC whitepaper that talks about how good pictures can look at high framerates (300fps and greater) - and even how good normal-framerate stuff looks when aquired at 300fps.

Ofcom and PSE - there is no secret sauce Mr Harding!

The issue of Photosensitive Epilepsy comes up often in television - back in the late nineties there was an episode of Pokemon that featured flashing images that provoked kids in Japan to have seizures. Since then Ofcom have been very keen to avoid this on British television and since 2003 have produced the following guidelines;

OFCOM Guidance(extract).pdf

This is an extract from the document but it does include the important details which hinge around the following;

3. A potentially harmful flash occurs when there is a pair of opposing changes in luminance (i.e., an increase in luminance followed by a decrease, or a decrease followed by an increase) of 20 candelas per square metre (cd.m-2) or more (see
notes 1 and 2). This applies only when the screen luminance of the darker image is below 160 cd.m-2. Irrespective of luminance, a transition to or from a saturated red is also potentially harmful.

3.1.1. Isolated single, double, or triple flashes are acceptable, but a sequence of flashes is not permitted when both the following occur:
i. the combined area of flashes occurring concurrently occupies more than one quarter of the displayed (see note 3) screen area; and
ii. there are more than three flashes within any one-second period. For clarification, successive flashes for which the leading edges are separated by 9 frames or more are acceptable, irrespective of their brightness or screen area.

These parameters are well defined and so anyone who can understand them can build a PSE detector that will with certainty detect when a violation occurs. This is how the situation should be as it avoids any one manufacturer of test equipment having a monopoly. Unfortunately this is just the situation that has nearly developed with the Harding FPA detector. Their machine is a PC with SDi capture card that you digitise the video sequence to be checked into and it runs an analysis. The other popular unit is the GordonHD which is more like a traditional piece of equipment in that it sits in the signal chain and gives an alert when it sees a violating sequence go past.

We have a couple of customers who like the idea of realtime performance that the Gordon gives and don't like having to capture (the Harding doesn't support standard codecs so no Quicktime reference export from Avid!), analyse (in slower-than-realtime) and then get a report - only to repeat it all after you've corrected the offending clips (because the broadcaster likes to see a full 10:00:00:00 - 10:54:00:00 report!). The Gordon on the other hand is cheap (£3k against £13k) and just sits there taking a feed of HD/SDi video and Timecode and firing a GPI when a violation is detected (and even entering the TC into a file) which means you can have it hanging off the Avid (or whatever) and the editor can rock'n'roll over a piece of footage adjusting his edit point over the flash frames (it's mostly paparazzi footage with all those camera flashes that cause it) until he gets a sequence that doesn't cause a problem.

Anyhow - you can tell which machine I think is best. Harding is a great self-publiciser who gives you the idea that he alone knows the secret-sauce of PSE. The guys at Tektronix tell me it's on the way as an upgrade for their WVR-series 'scopes but they are worried that Harding has all the patents stitched up.

Anyway - a quick once around pals revealed the following;
Ascent Media check all of five's output (including the two daughter channels) on a GordonHD, ITV's QC department at Upper Ground use a Gordon as their first-pass analyser and Channel Four specify it as well. However, talking to everyone in facilities reveals that they (almost) universally believe the Harding to be the only machine capable of doing the job.
I had several earlier-model Gordon's at Resolution and they were superbly fitted to the job (and cheap enough to have one in every suite). We never had a tape sent back that had gone through it and that included many more hours of terrestrial television than most facilities ever turn out (including quick turn-around stuff with lots of potential trouble - think the Friday night eviction show for Big Brother).

John Emmett of BPR is a gentleman of the old school (they make the Gordon) and you can find an interesting paper on the subject of PSE he co-authored here.

The Shield, end of season

Episode 13 of Season 7 was one of the best and most dramatic hours of television I've ever seen. I've been following it since the first year and it is the only cop show that has never lost it's dramatic tension and has never indulged in 'character development' episodes. Compared to the various CSI variants (which I like for different reasons) it shines.

New York tests analogue shut-off

New York City over-the-air analog TV stations went dark for two minutes yesterday. The prescheduled test gave a temporary taste of what's planned when the stations permanently pull the analog plug on February 17, 2009.

My DVB-T television (which runs Linux!) needed a first birthday the other day (the DVB decoder temporarily went AWOL) and so for a day I was watching composite analogue signals from Crystal Palace. I have to say that I now find MPEG2 compression artifacts less objectionable that multi-path/PAL-decoder errors. The analogue switch-off here in Blighty can't come quick enough!
Now then, when's that DVB-T2 HD over H.264 switch-over coming?!

TriCaster - very impressive

Earlier in the year I banged on about the TriCaster after I had a demo. We've just finished an install at the College of Law using it as the centre-piece of their little three camera studio and I am even more impressed than I was! Driving the virtual environment is so easy and it really does perform well. Having a selection of four shots per camera (you set the shot for the close-up and then each camera is available as the close-up, MCU, twp-shot and long-shot) with an environment that tracks perfectly is a revelation. The in-set virtual monitors work as well. The perspective and reflections on desks etc are all very convincing and once you get past the fact that all the virtual sets look like CNN or ESPN you can really produce some expensive looking tele.

I hope Root6 pick this up as a product because there is nothing to match it sub £100k.

Live from Abbey Road

What with Later with Jools Holland being off the air now it's good to see that there is one live music show that values musicianship over style.
Muse, Radiohead & Paul Simon are the acts I'll be watching for in this series - here are the songs I captured from Muse's performance on that show in 2007.

Sony History

A great site that gives an overview of Sony's product line over the years. Very interesting.

It's business time - The Flight of the Conchords

Coming soon to BBC4 this is the most original sitcom in years - I'd list Pheonix Nights (and the subsequent Max & Paddy), The Office, Lead Balloon, Outnumbered, and Curb Your Enthusiasm and the best things so far this century. My friend Kevin Cade (who we're visiting next weekend - looking forward to seeing Lucy and the boys for a sleep-over) made me aware of these guys last year with a clip on his podcast;


Sarah and I have been enjoying the HBO series which (as mentioned) will be on Freeview soon;

Memories of Lime Grove

I was recently supervising a job in White City and took a lunch-break to wander around the market and down to Lime Grove (the first studios I worked at when I joined the Beeb in the eighties). Of course it's all been redeveloped as housing but it was nice to see the fashion college and primary school across the road.

Martin Kempton's site is excellent and will easily kill an hour of work-time! See his pages on Television Centre.

The move of the VT department to stage 5 did not take place immediately. They had to wait for a new tape format to be established before equipping all the suites. This format was the D3 cassette. Developed by Panasonic, the BBC was its first major customer. A few suites were opened in 1991 and used for training but the big move to stage 5 happened in January 1992.

The BBC's post production department had been created in 1989 - combining film editing with VT editing and sound dubbing. This new department was, as its name suggests, more concerned with what happens to the programme after it has been made rather than during it. From 1991, the new D3 cassette enabled each of the studios to be equipped with its own machines which were (and are) operated by the studio resource manager.

TriCaster

I had a really informative demo at CVP. I'm normally quite dismissive of all-in-one solutions that promise the Earth for a low-low sub-ten-grand price. I've seen NewTek's boxes demo'ed at trade shows for a decade but never seen them in a television facility or an OB truck. I always assumed that it was a very clever demo that avoided all the hard stuff (have you ever done that at a trade show?!). The expression Graham uses is 'suspiciously cheap'! Anyhow - I had a Bruce Springsteen moment when I got to spend an afternoon playing around with the TriCaster.

Now not suggesting you build an LE studio around it but it does include everything a small studio would need - six component video inputs, two virtual VTRs (with a rundown scheduler), eight input switcher (re-syncs all i/p's), DVE, keyers, mattes, caption generator/graphics subsystem and a virtual studio model.
When you design your set you tell it how things are scaled and if you then cut a real camera between three virtual positions it re-sizes the talent accordingly so - with only three cameras you can cut between maybe nine virtual shots and it really works - it seems like you have three cameras looking at each shot. It records an AVI to it's internal drive as the safety record and the virtual set knows all about plasmas etc (so you can play in as if it really was an in-shot monitor) - an in-set monitor is one of the things you can have in the model of a studio and you assign it as a destination and cut live feeds (cameras, VTs) or virtual sources (GFX, Virtual VT sources) to it and if there are any 'shiny' surfaces in the set - table tops, glasses of water etc. they pick up reflections of cameras sources, plasmas etc.
iVGA is another unique feature where the system can take a real-time VGA feed over the network. It will scale or follow the mouse for presentations and the quality was superb. I can't think of another gadget that allows you to do that without using a scaler.
I was blown away - I kept looking for the SGI workstation behind the demo booth!

I'm hoping to base a little three-camera web-casting studio around one in the next couple of months.

Me on German TV a couple of years ago

You know you're getting old when.....

You take your nine year-old to the Science Museum for the day and you see half a dozen bits of software and equipment in glass cabinets that you used to work on or fix during your career!


Here is an Ampex AVR1 2" video recorder - although we didn't have this model at the Beeb we did have AVR1000s. You can also see an Apple 2, a ZX80 and a copy of Windows 3.11

They also have Technics 1210s and a Phillips 1700 series VCR. On the right is a Cray-1 which looks like a masterpiece of engineering. It is well worth a visit and the have a whole gallery dedicated to telecomunications. I would have spent the day in there but for two nine year-old who wanted to see the rocket show!

BBC iPlayer on my TV

Looking good - once again the beeb show the way. Colour TV, Teletext, Nicam, DAB, DVB-T, HD-television and now IP-TV.
The BBC have either introduced or made successful every innovation in broadcasting.
If you consider how they managed to turn around the fate of DVB-T (OnDigital becoming Freview) and how good their IP-TV offering is in the face of Channel Four and Five's offering you realise it is imperative that we have a BBC.

Absolute Zero

On BBC Four over the next couple of nights - looks very interesting.

This two-part scientific detective tale tells the story of a remarkable group of pioneers who wanted to reach the ultimate extreme: absolute zero, a place so cold that the physical world as we know it doesn't exist, electricity flows without resistance, fluids defy gravity and the speed of light can be reduced to 38 miles per hour.
Each film features a strange cast of eccentric characters, including: Clarence Birds Eye; Frederic 'Ice King' Tudor, who founded an empire harvesting ice; and James Dewar, who almost drove himself crazy by trying to liquefy hydrogen.
Absolute zero became the Holy Grail of temperature physicists and is considered the gateway to many new technologies, such as nano-construction, neurological networks and quantum computing. The possibilities, it seems, are limitless.

Upgrading a Tek WFM7100

I demo Tektronix monitoring products and today I had to upgrade our loaner WFM7100. I'd done software on these chaps before and you can either do it over the web interface or via a USB stick on the front panel. In the case of this version 3.0 update (from the previous v1.25) you have to replace the front control panel, update the boot loader over the network and then use the USB stick to upgrade the instrement.

It's quite a change - it's made it into a WVR7100!
It seems a lot more stable and quicker. Also - it's not a touch-screen any more - it has the same front panel button set as a WVR (but arranged around the display). Using the Java app to control it you can't tell it apart from a WVR. Amazingly Tek ship this upgrade kit for free - given how well made the new front panel is I imagine they are taking a hit of hundreds of pounds per customer update.

I was tickled to see the attached label on the USB stick - you might kill your machine by doing the upgrade and if you do we'll bill you to fix it! I can report the update was entirely successful!
Actually - Tek upgrade procedures are always entirely straighforward and the instructions never leave anything to chance.

Another cool feature is that (being a dual-link HD-SDi machine) it now supports dual live inputs (at YUV 4:2:2, not RGB 4:4:4!) so you can be monitoring two video signals at once!

Scanimate

Scanimate is an analog computer system that was built by the Computer Image Corporation of Denver, Colorado in the late sixties and early seventies. In all only eight machines were ever produced. It was used on many famous jobs over the years, and many of the people that were involved with its development, operation, and care and feeding have gone on to do significant things in a variety of places all over the world. Dave Seig's website is a real treat and a reminder of how innovative engineers had to be before digital framestores were possible. Many thanks to my old mucker Saul Budd for putting me on to this.
It reminded me of the BBC Anchor caption machine that was an electronic analogue video caption generator. By generating shaped wipes (in much the same way as an analogue vision mixer works by using line and field rate waveforms to create circular, square, etc. shaped wipes) with variable voltage offsets to position them the machine was able to make letter shapes and hence words (and even whole lines of text!). Being an analogue machine it drifted and so the kerning between letters would change and even the size of characters changed over the duration of the programme (requiring the operator to keep his eyes on things!).
Now when I started at the Beeb in the eighties people still commonly referred to electronic caption machines as 'anchor' (the news studios all shared an 'anchor lobby' which at that point is where the Aston 3 operators worked). I never saw a working example but ironically some programmes still used real artwork captions (scanned on Sony DMX3000 cameras).

The PAL vertical interval

Our very own Kevin King asked me about the vertical interval in a PAL signal - the above diagram is excellent and has all you need to know. It's taken from a Tektronix training manual from the late eighties by Margaret Craig called Television Measurements - PAL Systems.
Essentially you should bear in mind the following;

• Active video starts at line 23 - actually line 23 is a half line so the first 26 u-sec is blank - people who don't know about video often notice this!


• The other half line is the first half of line 623 (end of field 2) - the reason for the two half-lines is to give the line-scan circuit the best chance to make it back to the same point when it starts the new field.


• There is no half-line at the start of field-2 or the end of field-1


• Field 1 and Field 2 both end with five equalising pulses and then start the next field with five broad pulses, to be followed by more eq pulses. These are the only lines not to have a colour burst - that's what Bruch Blanking does on older SPGs.
  

The reason for a lot of this is down to the stability of phase-locked loops constructed from valves rather than transistors - if you have (potentially) unstable oscillators for every waveform (line-drive, field-drive, sub-carrier etc.) then you have to take every effort to make sure nothings changes phase too quickly - hence the half lines, the broad and equalising pulses etc.

The how and why of COFDM

Coded Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (COFDM) is a form of modulation which is particularly well-suited to the needs of the terrestrial broadcasting channel. COFDM can cope with high levels of multipath propagation, with a wide spread of delays between the received signals. This leads to the concept of single-frequency networks in which many transmitters send the same signal on the same frequency, generating “artificial multipath”. COFDM also copes well with co-channel narrowband interference, as may be caused by the carriers of existing analogue services.

This is a very well written explanation of COFDM (as used in both digital terrestrial television and digital radio in the UK) - the workings of the multi-carrier system was something that I never really understood but this opened my eyes (did you realise that every DVB-T mux uses more than 6,000 carriers!). Recently I was explaining to someone how Viterbei decoders work (with particular reference to Digital Betacam VTRs) - again, I didn't realise that COFDM uses a modified Viterbei decoder (the 'soft viterbei decoder').
I wish I hadn't specialised in post-production so early as there are many things the the broadcast chain that I'm rusty/ignorant of.

Crystal Vision & TV aspect ratio

I like Crystal Vision - like MurrayPro and Quartz (though for how much longer with them is anyone's guess!) they are small English technology firms that pay attention to detail and care about their customers. You can generally speak to the developer or designer and know you'll get sense (try that with Avid!).
This is a brilliant illustration of the three aspect ratios used in standard def TV.

Unit Post and JVC monitors

This from UKPost.org

Tim Burton, Technical Manager, Unit Post Production, explains, "The MCR has enabled us to keep the edit suites cutting 100% of the time, and streamline how we execute ancillary tasks. The biggest gains have been in digital delivery and rendering times, by moving these tasks from the workstations to a 20 processor cluster we have seen a 5 fold increase in speed. Root6 completed the installation to an extremely high standard and It was a pleasure to work with Phil Crawley as he took the concept and helped develop it into a rounded solution within weeks. We have only scratched the surface of what this technology can offer and are continuing to expand and refine our systems and workflows."

I like those guy! I was back there today helping them out with some colour issues in their grading room. I discovered a few things about JVC SD/HD monitors - specifically;

• If you use one of their HD-SDi, SD, or mixed-mode cards you only get the Rec601 matrix. This means that when you calibrate for the tube for correct illuminant-D you wind up with a monitor that shifts either green or magenta (depending on which way you calibrated).


• If you install a component input card the colourimetry doesn't shift in this way - BUT the change in the raster causes the monitor to sit the picture down (the blacks get crushed) and you get a slight yellow cast in the white.

So, with all this in mind I've taken to calibrating those displays for HD and SD and handing the customer a set of instructions of changing the numbers when they start a new job.

ITU Rec 601 vs Rec 709 colourspace

Every superhero knows that in transitioning from standard definition television to high def we've adopted a different matrixing function for component to/from RGB conversion. The numbers for (old-skool) Rec 601 are thus;

Y = 0.299R +0.587G +0.114B
Cb = 0.564(B-Y) + 350mV
Cr = 0.713(R-Y) + 350mV

And the new kids on the block (Rec 709);

Y = 0.213R +0.715G +0.072B
Cb = 0.539(B-Y) + 350mV
Cr = 0.635(R-Y) + 350mV

So, not only has the weighting of the colours that make up the luminance path changed but the weighting of the colour difference signals is different. I've heard varying accounts of why they felt the change was necessary - I think it's probably to do with cameras and telecines (now be entirely CCD-based as opposed to the ubiquity of tubes when 601 was being formulated) and display devices (are we going to be able to buy a tube'd monitor by the end of this year?!). The new values better reflect the tri-stimulus nature of human vision and are less bound by the very noisy response of the blue-tube in image acquisition devices of yester-year.

However, one of the upshots of this is that digital devices that can receive an SD/HD-SDi bitstream have to be able to switch in the appropriate matrix. If that isn't the case then you'd notice a green cast on pictures if you switched between standards (going from HD to SD) or a magenta error going the other way. In the case of a monitor you'd have to re-calibrate the white point to D65.

The reason this has cropped up is that a facility (where I've just started to offer them colour calibration advice) has noticed that a monitor that was lined up correctly for HD working is showing the wrong colourimetry when being sent an SD feed. It's gone green (and not with envy! - oh, and that isn't the facility in case you're wondering!). It's a JVC DTV1700 series monitor which (although a cheapie at <£2k) has an EBU-phosphored tube (so you can calibrate it to 6500k at the white point). It looks like JVC's input card doesn't do the matrix switch. So, I'm wondering what other monitors do - I was sure the Sony BVM-D range did (but those monitors started in the mid-teen thousands of pounds). Any comments from people who've hit this before? As an aside the image (right - click it!) is from a very good Tektronix poster entitled Understanding Colors and Gamut - I have many copies (along with the equally exciting Understanding High Definition Video!) - give me a yell if you want one.

Celebrity Big Brother

I was very involved in the first three years of Big Brother (previous stories; Marcus, the voice of Big Brother, Avids dangerous for transmission, and my OB truck) - I designed and (with Tony D's help!) built the post-production environment, wrote the video ingest automation for the network review system and was one of the technical supervisor on most days. I felt that at the time they really saw it as a brave and new format where they were doing some truely innovative television. By the time I left it seemed that all the experienced TV folks who'd done other things before Big Brother had moved on and all the production crew and editors were youngsters that had only done reality shows. I think it's no coincidence that as a programme it's become degenerate and the only interest it holds is a purient one. It's all come to a head this week with small-minded bigotry - is she a racist? It probably doesn't matter - it's all bullying after all.

End of Torchwood!

The trouble with Torchwood is that it's not really clear who it's aimed at. It contains swearing, blood and sex, yet still somehow feels like a children's programme. Thirteen-year-olds should love it; anyone else is likely to be more than a little confused. Which isn't to say Torchwood is bad. Just bewildering. And very, very silly.

Charlie Brooker, Oct 28, 2006 The Guardian

I said this all along - a series that was ideal for my three except it has a few adult add-ons. Quite quickly I realised I'd get little peace unless I did them a version and so every week for the last three months I've dutifully copied the MPEG2 transport stream file onto my laptop (captured straight from the BBC Freeview mux - see Media Portal in my previous entry) and cut it down (using Video ReDo - again see previous entry) into a version I'd be happy for my seven, eleven and thirteen-year olds to watch. In most cases it's been very easy - just the Father Jack language (¨arse¨, ¨feck¨, ¨girls¨!) - I know they hear it all the time at school and on the bus but the youngest does have a habit of picking up what he sees on the tele and I want him to stay a innocent just a bit longer!

Episode 6 - ¨Countryside¨ was the most brutal (check out the cut-list, right) involving cannibals and required a bit of work to make the story hang together and yet keep it out of nightmare territory! Still - I think as far as cutting a P as B goes it worked out well and we made our own set of DVDs of the whole series (with annimated title screens etc.) which has proved very popular with parents of school friends! If only I had access to the rushes I could do a proper CBBC version!

Now, I could cut some of the extracted Torchwood footage into the Sarah Jane Adventures to make a late-night BBC3 version of that show!

Handiest software in the world

These are the bits of code I use regularly;

Video

• VirtualDub - This is the MPEG2 build by fccHandler. If you need to make AVIs (with any codec on your system) VirtualDub is the way to do it. It has a huge library of pluggins for manipulating pictures and sounds.
  
• Video ReDo allows you to edit the GOP without re-compressing the whole transport stream. If you do make a non-Iframe edit it only re-encodes between Iframes. It is superbly quick for cutting down TV programmes and even has a commercial break remover that works! I use it almost every day for getting the DV-MRS files out of my media PC (running MediaPortal) onto to video-DVD. Best $50 you'll spend
• MediaPortal is an open-source alternative to Windows Media Centre. I've been using it for about a year and am very impressed - I've written loads about it in the past so just use the search box (right) to find previous articles. Haven't used my VHS since!
  
• GSpot is the business if you can't figure out why a codec won't work properly or a file isn't decompressing as you expected.
  
• TMPGenc is just the best for transcoding to MPEG variants.
  
• Smart Ripper is my weapon of choice for extracting the VOBs from a DVD and decrypting them ready for....
  
• RipItAll which does the best job of re-encoding DVD VOBs into any AVI codec of your choice with all the re-sizing (for square pixels) and cropping (for removing black bands). This is how I make DivX files from DVDs.
  
• VSO DivXtoDVD does a very good job of making VOBs from any playable movie format. It puts chapter markers at near five minute intervals as it detects scene changes and is a fine way of making playable DVDs from any movie you might have downloaded. It has very few options (frame-rate, aspect ratio etc) but does a clean job of de-compressing / re-compressing (two pass) and even pulls up 23.976fps to 29.97 on the fly. Very fast.

More as I remember them!

From the sublime to the ridiculous

We've been doing an install at a Soho facility and as ever Tony and the wiremen do a superb job - neat and accurate. The right-hand image shows our cabling on the top cable tray and the previous systems integrators efforts below; Un-numbered cables that have been just thrown in. They've attempted to run HD-SDi over skinny coax and fibre channel over long pre-made tight-buffered optical cable. By contrast we do all video on Vision 1000 and all fibre on kevlar-armoured loose-tube cable. I'm amazed that previous company had the cheek to submit an invoice!

Magic Avid!

This is a killer! Avid have a dual-boot solution that allows you to have both NitrisDS and SymphonyDS apps on the same machine - but rather than doing something modern with a partitioned drive and bootloader they have the Avid dual-boot option that uses a key-switch to power one of two system drives! All built into a nice metal panel that fits in a 5 1/4 inch drive bay and just switches the drive power. I laughed heartily when Joel showed me that.....

Annoyances

I've had a busy few weeks (which is good!) but I've had a few small run-ins with customers.

• I had to go and investigate a suite where all the laybacks (to BetaSP!) had visual disturbances. The issue had supposedly only started after we'd changed the video i/o card in a workstation. When I got to look at some of the tapes it was clear that the fault was either RF or tape damage. When I parked the deck on the offending frames and opened the tape you could see the scratch running the length of the lower edge. If memory serves it is TG2 and TG5 that guide the lower edge of an SP tape and so clearly the fault with mechanical and definitely located in the record VTR. I showed this to the editor who was adamant that it couldn't be the case and that it was us having done something when we fitted the new video i/o card - ¨Coincidence, I think not¨!
  His colleague realised the silliness of his position and apologised, but because I wasn't willing to back down I left under a bit of a cloud.


• Colour balancing monitors - I got booked to go and calibrate a monitor for a grading session that was about to start. When I got there (colour probe in hand) I found an industrial JVC display - NTSC-phosphored tube and no tweaks on the outside. I explained this to the editor and left. The next day they called to say how unprofessional I'd been and why hadn't I set up the monitor. Well - as a freebie - I'd set the black and white levels but they wouldn't accept that the display was un-calibrat'able (made up word). Why people believe they can make a £1,500 monitor look like an £11k grading display is beyond me. Also - did they think I was lying or stupid (it must have been one or the other).

I'm wondering if other industries have such huge egos? Someone knows they're wrong, the person they're shouting at knows they're wrong, they know that the person they're shouting at knows they're wrong BUT to smile, apologise and walk away with everyone's dignity intact ain't an option.......

Quantel eQ

In the eighties (when I was working in engineering at BBC Television News) I was in post-production maintenance with responsibility for (amoungst other things) a bunch of origional series Quantel Paintboxes (they became ¨Classic Paintboxes¨ when the V-Series hardware was launched). I knew those things inside-out. They were so elegantly designed and logically laid out that maintaining them was a joy and I could figure out which board had a fault in a couple of minutes and get it down to the chip in twenty.
After I left the Beeb I had virtually no dealings with Quantel. I used to see them at trade shows but it's always hard getting past the marketing to see what the real engineering is. They've regularly published a little book called The Quantel Digital Fact Book (which should, in truth, have been called The Quantel Digital Lie Book!) - essentially it was a bunch of marketing spun up to look like engineering. One article entitled ¨Resolution Independence - a universal panacea?¨ banged on about how a single platform couldn't support differing TV standards properly. They dropped that particular bit of fiction when they introduced resolution independent equipment! The superiority of 8-bit video was another myth they propogated (and I heard a number of otherwise sensible Soho engineers repeat that bit of nonsense) - again, they stopped saying that when their kit started to do 10-bit.
Anyhow - last week I was installing an eQ workstation and made a few suprising observations;

• It's now a PC! They use an industry standard Intel server board (dual Xeons) with commodity drives (SATA) and graphics card (Radeon X800).
• The video i/o card is bought in - although I couldn't get a good look at it I'm pretty sure it was a DVS Centurus card - as used in Clipsters, Baselights etc.
• I saw an AMC sticker inside - we've used those guys to integrate specialised computers for us - they do a good job but I was suprised to see them building Quantel machines!
• They include all of the extenders you might need to get USB and SVGA to the suite - it's nice to see that they still cling to the notion that equipment belongs in a machine room and people in the edit suite - Avid would do well to learn this!

Although the eQ in question had a fault and I didn't get to see it running reliably it does seem that Quantel (although having gone to commodity hardware even more so than Avid) take seriously the idea of a professional application. It seemed snappy, launching quickly and responding really well. I suppose it your heritage is in expensive hardware that was built for one job only you have a good set of pointers.