Amulet - they fixed OS-X's Temporal Dithering issue

As mentioned in a previous post temporal dithering on OS-X has proved troublesome with Amulet (and in fact it bedevils all KVM-over-IP systems). The guys at Amulet have written a Kernel Extension that stops the card turning on temporal dithering. James, their engineer, explained to me that it's a different technique between nVidia and Radeon, but they've got it licked;

 

 

kexstat is a utility to show which Kernel Extensions are loaded. Here I've grep'ed the output to exclude all the Apple ones. You can see the Amulet one at 0x2000

The proof of the pudding is that now all the MacPro clients on this particular Amulet system look splendid; even full-screen replay of 1080P material.

New podcast - RS232, fifty years and still going!

Hugh and I go into the details of RS232C and how it is still used in broadcast engineering for configuration and test. Find it on iTunes, vanilla RSS, YouTube or the show notes website.

Getting cheap/unsupported laser printers working on OS-X

Got a Dell, Samsung or Xerox printer where the manufacturer has dropped support AND it was too cheap to have a full Post Script implementation? Whereas Windows seems to support a very broad range of budget printers natively OS-X is more picky when it comes to PCL-models.

So - this saved us at the workshop; http://guigo.us/mac/splix/

Miranda, Grass Valley and good-old GPI tallies

I never realised that lots of manufacturers use ACOS protocol to send tally and UMD-names between vision mixers, multi-viewers and routers. I assumed that big switchers still used GPI closures for tallies but when I got to a customer's site to make a GVG Kayak mixer talk to a Miranda Kaleido multi-viewer I couldn't find the RS422 port on the back of the Miranda; turns out it's an option!

So - back to the good old dry-GPI (i.e. relay closure) tallies.








After a couple of false starts here is the cable used to connect the GVG to the multiviewer.

The next thing is to associate the appropriate GPI ins with the video inputs on the multi-viewer; this is X-Edit, Miranda's network config tool. Once you've dragged the GPIs to the source lines you have to go into the layout tool and associate the UMD red-light-up (it the RHS of the UMD definition) with the GPI event - you can set as many or as few of the virtual displays to activate.