Saturday, July 25, 2015

The Engineer's Bench podcast - "KVM-over-IP and Data Encryption"

Hugh and Phil talk about KVM-over-IP systems with particular reference to Teradici and Phil's favourite manufacturer Amulet Hotkey. They also go over the basics of encryption with symmetric and public-key crypto.


Find it on iTunes, vanilla RSS, YouTube or the show notes website.

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Typical edit suite monitor calibration; some traps for young players

I spent the morning in a very typical Soho edit room with a JVC DT-V24-series LED-backlit LCD as the "front of house" monitor and an LG LED-backlit LCD as the client display.
It's quite easy to get the JVC looking right - BBC style 6504k for Rec.709; I've waffled on about this a lot in the past, but I had some new encounters (due in some small part to the new version of ChromaSurf; the software I use with the Klein K10A probe).
  • The Klien is a fast photometer, able to make a reading in around a second; this has huge implications for LUT building and it's why when using LightSpaceCMS you can profile a 17-point LUT in less than two hours. Older probes that can take ten seconds when coupled with something like SpectraCAL (which does not have a proper colour-engine, it essentially halves the difference every time is sees a bad colour match) might have your waiting more than a day for the same LUT profile. Being such a fast probe means that in the current release of their software you can do a 32-sample read of very low (i.e. noisey) blacks and get a reasonable figure. 
  • Just because you can read down at sub 1Cd/m2 doesn't mean you should! With LCDs when you get to sub 5% black you actually see more of the colour of the backlight leaking around those little thin-film transistor pixels. This is why I tend to calibrate black level ("Bias" in Sony-speak) around 15% to make sure I'm getting a real read from the pixels.
  • Even if a domestic display claims to have a Rec.709 mode don't believe the hype; this is the abuse I had to land on the display to get this one to match the JVC and for the Klein to be happy.

Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Colourimetry and Boland broadcast monitors

I have been so busy that (to my shame) I haven't been able to blog for two months now. This morning I did a presentation for the Root6 Tech Breakfast series entitled “Colourimetry, Calibration and Monitoring” - 

You can grab my notes here;
http://www.engineersbench.com/phil/Public/Root6-misc/Colourimetry_TechBreakfast_July2015.pdf

This is all to promote the new US manufacturer we've taken on; for my money their BVB25-OLED monitor is the best TV display for under £10k.