I've spent the last couple of weeks designing and supervising the install of
Optomen Television's new editing facilities in Kentish Town, North London. I decided this time to try extending all the DVI feeds over fibre - I've done it before on more expensive projects but up until now it's been prohibitively expensive for SD-only Avid rooms. However,
Lindy are now carrying extenders that look remarkably like the ones I've used in DI projector rooms before. In fact Lindy are sourcing them from the same OEM as others (
Gefen for example) but selling them for sensible money. They have proved good - there are a couple of things worth noting;
- Pay attention to the fibre allocation - you need two duplex multi-mode circuits (which we ran in loose-tube cable terminating it in dedicated wallboxes) - on the receiver the inputs are crossed-over WRT the transmitter - they presume a TX-RX cross-over (but the manual makes no mention!).
- The nVidia FX1500 cards that ship with the Avids have both RGB (SVGA) and DVI on their 29-pin DVI-I connectors but the card detects if a monitor is connected and mutes it's other output - so you can't used these splitters as the card doesn't support simultaneous analogue and digital output - bummer!
So I'd recommend these (with the normal warning about
doing the fibre properly!)
