Telcos and dark fibre

My institute's magazine is superb - unlike most industry/free rags it is readable and reminds me of how good Scientific American was in the eighties. One of the best articles last week was on the amount of dark fibre there is in the world. The link (above) is to the article;

The telecommunications industry built too much fibre-optic network capacity during the 1990s. Companies such as KPNQwest, FLAG, Global Crossing and Tyco borrowed too much money and laid too much fibre, and suffered the consequences. Is that over-capacity still present? It’s not clear.

This diagram is missed out of the HTML version of the article.

Balanced to unbalanced audio - wiring?

Simon, one of our wiremen asked me the following question;

...why do we always cut-back the black core when wiring FST into RCA (phono) connectors?

Back when all broadcast gear drove balanced lines with a proper rep-coil (a 1:1 audio transformer) you could safely bodge-unbalance a balanced line by shorting the cold to the screen and you get full signal across half of the sending rep-coil and everything worked. Nowadays not all equipment drives a balanced line this way - may bits of gear use op-amps to derived the +ve and -ve going halves of the balanced pair (via the inverting and non-inverting inputs - think 741 Op-amp). If you pull one of the signal cores to ground you effectively short one bit of silicon and it sits there warming up. That may not be a problem, but in the case of Avitel distribution amplifiers (well, after 1995) they driver stage burns out after a few months (long after the SI engineers have left!). This exact problem bit my backside when I worked at Oasis TV and all the monitoring switchers in the machine room had unbalanced inputs.
The only downside of using my method is that you loose 6dBs of level, but probably into a piece of equipment that wasn't calibrated (like a DVD recorder or TV). I think that's a worthwhile compromise to avoid the possibility of frying the backplane on audio distribution amps (or suchlike).

How can you soar like an eagle when you're surrounded by turkeys?

Graham made that observation!

Channels Four and Five

I must have made a subconscious connection last week when I saw Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth film on Channel Four. I made that entry about incandescent bulbs. Although I was glad they showed it I wish Channel Four would be true to their climate change denying past - remember The Great Global Warming Swindle which Channel Four commissioned, transmitted, released on DVD and stood by when Ofcom found it to have misled the public? I made a rather excellent (in my opinion!) blog post here where I also mentioned bulbs(?!)
Anyway - I used to watch Channel Four a lot ten years ago and Channel Five never - the situation today has almost entirely changed with me watching Five a bit and Four rarely (I did rant on about it after Christmas).
Now then, we do a lot of work for Five and their engineering department are a really nice bunch of guys. I was in their main transmission suite last Wednesday and was surprised to see that although promos, stings, ads and other interstitials come off server main programme segments still come off tape. I did my heart good to see a stack of DVW-500s!

Best Ringtone

I like a good comedy ringtone - something that is distinctive and makes other people smile. Here are my most recent ones - feel free to download and use them;

• Everybody, Everbody! from Homestar Runner
  
• Trogdor! the burninator
  
• Spanish Flea - the cheesiest Herb Alpert intro
  
• Minimum Wage by They Might Be Giants - the whip crack is the best!

So much better than some dime-a-dozen R&B hit!

VNC on the Mac

I've been bugging my colleagues for a better VNC client than Chicken of the VNC but nobody knew of one! It turns out that Remote Desktop (which has VNC as a subset protocol) also includes a lightweight client (in Leopard). From Finder do;

Go > Connect to Server and enter VNC://machine-name-or-IP

and enjoy the love - it is a lot more responsive than Chicken as well.

Planned Obsolescence and the end of tungsten bulbs

Planned Obsolescence is a terrible thing not only from a consumer's point of view but also it's terrible for the environment. I have an uncle who worked for Osram and he always felt uneasy about the practice (that was very common in the manufacture of incandescent light bulbs) of pumping a transient high current through the bulbs as they came off the production line to ensure they failed after an average of 1000 hours. Without that final conditioning (sic!) a tungsten filament bulb will last tens of thousands of hours. In fact some companies sold those bulbs for many times the price in industrial quantities to users for whom sending a person down the sewer (for example) to replace a bulb hugely outweighed the price of the lamp.
I'm glad the compact fluorescent has put pay to the tungsten lamp, and hopefully LEDs will be the next evolution - they consume a tiny fraction of the current for the same light output.
Let's hear it for the rainforests!

Established standards Apple play fast 'n' loose with

• RS422 - Of only minimal interest to the average user but RS422 is used extensively in television equipment. It is THE remote control protocol for driving VTRs/Telecines/effects machines etc. When Avid, Media 100 and IMmix VideoCube started delivering offline editing machines based on Macs in the early nineties they use the onboard RS422 serial ports to control the VTR and it works (just!). RS422 is a balanced serial standard where the Tx and Rx lines of an RS232 ports are balanced (either in a rep-coil or op-amp driving the line). Merely by providing a Tx pair and strapping one side of the pair to GND isn't good enough!
  
• USB - I know the iMac was the first machine to popularise this now-ubiquitous interface but why do Apple provide USB cables with that little lump on the inner edge of the socket? I have to reach for a set of pliers every time I use an Apple USB extension!
  
• SCSI - Apple have NEVER used the approved connector - from the very first Mac they used a 25-pin D type and when SCSI reached the v.3 spec (40MBytes per sec) with 50 or 68 pins for balanced working Apple pulled the same stunt as RS422 - balanced with one side of each pair tied to GND!
  
• PCI - it's why you have to buy an Apple-specific version of any card more complicated than a USB card!
  
• DVI - What was all that stuff with the Apple Cinema Display connector? It was just DVI in a different (more expensive) form.
  
• EIDE CD/DVD drives - I lost count of the number of times I had to buy an Apple replacement optical drive that was a standard Sony/LG part but with APPLE FIRMWARE! A £50 drive that costs £250!
  

Tektronix - why they really are STILL the best! pt.1

I often say that customers only ever avoid buying Tek because they can't afford them - nobody ever says "...I need a Hamlet/VideoTek/Leader etc." because it's the best solution, rather it's cheaper than Tek. However - in the last year they've had the WVR/WFM 5000 range which puts pay to even that.

Anyway - last week I went to their Vision '09 day - a kind of pre-NAB training day for users and dealers. They ran four sessions.

Upgrades to WVR/WFM-series 'scopes

• ANC data - the HD-SDi ancilliary data stream can now encompass user-defined type. So, you could make a new ANC-type called whatever you like and as long as you know the pre-amble values you can have the Session Data page watch for those packets. Very useful if you wanted to individually mark the output of encoders and then check to see which machine made an HD-SDi stream. I suggested it to Root6's Dev team for Content Agent.
  
• Dolby information - On the Audio Session tile you can now see the values for the DolbyE metadata - Dialogue Normalisation, Dynamic range and Downmix. You can also check the the guardband figure to see if the embedded DolbyE data is locked to video.
  
• Black/Frozen - this is a new parameter in the video QC section - previously you could check for extended periods of silence on the audio but now the instrument can check for frozen or extended periods of black - it's window'able as well so you can check if the lower-third financial ticker (for example) has frozen despite the studio video continuing.
  
• Infinite Persistence - you can turn any display into a storage 'scope - useful for checking for those extreme events that occur rarely.
  
• AFD - a few more vertical-interval signals (although they're now rolled in with the ANC data) can be detected - widescreen flag, V-chip, etc.
  

Overall a superb set of features which come for free (just download the updater) - WFMs can do it off the USB socket on the front, WVR machines over the network. This will all be available after NAB.

Why I'm an engineer

I don't know if it's due to my being well and truly into my forties, more grey hair or the fact that I (nearly) have three teenagers but the last few months have found me pondering where my career is going and what's it all about. A couple of things caught my attention this week that really affirmed to me the importance of engineering in it's many forms.

1. G.K.Chesterton - a couple of years ago I banged on about one of my favorite books - The Man Who Was Thursday. Here is a fragment from chapter one where the hero Syme makes his first stand against the anarchism of Gregory;

Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria. No, take your books of mere poetry and prose; let me read a time table, with tears of pride. Take your Byron, who commemorates the defeats of man; give me Bradshaw, who commemorates his victories. Give me Bradshaw, I say!"
"I tell you," went on Syme with passion, "that every time a train comes in I feel that it has broken past batteries of besiegers, and that man has won a battle against chaos. You say contemptuously that when one has left Sloane Square one must come to Victoria. I say that one might do a thousand things instead, and that whenever I really come there I have the sense of hairbreadth escape. And when I hear the guard shout out the word 'Victoria,' it is not an unmeaning word. It is to me the cry of a herald announcing conquest. It is to me indeed 'Victoria'; it is the victory of Adam."

2. Marc Koska - In 1984 Koska read a newspaper article predicting the transmission of HIV through the reuse of needles and syringes. Koska was fascinated by the problem and vowed to do something about it. He studied how drug addicts used syringes in the UK, went to Geneva to learn about Public Health Policy, visited several syringe factories, studied plastic injection moulding, and read everything available on the transmission of viruses like HIV.
After a year of intense study, he concluded that syringe manufacture was the key to the problem. Koska designed a syringe (K1) that could be made on existing equipment with a small modification. It was made from the same materials and could be used in the same way as a normal syringe so that healthcare professionals would not have to retrain. K1 syringes cannot be used again so the next patient will also have a sterile and safe injection.

There is a very good interview with Koska on Radio 4's Saturday Live - you can catch it one the iPlayer.

Schmap

Schmap is a map/travel website that gives you a bit more with recommended walks and tourist information - it's very well done and works on mobile devices.
Oh, and they used one of my photos from Glastonbury (taken last Boxing Day!) - click the title link.

Expensive HDMI cables are a scam!

If you ever spend more than £15 on an HDMI cable you have wasted your money - the above story (on Engadget) isn't just true in the states, I've seen the same 'demo' of Monster cables on Tottenham Court Road.

Root6 offering training.....

...and I'm doing it!

See the link for details - I'm bemused that someone has labeled me an industry legend!

Double-insulated (class 2) mains equipment

A Class II or double insulated electrical appliance is one which has been designed in such a way that it does not require a safety connection to electrical earth.
The basic requirement is that no single failure can result in dangerous voltage becoming exposed so that it might cause an electric shock and that this is achieved without relying on an earthed metal casing. This is usually achieved at least in part by having two layers of insulating material surrounding live parts or by using reinforced insulation. The IEEE regs say that one of the layers can be an air gap and so as long as the chassis is predominantly made of plastic it's not hard to get class 2 certification for a piece of equipment (you'll see the sign on your DVD and probably even your TV). Now then, read the article linked (above) - it's possible to get residual voltage on the screens of video and audio cables, but once connected to other equipment (particularly broadcast VTRs which are class 1 - proper mains earth) you'll not even be able to measure them as they have no current carrying capacity.
Today I had to go to a facility where folks were getting shocks off the audio jackfields and at the edit desk monitor power supplies were blowing. I traced the fault to the DVD recorder AND the VHS machine - both were dumping around 90 volts onto the screen of the signal connectors.
I thought i was missing something fundamental - my first action was to PAT test all of the bay and desk mains and it all checked out. In the end it really was those two domestic machines. I got another DVD machine off the client which didn't have the problem and so I can only assume that some event in the past has compromised the internal isolation.

Counting Crows 'do a Radiohead'

I've liked the Crows since the early nineties - I've seen them a few times (most recently at the O2 Wireless Festival last summer). They are going label-free;

...the internet opens a world of limitless possibility, where the only boundaries are the boundaries of your own imagination. We want a chance to push those boundaries back as far as we can. Unfortunately, the directions we want to go and the opportunities we want to pursue are often things that our label is simply not allowed to do. We've been friends for a long time and we've worked together for a long time so they understand the direction we need to go in and we understand why they can't always go there with us. We all want what’s best for everyone which is why we've decided to part ways.

The world has gone mad

Despite the lack of clinical evidence, homeopathy remains one of the most popular complementary therapies in the UK.

That's because Joe-public isn't as good at making medical descisions as the people who trained for many years! What is it with the NHS giving us 'choices' in treatment - I am not medically qualified and I certainly don't want a doctor shirking his/her responsibility by letting me make choices on a subject I know little about. The whole reason I go to the doctor is because they know better than I do!
That's a very dark road to go down - before we know it hospitals will be offering quack unproven remedies because they appeal to a lot of people. Oh, wait....

ZFS - modern filesystem

I've banged on about Isilon in the past and it still seems like the best commercial solution for people who need large storage pools that are 110% reliable with predictable/scalable performance and a single mount-point (if necessary) that can grow dynamically without impacting the end users.
Given that NTFS and HFS are both looking a bit elderly now (and NTFS in Vista even more so) and the world needs a contemporary file-system that goes beyond what we needed back in the days of FAT16. The good news is that ZFS is supported fully in OS-X 10.6 server and so it may be the case that we see very Isilon-like storage pools built from more commodity hardware. If you're interested then the Wikipedia article (link in the title) gives a good overview of ZFS's zpools (their virtual volume construct) - they are analogous to Isilon's nodes.
Anyway - a superb into is to be had with this podcast featuring the guys from Sun.

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.

New technology - commodity hardware

AJA FS1 is a 1u gadget that sells itself as an everything-everything format/standards converter. At only a grand and a half there is no way it can compete with a broadcast-quality convertor from the likes of Snell & Wilcox but for most uses (A-D conversion etc) it looks superb. I had a few minutes to play with it and the really cute feature is that all of the functionality is available over a web interface. I think it's a good competitor to the Leith X75.

BBC Ingex is an open-source project to allow multi-cameras ingest to Avid & FCP codecs on commodity hardware. It runs under OpenSUSE 10.3 (and this because it needs the XFS file system). It can capture four streams of SD or two streams of HD in mildly compressed (typ. 2:1) for the online and 20:1 for the offline. For multi-camera studio shoots it seems like and excellent idea. Anyhow - we have a DVS box (the hardware of a Pronto with two Centurus cards) running it in the workshop and are trying to get familiar enough with it to re-install from scratch (including configuring the XFS RAID) and compiling the source - they are promising an RPM package!

Protools and the mighty XMon

I'm about to install a Protools rig and the one box I can never remember the correct cabling for is the XMon - so here is a list of the i/o and what you need to do;

CUE inputs: These are the feeds you are going to switch through to the headphone/monitors (typically the booth in a TV suite) - these should be normalled to the outputs of the 2nd 192 interface.
MAIN inputs: These are what will be fed to your surround speakers and so should ideally be normalled to the output of the first 192 interface.
SURROUND inputs: These would typically be the confidence return from a Dolby encode-decode path - so you could monitor how the surround mix is going to sound once it's been converted.
STEREO inputs: Like the 2TR return on an audio mixer this is the switched monitoring return of the VTR (typically) - folks often put the unbalanced output of the computer and maybe an iPod jack on i/p's 5-8.

CUE outputs: These will feed the booth headphone amp and in the case of a music studio any floor wedges.
MAIN outputs: These feed your 5.1 (or 7.1) monitoring system, your expensive Dynaudio speakers (for example).
ALT outputs: Used for grot monitoring - typically a stereo set of speakers (small ones) to test for domestic compatibility - can also drive a 5.1 amp.
TB/LB/Util: This D-type has in and out - an extra T/B mic for example, and the feed to the big plasma TV's speakers.

So there you go - remember that all eight of the D-types can carry eight audios, but in the case of none music studios (film & TV) you're unlikely to have more than stereo cue monitoring (for example).