Do you ever need timecode?

...and all you've got is your laptop or MP3 player? It happens to me sometimes, and then I'm glad of having a few minutes of code as a recording. It's here, on my Dropbox

Engineer's Bench podcast - "Digital Cinema"

Hugh and I are joined by Deluxe Digital's CTO Laurence Claydon to talk DCI, DI, projectors and Dolby ATMOS. Find it on iTunes, vanilla RSS, YouTube or the show notes website.

Beware the fibre contamination!

These are two pictures taken down my hand-held fibre microscope - you can see the core and buffer of two examples of fibres that were spliced maybe three months ago in a new building. I suspect builder/decorator dust contamination and even though they have had their cover-pieces on they aren't air-tight and so we're now looking at an extra 0.2dBs of loss on those circuits.

Not a whole hill of beans, but worth noting.  It is jolly hard to position and focus an iPhone over the eyepiece, but here is an image of what a new, uncontaminated fibre pigtail looks like (these are all multi-mod OM3 BTW). Aside from the JDSU microscope I also carry a Cletop cleaner when I'm on fibre mission. It's a small cleaner with a replaceable cartridge that allows you to swipe the end of the patch cord or pigtail with a fresh piece of dry-clean, lint-free material and it removes even stubborn stains.