Boland's new hi-brite 7" camera/on-set monitor

It seems to be a thing for small on-set/camera monitors that they should have a hi-bright mode when being used in non-edit environments. The Boland BVB7a is an excellent little monitor and can be powered from the camera's 12v battery feed as well as coming with a DC PSU. It can take SDi (single or dual-link) as well as HDMI and composite (yes!). I shot a little video of me profiling it's colour capabilities.

BM UHD/4k converters - some gotchas

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/miniconverters/techspecs/W-CONM-17

I've used a few of these guys recently - Blackmagic's quad HD/SDi input to HDMI 2.0 output for taking the UHD / 4k (either tile or 2SI standard) and making something that will display on a 4k domestic TV.

They seem to work quite well, but here are a few things that I had to get around;

1. Firmware - I had two identical ones and I initially tested both with Quad-SDi out of Avids at UHD (3840x2160 at 25 & 30P) - all good. But when I started a 4k project (4096x2160 at 24P) only one worked - the other showed nothing on it's HDMI output. Eventually discovered only one of them had current (v.7 as of May 2016) firmware!
2. Power cycle if colour space wrong - both have periodically decided they are going to mistranslate Y, Cb, Cr -> R, G, B - power cycling fixing it; hopefully the next firmware update will stop this?
3. Four signals are always interpreted as UHD; if the Avid is running an HD project the four SDi feeds out of the back are all identical and the converter has no way of knowing it's not quad-link. The Tektronix 8200-series and the Canon VP3010 monitor both have to be told (and I set presets for just this) but the BM converter needs to see three or fewer signals to realise it's only a 1920x1080 raster. In the case of this job setting up two macros on the video router (one to route all four, one to send a non-used input to i/p's B, C, & D of the BM).
4. Glad I'm rocking a MacBook Pro! I would not have been able to update the firmware otherwise as I've yet to move on from Windows 7 - and the workshop PC is still 32-bit Windows 7!

The Engineer's Bench Podcast - tops tips for video

Next in our tips series - broadcast video.
Go to the website for a PDF of the notes.

https://youtu.be/18QR4E1yzKI



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

Tech Breakfast – “Encryption”, Soho Screening rooms, London

A presentation I gave; starting with the fundamentals of cryptography (difference between symmetric and public-key etc), I talked about encryption techniques used in the Enigma machine (with a genuine, working example) through to HDCP and the other forms of content protection used in our industry: 

• Symmetric vs Public-key crypto 
• Examples – DES, AES/Rijndael etc 
• HDCP, Blueray and the MPAA etc 
• PCoIP – security of KVM extenders 

Notes are here
http://www.engineersbench.com/phil/Public/Root6-misc/TechBreakFast_March2016_Crypto.pdf

Crypto - March 2016 Root6 Tech Breakfast notes & Ross Anderson

You can grab my notes here, event details http://www.root6.com/news/tech-breakfast-encryption/

Also - good watching on YouTube:

A review of Colour Reproduction in Electronic Imaging Systems: Photography, Television, Cinematography by Michael S. Tooms

All of my colourimetry comes from doing it; my theoretical knowledge isn't that great as I didn't study it at university and the colour training at the Beeb, although entirely appropriate to what a TV engineer needs was just that; TV-centric.

Over the last ten years I would credit the following industry colleagues for widening my understanding and appreciation of colour reproduction;

1. Martin Euredjian of eCinema Systems was a colourist and telecine engineer before he started making reference-grade LCD monitors - Root6 sold them for a while (around a decade ago) and Martin was very generous in his product training. He opened my eyes to the problems of metameristic failure between different display technologies.
2. Martin Parsons of Image Eyes who used to be the head of colour at MPC; like me he's now a colour-gun-for-hire but I always enjoy getting his take on things and since he 's done an awful lot of calibration he knows when it's appropriate to maybe go slightly off standard to match two displays and keep the colourist happy.
3. Steve Shaw is the proprietor of LightIllusion where I have bought probes, LUT boxes and of course LightSpaceCMS which really is the best calibration package out there. In terms of speed and accuracy nothing comes close.  Steve is very gracious with his knowledge and runs a good forum on his website as well as being a prolific presence on Lift, Gamma, Gain.

I recently was recommended Michael S. Toon's book Colour Reproduction in Electronic Imaging Systems: Photography, Television, Cinematography.  I picked this up at Amazon to read on the iPad Kindle app and like most academic volumes it comes in around sixty quid.

So - as mentioned, my background is the CIE1931 chromaticity chart and how that then relates to Rec.601, 709, the DCI-P3 colour space and Rec.2020 (the proposed colour space for UHD TV which is as yet no available on any current-model monitor).

Any practical skills I have with colour come from;

1. Calibrating and matching TV cameras ("racking" or "shading" in the USA) for studio shoots.
2. Calibrating and matching TV monitors - firstly in tape edit suites (it was always common practise to have two grade-1 monitors; the record monitor and the preview monitor).

So I think I have a good eye for quickly spotting how two displays differ - I can match two monitors or cameras pretty quickly but like most people I don't have perfect colour memory (and don't let any colourists tell you that they do!).

The first things the book set me straight on was the history of colour research before the CIE1931 diagram. Before cinematography and early colour TV experiments the concerns of industrial colour science was mixing of paints and pigments. An important consideration in colour mixing is being able to predict new colours from the volumetric mix of two pigments and the early colour models (Munsell and Guild & Wright) tried to reflect this with a choice of primaries at 460, 530 and 650nm giving rise to constant lines of "just noticeable difference" - JND - on their chromaticity charts.

However - the negative lobes associated with the gamma (green) and rho (red) responses mean that an all-encompassing colour chart should place the primaries outside the spectral-locus which gives rise to non-consistent lines of JND and a grey-scale definition in video colour spaces that seems to be at odds with the equal-energy point in the centre of the CIE1931 chart that gives us our white mix.

one of the worksheets that are available for download with all the empirical data used in the book tabulated and plotted

So I have no hesitation about recommending this book; it is readable and has enough maths so that you never think there is an slight-of-hand going on. For me it has filled in the holes that bothered me in my knowledge of colourimetry. If all the changes that are going on currently in the industry (principally Rec.2020 and the XYZ colour space) are something you have to deal with then this provides and excellent bedrock of colour knowledge.

Free Tektronix UHD/4k info posters

Get 'em here & here!