My favorite rockumentaries of all time

1. "Still Bill"
   The film follows the life of Bill Withers, from his roots in West Virginia to his career in the United States Navy, to his famed musical career and post-retirement family life.


2. "Sound City"
   In 1991 Nirvana recorded the album Nevermind at Sound City Studios. The band's drummer Dave Grohl was inspired to create the documentary after he purchased several items from the studio, including the Neve 8028 analog mixing console, when the studio closed in 2011.


3. "Muscle Shoals - the greatest recording studio in the world"
   Documentary film about FAME Studios and Muscle Shoals Sound Studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.


4. "Oil City Confidential"
   
   A film by Julien Temple about the early days of Dr. Feelgood, Oil City Confidential, premiered at the London Film Festival on 22 October 2009, and received a standing ovation.


5. "Pink Floyd; Wish you were here"
   
   The film gives an extensive insight of concept, recording the songs and designing the album cover. It includes exclusive interviews with almost every key person, who participated in producing the album. It is the second Pink Floyd documentary by Eagle Rock.


6. "You've got a friend; the Carole King story"
   
   In her own words, the story of Carole King's upbringing in Brooklyn and the subsequent success that she had as half of husband-and-wife songwriting team Goffin and King for Aldon Music


7. "Classic Albums; 'Damn the Torpedoes' by Tom Petty"
   http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00x7chg
   

HDR for Television; HLG, DolbyPQ etc - a primer

I have been such a poor blogger! It's been a month-and-a-half since I set finger-to-keyboard but I have been busy at work and home. Here is a presentation I gave at the Soho Screening Rooms for one of Root6's Tech Breakfasts.


You can download the notes from root6.com.

HDMI, HDCP and SDi out from Bluray players

It's been a few years since the master HDCP key escaped into the wild and so it seems that particular content protection system is fundamentally wounded (if not dead!) but reputable manufacturers still respect the HDCP flag (even if no encryption is present) and the MPAA are still issuing device keys to manufacturers and volume keys to content producers.

So - I have been installing some Oppo Bluray players (nice, high end machines) and they support HDCP rather too aggressively; on a non-compliant display you don't even get the boot screen or any menus! So - an SDi converter is out of the question. 

The usual trick is to use one of these cheap'n'cheerful HDMI splitters which present a device key to terminate the signal but then send it to two outputs having done the decryption. 

Works perfectly with Backmagic HDMI->SDi converters with the exception of the audio; the Blackmagic knows nothings about DTS+ or DolbyDigital (or any of their variants) - it only understands the basic PCM stereo part of the bitstream and so that's what you get in the SDi stream.

However - in the case of these Oppo 103D players they have decoders on board and present the de-compressed audio out of the back as good old analogue feeds;

In these rooms I've fed them to the analogue inputs of the Tektronix WVR8200 test set and hence by selecting a different audio input you can toggle the TC Electronix ClarityX controller between 7.1 from the Avid and surround sound from the Oppo.

New grading room - a few notes.

I've been building a Baselight room recently - the monitor is a Sony X300 UHD/HDR display (expensive!) with an AKA custom grading desk. Here are some photos;

All courtesy of my colleague & pal Graham McGuinness

1. The X300 is a heavy beast at 16Kg and if you want to hang it off a monitor arm - the only one I found suitable was from Novus; we've bought a few things from them recently and they are a very high quality manufacturer. The TSS-range is here but we tend to purchase from our friends at MW/ThinkingSpace as they hold stock and are super-helpful.
2. The X300 out-of-the-box was a tad hot in 2k mode (they distinguish between rasters as 2k/4k - not HD/UHD; just to keep the DCI film snobs happy!). I was expecting the EBU recommended 100Cd/m² but was 125 Cd/m² and a bit blue-in-the-whites, but not enough to bother adjusting unless you were pointing a probe at it! So - this one is correct for rec.709 but the customer (hasn't yet) decided what their wide-colour-gamut and high-dynamic-range workflows will be.
3. I had my friend and carpenter Tony Andrews (Andrews Construction - for all your carpentry and building requirements!) built the lightbox. In the past I've talked about Crown Plain Grey 5574 Matt Emulsion as being suitable for the backwall, but that's now a discontinued paint and so an excellent match is Delux's "CN8 Grey Steel 3".
4. Display Port monitors and Baselight-1 - so running Baselight v.6 on an HP Z840 means you have a four display-port output nVidia card. Historically they would prefer you to use DVI monitors, but this is 2016 and a pair of HP Dreamcolor 27" monitors are being extended via Amulet (my favourite KVM extender). In this case you need to have Filmlight provide a new version of xorg.conf for X to see higher order monitors as primary and secondary GUI displays. 
5. The Blackboard2 control panel is fed over a DVI adaptor hanging off port 2 of the nVidia. Be warned! It runs at a very funny raster (3460 pixels wide!?) at only 15 FPS. It doesn't respond to EDID requests and so consequently you have to use a very simple extender to run it to the suite - no KVM-over-IP, just a fibre balun (I used one of these).
6. Similarity the USB for the Blackboard declares itself as an HID device but then ignores HID-probes, so again, only use a balun to extend the USB, no over-IP.

Fuji IS-Mini software for colour space conversion

For patch generation and LUT testing the Fuji IS-mini is hard to beat for sub-£1k. LightSpace will drive it for profiling monitors and since it has both HD/SDi and HDMI outputs it is very useful all the way to 1080 lines at 60P.

The software that comes with it is kinda utilitarian but can speak to multiple IS-minis over either USB or ethernet. So you can load LUTs to several units from a single computer and it will even listen to the commands from a Tangent Wave control panel and you have a very canny little grading system (all be with no memory!) - but for live colour correction it is used everywhere from HDR cameras feeding BT.1886 productions to folks who need to correct for unusual cameras in an otherwise standard OB environment.

Having said all that it isn't a patch (pardon!) on LightSpace but they have just released an unlocked beta that feature colour space conversion LUTs which might be of interest to general colour-tinkerers.

From Fuji's site;

The rapid adoption of 4K Rec2020 and the development of HDR has necessitated an increased need for colour space conversions, such as color gamut, various LOG curves and numerous other standards. As requests for products to handle this have increased, FUJIFILM has begun to develop a system for IS-mini users that will allow greater flexibility with colour spaces.

And the obligatory bullet points;

• Convert the content of Rec709 to Rec2020. 
• Convert the image data of SLog3 / SGamut shooting to HDR ST2084 / Rec2020. 
• Convert Legal range to Full range 
• Convert the image data of the various cameras to SLog3 / Rec2020. etc... 

Grab it here.

Memories of 1999 at Resolution Soho

I'm working the weekend in a building that has been a TV facility for the last couple of decades. I had the privilege of being Chief Engineer here during 1998-2003 when it was the Soho branch of the Resolution Post Group. 

Having opened a few cable-risers it looks like this place is largely the same (aside from the decoration) and in many of the rooms there is still equipment I either purchased or had the pleasure of fixing or calibrating.

Custom talkback box; this is a little thing I home-brewed around 2000 - it's just a talkback box with a cue-light button on it. Still in use though!

This wooden-surround for the Wacom tablet for a Softimage DS workstation had an little audio switcher built into it (selects between DS, VTR return and CD). The grahics tablet was originally hidden inside the polycarbonate sheet so you couldn't see it.

This monitor shelf was a bit of a mission; galvanised scaffolding poles are held in a triangle shape by chandler's wire & connectors. The tear-shape glass shelf sits on top of that (the ends of the poles have rubber caps) and the monitor's weight stresses the structure to keep it solid. I thought it would collapse in a week but here it is a decade-and-a-half later!

Also notice the PMC TB1 loudspeakers; most of the rooms here still have them. They were all purchased between 1999 and 2001 and are all still sounding good.

Back in 1999 there were no WiFi walkabout 'phones or office-grade DECT handsets. So - I bought the best domestic ones I could find and then spent a few days seeing where the best place was for the base-stations for maximise coverage for the runners, engineers and tape-ops (we still had those!). It turned out to be an external wall at the rear of the building. They're still there! (Although no longer used).

STOP PRESS!

My good pal Malcolm Baldwin reminded me that he'd made the talkback box - he commented that he'd never really liked it but I thought it was splendid. Just shows that some engineers have higher standards than other...!

HPA Tech Retreat, 2016 - I'm speaking about CWDM & signal transport for 4k/UHD/HDR

Next week I'll be representing at the HPA Tech Retreat; I even made it to the "featured" list!

From the Root6 blog;

In a session titled ‘Fibre/CWDM Infrastructure for Live and Remote Rec. 2020 and HDR Applications,’ Phil will argue that we now have enabling and affordable technology with CWDM to deliver high quality images without resorting to IP. “With the (some would say unseemly) rush to IP and Rec.2022, are we in danger of losing the very things that make broadcast video production so good – namely low-latency and uncompressed pictures? With a four-fold increase in data rates brought by UHD/4K and the last five years having seen commoditisation of CWDM, – we now have an enabling technology for quality in the face of the IT department!”