Category Archives: Connectivity

HDMI 2 is going to be released soon…and we mean to tell you about it and a whole lot more.

100BaseT HD A/V Spec Released/Promoted

Made possible by a chipset from Valens Semiconductor, the HDbaseT Alliance is inviting companies to join. There is a HDBaseT Comparison Table listing details of other current and future technologies alongside the HDBaseT 1.0 spec.

The HDMI cable was an incredible advance when it first arrived, but it isn’t easy to pull one through conduit and create an end in situ. The cost of using the technology was also the cost of the chipset, plus a payment based upon quantity with the HDMI alliance. The HDBaseT Press Release doesn’t mention any license fees.

 

It takes just a little thinking to realize how important a technology that can pass network data, USB, control data, daisy-chain (or star) devices, plus pass audio and video. The pr mentions a video recorder serving all devices in a multi-TV house, but it goes much farther. The digital signage field has handled some of these protocols, for example, but it has been through proprietary work. 

More data: Find chip prices and if there is licensing considerations.

DCI Compliance – Then There Were Three [Updated]

The good news is that after 10 years of TI doing the yeoman work of making the digital cinema industry happen, they finally have gotten two of their OEMs past the goal.

They also announced that there are now 300,000 3D capable projectors in the field. But that was a different group making noise for a different industry.

Congrats to TI. Next up, a server company…bets anyone?

[Update: Christie PR was able to help parse the noise…]:

Yes, there is a difference in our announcement.  Barco’s announcement says only that they’ve passed the “procedural” portion of the CTP.  Christie is announcing they’ve passed everything, which includes the  procedural AND design aspects, so we’re much closer to receiving complete DCI compliance certification.
Here’s Barco’s announcement:
Kortrijk, Belgium, 17 March 2010 — Barco, a global leader in digital cinema announced today that its ‘Series 2’ digital cinema projector has successfully passed the procedural test for DCI compliance administered by CineCert, the leading 3rd party authorizing test facility.
Hope this helps.

 So there. We now know better what to watch for.

Professional Differences – Set Top Boxes

There are 4 other topics, just as important, but not as buzzword compliant? Why not?

Because the standards in this field are off in the distance.

That can be better said. Today’s standards are many. A cohesive standard is off in the distance, but components of it will be implemented on an adhoc basis. The loser will be the facility who can’t adapt…and likely, one won’t know until the last moment.

For example: What if a right’s holder decides they want to put a professioal grade encryption on the next live event? Will the consumer box that has been used successfully for opera all these months work?  No. Can it be modified to work. No. Will a professional box be able to accept a code at the last second via the ethernet port (a port that the consumer box doesn’t have!)? Yes.

If there are problems with lip sync, can the projectionist adjust the consumer unit? Need you ask?

The report can be downloaded from the EDCF website. Don’t forget to support the European Digital Cinema Forum when you can. The Member’s Only site has many more interesting documents. Membership is not onerous.

Going Live! See the Annex Page

Arqiva Set Top Box Query–Pro or Cut off?

ISDCF Brings Light To Series II Issue

Digital Cinema User Alert #1; TI Series 2 Projectors and Open Captions/Subtitles

the industry service group released a pdf statement dated 12 May 2010 which speaks to a problem with a connectivity process named CineCanvas™. This capability has been part of the TI feature set since early 2004, allowing subtitles and captions to be ‘drawn’ on the screen by the chip instead of by a process of being ‘burned in’. Not only is the appearance significantly better, but it allows the studios and distributors to streamline their delivery processes.

At the September 2009 IBC Convention in Amsterdam, an announcement was made by TI that there would be a delay, and that a software revision would come in Q2. Several server companies scrambled to provide server generated subtitles, Doremi being the first to announce.

But at a recent plug-fest it was found that there are ‘issues’ with this method which made distributors go back to ‘burning in’ the subtitles. And thus, this announcement.

In the larger EU countries like Italy and France, where overdubbing is an art-form mandated by the government and by long-practice, this isn’t an issue. The German and Spanish market are also renowned for their dubbing work. Children’s films wouldn’t be included in the problem either, since children aren’t expected to read and so their movies are traditionally dubbed.

This is much the same in the Asian markets. But, integrators – be aware of this issue, and don’t let it happen again. (See the wikipedia ‘dubbing’ article for more detail.)

EU Dubbing Countries

     Dubbing only for children: Otherwise solely subtitles      Mixed areas: Countries using occasionally full-cast dubbing otherwise solely subtitles      Voice-over: Countries using usually one or just a couple of voice actors whereas the original soundtrack persists      General dubbing: Countries using exclusively a full-cast dubbing, both for films and for TV series blue/red for belgium and slovia Countries which occasionally produce their own dubbings but generally use dubbed versions from another country whose language is sufficiently similar that the local audience understands it easily. (Belgium and Slovakia)

MCE 8X Blu-ray Disc External Recordable Drive Drive delivers speedy performance via USB

  • For the full article, read: MCE 8X Blu-ray Disc External Recordable Drive Review | Storage | From the Lab | Macworld
  • Oct 16, 2009 1:30 pm    by James Galbraith, Macworld.com
  • The drive can burn 25GB Blu-ray (BD-R) discs and 50GB BD-R DL discs at speeds of up to 8X. Burning data BD-R/RW is supported by OS X’s Finder or through a third-party application like Roxio Toast. You can burn high definition Blu-ray discs to watch on your home theatre or component Blu-ray players using the latest version of Apple’s Compressor (; part of the Final Cut Studio), or with Roxio’s High-Def/Blu-ray Disc plug-in for Toast Titanium. And though some Windows software allows you to watch Blu-ray movies on your PC, these high definition discs are not viewable on your Mac. Aside from Blu-ray media, the drive can burn all flavors of DVD, +/-, RW, DL, as well as CDs and CD-R discs.

    The drive was one of the fastest Blu-ray burners we’ve tested, though the speeds were similar whether I used USB 2.0 or eSATA. In fact, when copying data from DVD-R disc to the desktop, the drive took longer when connected via eSATA than when connected via USB 2.0. The drive wouldn’t work at all with Roxio’s Toast when connected via eSATA. I wish the drive didn’t include an eSATA port–it’s no faster than USB when burning optical discs and relatively few people have eSATA cards installed in their Mac. But the eSATA port is included, and because it was flaky, I have to ding it.

  • The MCE 8x Blu-ray Disc External Recordable Drive is a relatively speedy optical drive. Its USB 2.0 connection worked flawlessly, creating no expensive coasters during our testing. Its eSATA performance was no faster than USB and the drive couldn’t burn discs with Toast when connected in that way. If you intend to use the drive with USB, it’s worth a look. Timed Trials

    Interface Burn and Verify
    DVD-R at Max
    Speed in Finder Copy Data
    from DVD-R
    to Desktop Burn DVD+R DL
    at Max Speed
    Toast Burn BD-R at
    Max Speed
    Compressor Copy 8GB from
    BD-R USB 2.0 eSATA

    10:58 4:48 27:05 13.5 8:05
    10:58 4:57 N/A 13.53 7:57

    Scale = minutes:seconds Specifications

    Mechanism Connections Write Speeds Included Software

    Matshita BD-MLT SW 5584
    USB 2.0, eSATA
    BD-R: 8X max; BD-R (DL): 8X max; BD-RE: 2X; BD-RE (DL): 2X; DVD-R: 16X max; DVD-R (DL): 8X max; DVD-RW: 6X max, DVD+R: 16X max; DVD+R (DL): 8X max, DVD+RW: 8X max; CD-R: 32X max; CD-RW: 32X max
    None. Toast Titanium 10 is a $100 option.

    [James Galbraith is Macworld’s lab director.]

  • QuickTime X walks before it runs

    Read the entire article at:

    MacUser: News: Analysis: QuickTime X walks before it runs

    Analysis 2:30PM, Thursday 17th September 2009

    By the time Apple came to develop video playing features for the iPhone, it was clear that the legacy QuickTime code wasn’t up to the job. That, together with Apple’s commitment to transition its applications to 64-bit Cocoa meant that something had to be done. So it took the engine it had built for the iPhone and used it to develop something new. That something was a complete, top-to-bottom re-write of the QuickTime framework. QuickTime X is not an upgrade to QuickTime 7, it’s a brand new framework and application.

    The result is a video playback engine that exploits the capabilities of modern graphics processing units and, on a reasonably modern Mac, allows smooth-as-silk high-definition video playback. The downside, apart from the lack of editing features, is that QuickTime X plays a very limited range of codecs and there’s no support for plug-ins to add new ones. And if your Mac doesn’t have a modern graphics card, performance may even be worse than in QuickTime 7.

    The good news is that QuickTime X is a beginning, not an end. Apple has taken a wise decision to focus on getting the basics right with QuickTime X and release it with limited features, rather than try and cram everything into what is essentially a 1.0 release. As with other applications, where the transition from Carbon to 64-bit Cocoa has been made without the addition of new features, Apple’s developers have been cautious but sensible.

    We can only speculate about where QuickTime will go from here because Apple, in line with its stance of not commenting on unannounced products, won’t tell us. But it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to imagine that future versions of QuickTime X, probably released along with updates to Mac OS X, will put back the missing features. So, in the next version, we might see support for plug-ins, and in the one after that, the return of the Properties window in Player, and along with it the ability to cut and paste sections from individual tracks. Although it’s unlikely that all the old features will return – for example, so much video is now shot on progressive scan video cameras that support for de-interlacing might be deemed unnecessary.

    In the meantime, QuickTime 7 will be updated to ensure it remains stable and secure, and will remain a part of Mac OS X for some time to come. It’s not an ideal situation, but developing a modern API for playing back audio and video, with support for Mac OS X, the iPhone, and Windows was never going to be easy. Apple has made many transitions in recent years; from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X, from PowerPC to Intel, and from 32-bit Carbon to 64-bit Cocoa, and it’s learned a great deal.

    Perhaps the most important lessons are not to try and do everything at once and to maintain support for the outgoing tool – whether it be Mac OS 9 with Classic, PowerPC with Rosetta, or QuickTime 7, while the replacement finds its feet. Classic has long since disappeared from the standard Mac OS X installation, Rosetta followed suit with Snow Leopard, and eventually QuickTime 7 will follow them. By then, QuickTime X will be several generations old and we’ll have forgotten what all the fuss was about when it was introduced.

    Kenny Hemphill

    intoPIX showcases its new PRISTINE JPEG 2000 Board

    A wide range of applications can be addressed using PRISTINE: Digital Cinema, Audiovisual Lossless Archiving, 3G Contribution, 3D Stereoscopy and Ultra- High-Resolution applications.“We are setting a new standard with the PRISTINE. It is really a breakthrough to have a board that can perform JPEG 2000 compression and decompression in 4K with this level of flexibility and performance”, says Jean-François Nivart, C.E.O. of intoPIX.

    For Digital Cinema Package creation (DCP), the PRISTINE offers ultra fast, fully DCI compliant 2K & 4K encoding with frame rates going up to 120fps for 2K and 30fps for 4K resolutions respectively. PRISTINE handles RGB, YUV or X’Y’Z’ content.

    For Broadcast Contribution, the PRISTINE can process virtually all HD formats in real-time, with the possibility of working in multichannel mode. This allows addressing major applications in contribution for HD, 3G and 3D stereoscopic.

    For Audiovisual archiving, PRISTINE uniquely accelerates JPEG 2000 encoding and decoding while supporting a wide range of resolutions up to 4K+ (4096×3112). The embedded intoPIX technology allows both Mathematically and Visually Lossless compression providing unaltered quality. The PRISTINE range answers the challenge of long term audiovisual content archiving.

    Combining several PRISTINE boards gives access to the most demanding applications in terms of high resolutions. Processing Ultra High Resolution 8K is now possible, with both Mathematically and Visually Lossless compression.

    The new PRISTINE JPEG 2000 Boards will be available starting Q4 2009. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Specifications on the PRISTINE JPEG 2000 boards are available at the intoPIX booth #10.D29 (Hall 10) during the IBC 2009 Exhibition in September and downloadable at www.intopix.com .

    About intoPIX intoPIX develops and commercializes high end image processing and security tools for large data streams with high intrinsic value. The applications focus in particular pictures with highly demanding requirements regarding quality, security and authoring rights. Based in Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium), intoPIX was established in 2005, quickly becoming the international reference for hardware-based JPEG 2000 coding solutions. More information on the company and its product range can be found at their website at www.intopix.com

    intoPIX s.a. Place de l’Universite 16

    B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve Belgium Tel: +32 (0)10 23 84 70 Fax: +32 (0)10 23 84 71 [email protected]

    It’s an Analog World by Design – Adrian Nastase

      For example, we can only hear signals within a very small portion of frequencies from about 12 Hz to 20000 Hz, out of a very large number of frequencies in the Universe.  We call this band of frequencies sound.  We can only see signals with wavelengths from 380 nm to 740 nm and this spectrum spread we call light.  We are limited in our perception, but these sensors are good enough for us.  For the rest of the signals, we build electronic equipment to enhance our sensors.

    From an article on the Mastering Electronics Design
    Read the entire article: It’s an Analog World by Design by Adrian S. Nastase
    Edited beyond Fair Use…so click on the link to read the full article

    The signals we receive from Mother Nature are continuous.  We don’t hear any discontinuity or choppiness in the sounds of ocean waves or bird songs and this is what makes the world analog.  From our point of view, with the sensors we have, we interact with our world continuously.  The signals have amplitude that can vary in time and are composed of a complex of frequencies.

    So how is Analog defined?  Merriam-Webster dictionary reads that analog is “of, relating to, or being a mechanism in which data is represented by continuously variable physical quantities.”  The word comes from the ancient Latin, analogus, or Greek, analogos, meaning proportional.  The term was adopted most likely due to the fact that the continuous signal we perceive is proportional to another continuous signal;  or …

    No matter the reason for which the word analog was associated with continuous electrical signals, the analog domain and the analog design are here to stay because we live in a continuous world as we perceive it.  The interface between our world and our instruments and electrical equipment has to be analog. …

    We need to amplify and filter the signals we capture … in analog domain and the circuits we achieve these operands and tasks with, are called Analog Signal Processing.

    Analog signals and analog processing have their own limitations and that is why we digitize the signals, …

    The design of the electronic circuits that manage the analog processing is very subjective.  There are many ways to handle different tasks in the analog domain, …

    The design cannot be automated as with the digital circuits.  Sure, there are computer tools like SPICE based programs, which can verify and calculate the analog design, but the schematics have to be created by a human being in the first place.  Maybe that is why we have so many computer tools to automatically create digital circuits, while the analog tools are still to be invented.  Human creativity is difficult to be automated.  Maybe a distant future, when artificial intelligence will approach creativity, might be able to automatically create analog circuits.  But, will it? 

    Read the entire article: It’s an Analog World by Design by Adrian S. Nastase 

    3Questions – Doremi’s Streamer

    Using extended SPL, they can decode the HDTV stream and play it over Cinelink II to the 2K projector. This solution supports 2D and also 3D encoded with Sensio.

    Question 2: Is this a standard option? And can current owners upgrade to include this feature?

    STREAMER is an option that can be added at any time to a configuration.

    Question 3: We imagine that eventually, a cinema complex will need several satellite feeds, and back-ups for those feeds. Can the Streamer take more than one feed? If there is a failure with a feed, can it automatically roll-over to a 2nd source.

    In current version, we take only one satellite feed but this TS can have several broadcast channels so the DCP2000 players can select various channels.

    Is an editorial appropriate here? OK; as you can tell, our feeling is that the future cinema infrastucture will be very sophisticated. There will be many different inputs that need to be correctly, quickly and securely routed to the different screening rooms…much like a modern post-production facility does. We therefore applaud the foresight that this valuable option that the Doremi Streamer presents.

    The Ultimate Guide to Maya

    The easy to navigate interface of the DVD makes learning easy as you can skip directly to a project and get your hands dirty playing in Maya. Need a little more instruction on Maya, watch Paul work through a workflow tutorial to build your foundation before tackling a project. the choice is yours, learn at your pace!

    Throughout the course of this 2 DVD set, you will learn:

        * Organization of the Maya interface

        * Essentials and workflow’s within Maya

        * Workflow for modeling NURBS surfaces

        * Workflow for modeling polygonal surfaces

        * Workflow for modeling subdivision surfaces

        * Shading and texturing techniques

        * Lighting tools and methods

        * Rendering settings and techniques

        * Basic workflow’s and tools for animation.

    For more information, see the Paul Conner site

    Paul Conner has been creating content in graphics and computer animation for over sixteen years. He is currently a Certified Maya Instructor, and founder of the Digital Animation Center at the University of Colorado.

    Some of Paul’s clients include: The Museum of Nature and Science, Warner Brothers, The WB Network, The Discovery Channel, PAX-TV, Starz/Encore, 3D Magazine, Anheiser Busch, NBC, IMAX, Sire Records and Reader’s Digest. 

    Bright ~ 1080p ~ HDMI ~ Signage with BrightSign

    Sample image

     

    o Simple Networking – automatically download content from a folder on a web server, locally or over the Internet.

    o Managed Networking – With your own server or using a Brightsign Network Manager account with SSL support, you can organize, manage and update content and software remotely and securely. Units can be grouped together, creating and scheduling presentations to be deployed.

    o RSS & Time – Supports playback of RSS feeds, and updating time via the Internet.

    o Network Control – Send/Receive commands via UDP

    • Zones & Widgets for specialized concepts. You divide your screen into multiple, distinct content zones to playback videos, images, text and RSS feeds. Each zone has its own distinct playlist, and the layout and number of zones are configurable.

    o Also allows control of background color, background image, font, text color and supports PowerPoint style transitions effects between images.

    • 1080p with HDMI connections.

    • Some units specialized for kiosk use, some for presentation.

    Check them at: www.brightsign.biz

    Gefen Showcases New A/V Cinema Scaler Pro Solutions

    Gefen Showcases New A/V Cinema Scaler Pro Solutions for Integrating Pre-Show Advertising and Alternative Content in Digital Cinema Installations

    Amsterdam, Netherlands – Gefen’s new A/V Cinema Scaler Pro I and II provide two plug and play solutions for theatre operators seeking to expand their offerings. By integrating pre-show advertising and connecting satellite television, computer, video camera and gaming systems to the digital cinema projector, operators can rent the theatre for personal parties, important broadcast events and business meetings to build revenue.

    Both the A/V Cinema Scaler Pro I and II come in a rack mounted enclosure that supplies several inputs for today’s most popular audio/video formats. Each one offers robust scaling capabilities and format conversion. High definition video is output in the DVI format with accompanying audio that can be delivered as 7.1 DB25 or channeled through the theatre’s surround sound audio system.

    A/V Cinema Scaler Pro I

    The A/V Cinema Scaler Pro I with Analog DB25 Audio accepts up to six audio/video sources, providing two component video , one VGA , two DVI and one HDMI inputs. Audio is input in the HDMI format, in digital S/PDIF and TOSlink or analog L/R format. Audio can also be input and output as analog AES DB25 at up to 7.1 channels. The selected video is converted, if necessary, and output as high definition digital video in the DVI format, supporting resolutions to 2048 (2k). The on-screen and front panel LED displays guide users through all scaling features while the IR remote offers easy control. An RS-232 port is also provided. HDCP compliance is supported on the HDMI input.

    A/V Cinema Scaler Pro II

    The A/V Cinema Scaler Pro II with Analog and Digital DB25 Audio also allows the connection of six audio/video sources, outputting each selected source in the DVI format with 7.1 channels of analog DB25 audio. This unit also supports an additional digital audio input in DB25. With active analog and digital DB25 balanced audio outputs at up to 7.1 channels, the Pro II model offers a more enhanced audio option for theatres working with DB25.