Each week when I descend into CBC Vancouver to do my technology column with CBC Radio morning shows, I pass this long line of computer and TV monitors. This one seemed to be new this morning.
I don’t know what any of this means, but it’s COOL. I want it in my house.
So… er, what exactly does all this mean?
– Tod
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Would look good on the bridge of the Enterprise
Upper left - waveform monitor showing luminance values, including in this case vertical blanking I think. Been a long time since I played with one o’ those, but it keeps your video whites from clipping at 1 volt.
if you scan up on the high channels of most cable TV providers, you’ll find something like this.
Top Left: Video Waveform (like Ted said)
Top Right: Eye Diagram (digital signal test)
Bottom Left: Just a picture
Bottom Right: Audio Level and Phase Measurement
Ron: Seconded on that Enterprise idea. Any iteration of the Enterprise, although with the colour scheme, I’d recommend the “A” version from Undiscovered Country.
It would also fit in nicely on my Great Canadian Space Opera idea(no relation to Canadia 2056 or Elizabeth Bear’s “Jenny Casey” novels…)
Reminds me of War Games… remember that? With Matthew Broderick… circa 1983.
It’s video, how important can it be?
/facepalm
Hey Tod, what’s your PIN?
The bottom left one looks like a hockey game.
We see this in the arctic (Yellowknife) everyday/night: all the true elements of CBC & Canada: hockey, northern lights, the north star…
Sunshine - like this?
I believe it’s one of these.
Only a few years ago / In the analog tv world they use these. (that one is still being used today, not at the cbc…)
This is a WVR7020 rasterizer, the swiss army knife of broadcast measurement tools. It can take an HD or SD digital signal and look at the video and audio signals in multiple views.
In the upper left there is a waveform view. Technically there is no colour burst in SDI video stream, so the software creates an NTSC interpretation of the signal. The left half of the waveform includes the chroma component while the right half has the chroma stripped so you just see lumanance.
The upper right waveform is an eye pattern which is used to assess the quality of the digital signal path. Things like bad connectors and long cable runs can distort the signal and cause the eye patten to get “fuzzy” or jitter horizontally. Fuzzy or jittery eye may mean that the next piece of equipment won’t be able to decode the signal.
Bottom left is a picture view, which can have the embedded closed captioning displayed as it would be seen at home.
Bottom right is the audio monitoring view. In digital video you can embed the audio right in the video stream, so this unit de-embeds the audio and allows you to look at it on both monitors and a phase meter.
There are many other views you can pick from based on what you are trying to evaluate. It is a nice piece of kit.
The thing you often see on the upper channels of your cable system is a spectrum analyzer. It lets the cable techs see what frequencies are active over a piece of RF spectrum.
Is it really a WVR7020 and not a WVR7120?
I like the War Games analogy