VideoInsight ’10 Seminar by Tektronix July 21, 2010 Hilton LA/Universal City Hotel, Universal City, CA

Posted By Barry Goch on July 27, 2010 12:00 am | Permalink
Tektronix began their VideoInsight '10 series of seminars on the West Coast starting in Burbank, California on July 20th then heading down to the Universal Hilton the next day. I attended the Universal session and found myself amongst fellow editors, studio engineers, broadcasters, and more. Tektronix's Steve Holmes was the lead presenter and he gave an excellent presentation. In fact, I was very impressed by the professionalism and execution from the entire Tektronix team.

The first part of the presentation was entitled Audio Loudness Monitoring and Measurement. Steve discussed Dialnorm and demonstrated how to use the scopes to measure loudness. He went on to point out that new legislative standards are working their way through congress, HR 6209, the CALM act:

http://www.opencongress.org/bill/110-h6209/show

and content providers and broadcaster should be aware of this pending change to FCC policy.

He also referred to the ATSC standard:

ATSC RP A/85

http://www.atsc.org/cms/standards/a_85-2009.pdf

As a reference on the topic of loudness.

After a short break, Steve moved in to discussing Ancillary Data Monitoring. He mentioned the importance of the AFD, Automatic Format Description, flag in the ancillary data stream. He pointed out that if the AFD flag is in two different locations in the ancillary data, the picture could flicker between aspect ratios. Steve also showed where the SD and HD closed captioning data is stored in the ANC area and he also showed how the Tektronix scope can overlay the captions onto picture

After a lunch sponsored by Tektronix, Steve lead us through Color and Gamut Monitoring. He demonstrated their new spearhead display that shows color vector and saturation (Color Lightness, Saturation, and Value) in one display. He also suggested the that error setting be set to 1% to avoid single pixel anomalies setting off error messages. The errors are logged with time code read from video stream. To help people like me see exactly where errors are in the frame, Steve suggested enabling Bright Ups on the picture display to show where errors are in the image. He also mentioned that the Scopes are controllable via a web interface and also a USB interface on the front of the scope for downloading screen grabs

And for those working in 3D, the WFM 8300 can split a 3D image into two streams to monitor each eye for color and luminance. You can also use the line select to check parallax

The day was wrapped up with a session entitled Waveform Monitors as a Creative Tool in Color Correction with expert colorist, Steve Hullfish. Steve is the author of two industry standard books on color correction. I spoke with Steve on our lunch break and found him to be an excellent resource for the grading questions I had. Unfortunately, I had to leave for a meeting and missed his session. No worries though, the VideoInsight tour continues July 27th in New York.

http://www.tek.com/forms/response/video_insight_10/short/form/

It was a presentation of knowledge using Tektronix gear and not a heavy sales pitch. For those of you not in LA for Siggraph, I highly recommend attending.