Engineering - Talent Showdown

Last weekend we visited Coopers Technology College to give the producers of Talent Showdown a hand with the rig of their flyaway. Unfortunately we ran into a few technical hitches, notably due to a couple of unknown flaws in the rig of the sync. The initial system diagram (drawn by George Alton) can be seen below.

During the run up to the show there were minor flaws, mostly due to dodgy cable ends meaning that colour information kept being dropped in a couple of the camera outputs. Eventually we also realised that several of the cameras were losing their colour when they were run through the main programme bank of the vision mixer. After an hour or so of tweaking we couldn't find a solution and seeing as the preview outputs weren't losing their colour information we decided that it was something to do with the main programme bank. As a work around we then took the PVW output and ran this into a VDA and thus distributed it to the VTR's and the monitors.

Once the programme started we then ran into more problems, after the first five minutes a couple of the cameras kept dropping their sync during a cut from the vision mixer. This eventually got worse until they were not genlocking at all. The only feasible solution was to put tapes into all of the cameras and iso record them, all we had to do was sync up the timecode between the cameras to make it easier during the edit. We also recorded the camera that we were originally going to use as a back-up onto a VT Deck so that production would have plenty of options when it came to the final edit

After the shoot we realised that part of the reason that some of the cameras may have been losing their sync was because when shooting with composite video you have to be incredibly careful with timing, far more careful than we had been. Originally we ran the Black & Burst into a DA and distributed it across all of the equipment, what we apparently should have done is run a feed of BB into the vision mixer, then taking a separate assigned output of BB for each of the inputs and run these into the cameras, then taken the final BB o/p of the mixer into a DA and distributed that accordingly. We still need to verify that this is the case but at the moment that appears to be the thing that went wrong, however it doesn't explain why the timing was pretty much fine all morning!

At the end of the day we all managed to find a suitable work-around, it does mean that the post production team have a little more work to do and hopefully the footage doesn't turn out to be that bad.

Engineering - Cable Pulling

Here are a few photos of the cable looms that we pulled out of the Presentation and TX rack areas. After working out how we were going to organise them, they were then untangled from this mess and either coiled as single cables or made into new looms containing 8 cables each. This would hopefully allow the rig for Talent Showdown to go a lot quicker.

We also set up a small testing rig so consisting of an SPG, and a WFM both of which had long lengths of cable attached which could then be barrelled onto the end of the cable being tested. This served two purposes, firstly we could test the ends of the cables, ensuring that there was no signal dropout due to dodgy ends, secondly we could test that the overall length of the three cables did not affect the analogue test signal too much, this enabled us to have a test length which we could rig around.

Engineering - Cable Pulling

On Monday we began the new term by removing all of the cabling from the Presentation suite. As we had previously taken all of the equipment out and stacked it up in TV systems it seemed pointless to just leave the cabling underneath the bays, just waiting to be taken out after the move. Instead we saw an opportunity to re-use this cabling and in doing so, hopefully save ourselves some money.

The plan is to use a lot of the long coax in the Talent Showdown pre-record which is scheduled for this Sunday (28th) and basically make up the long cable runs from the cameras to the vision mixer by barreling lengths of coax together. Once this is over we can then begin cleaning up the cables and readying them for Matter, although we tried to keep the ends on many of the cables (again to decrease the amount material we'd have to buy in) we will inevitably have to re-end some of them and while this is being done we can ensure that we have batches of cables that are the right length for inter-equipment connection in our fly-away.

I'll post some pictures of the cabling up when we start inspecting it for Talent Showdown.

Interactive - Update

After speaking with Alex we have gathered a list of things completed and a list of things to do.

From last term here is what was achieved:

• Installed the Red5 server, this streams to our flash pods.

• Set up the proxy server for the trolley network, so that the internet can be accessed from one box.

• We have a much better understanding of how the Red5 streaming service should work and how the flash application (pods interface) will play the streams.

• The trolley has been racked correctly.

• The server and client are also setup, with the server now running the DHCP service required.

Things that need to be done:

• We need to either develop a server side application to the pods using one of the demos provided by Red5, an alternative would be to use Adobe's Flash Media Streaming Server, although we need to talk to sponsorship about this.

• For the client side of this application, Max will need to come up with an interface that we can use to bridge the gap to provide the data that he required.

• We need to set up the FCS workflow, James Uren said that he would help out with this in the first week back. All of the information to be used as metadata also needs to be gathered.

• We need to run power to all of the equipment in the racks.

• A live stream needs to be sent to Narrowstep via the Cisco media encoder, Max will need to re-skin the interface of the Narrowstep player to re-brand it to 2010 Rave Live.

• Jon was having trouble configuring the net booting process, we also found out that the Dell towers we are using as the pods might not be able to net boot at all, this may simply be an upgrade of the BIOS or revert back to booting from the USB pens.

• We need to work out the ports required.

There is still a lot of work to be done and we believe that the only way to break the back of this is to get the first years involved. This requires us sitting down and working out what roles they can fill. We also need to contact Max about getting access to the Media Bugs database and the Rave Live sign-up page on Media Bugs, this should preferably be done before we go back next week.

Engineering - Talent Showdown

Talent Showdown:
This is a pre-recorded programme (due to be shot on the 28th March) and the producers have asked for a hand with the flyaway and the rig. The plan is to build the flyaway at Coopers Technology College from which they can shoot their pre-recorded content, this will then be posted online for a viewer vote which dictates which "talent" will perfrom during Rave Live at Matter.
We accompanied them on a site visit last week to see what would be required. In order to minimise the fuss we are aiming to keep this as simple as possible, a basic 4 camera rig with a vision mixer, 2 VT Decks and monitoring. While on the site visit we drew up the rough system diagram shown below to give us a better idea of what we would need.


Several points arose during these initial planning stages:

• We would need to provide an SPG to keep everything genlocked

• The cable runs to the cameras were around 100m, this would have to be done over coax as the only cameras available were DSR500's and 570's, we now need to find out whether these are digital out or composite out, this would dictate the nature of the entire flyaway.

• Would we take both the monitoring and TX feed from the cameras (requiring twice as many cable runs) or would we just run the signals through a DA before the vision mixer thus eliminating the need for these cable runs.

Other than these points the rig should not be too difficult, as such we have notified the rest of the engineers and are waiting to see whether anyone would be willing to plan and then rig this show by the 26th March.

Engineering - Update

There have been several developments over the past week. The first concerns the transmission equipment, this was all removed from Pres today and placed up in TV Systems for the time being. The idea is to store it here whilst the rest of the chain is being constructed, this allows easy access to the individual items of equipment. Although this seems like a good idea on the surface, it may prove to be a bad move because now there is no reference to build the new system from, whereas before if a certain item was proving to be difficult to implement it could be checked out in Pres, now it will all have to be completely assembled from scratch.

The interactive build is proceeding well and after speaking to Max last week there are several things that he needs to implement before the next stage:
The sign-up section on the Media Bugs website (where production crews will register for their "Rave Live ID Numbers") needs to have an opt out check box or drop down in it so that people have the option to sign up-to Rave Live but will not remain on the Media Bugs system after the event.
There are a lot of engineers waiting to do some coding so we need to know what needs to be done in php and MySQL so that we can get on with it.
To proceed with Brandings' "augmented reality" logo we need the Rave Live logo as a .dae (Digital Asset Exchange) file.

The OB builds are fairly stagnant at the moment because the programme producers are yet to see the space that they have to work with at the venue (the next site visit is scheduled for the 8th March). Once they have visited then we can begin to gather their equipment requirements and contact the various companies with regards to borrowing some kit off them. There was also bad news in that SiS could not provide us with an OB unit this year due to scheduling constraints. After explaining this to management the decision was taken to approach Telegenic, who kindly provided us with a second OB unit last year, to see if they would be interested again this year. We have also began to build up a contingency plan should we not be able to obtain a truck, this would be in the form of a flyaway although positioning and equipment specifications have yet to be decided.

The last major news is that Jacques and Richard have finally managed to discuss where the lines are going to be run, they are now drawing up cable schedules for the day which can be forwarded onto Matter for them to approve. Once this is done we can begin costing and budgeting for the coax runs around the venue. We have also sent an email to be forwarded onto AEG inquiring about whether or not positioning an antenna on the O2 would be possible and if opening up the various ports needed for Adobe RTSP and MySQL access would be possible, and if there would be a cost involved in doing either of these.

Transmission - Encoders

After several frustrating weeks we now have three encoders up and running. Dan and I spent Saturday figuring out what was wrong and how to get a functional system. We began by connecting each encoder to the Thesys Controller one at a time via a cross-over cable, this let us boot them via TFTP and as such three began to work individually.

Installing a switch into the system meant that we could boot all three encoders without the need for us to constantly replug the cross-over cable. Once the encoders were running it was then a case of providing a system diagram for them to read from. This diagram also allows the user to adjust several other parameters such as bit-rates and IP addresses along with detailing any alarms in the system, it also means that the individual sources (video/audio) can be defined along with the type of output required from the encoders. Using an existing file that we knew worked from a previous year we began tailoring the individual parameters to the current system.

Once this was working we moved onto the Tandberg Multiplexer. In previous years this had been used as a re-multiplexer, with the initial multiplexing being done by the now defunct Divicom Mux. However this didn't present to much of a problem, all that we needed to do was identify the incoming Programme Association Tables (PAT) (which was done using the Transport Stream Analyser (TSA)) and re-assign the Packet Identifiers (PID) to what we required them to be. Other things done at this point was to ensure that the PCR was assigned so that it appeared with the video stream and define the services so that the channels had names and the video and audio were associated together.

Once all of this had been achieved it was merely a case of looping the Mux output through the TSA and then looping the stream again through three Integrated Receiving Devices (IRD), we used these to decode the pictures and audio so that we could see the channel outputs on monitors. All three encoders were used to code three separate channels because even though this isn't how it would be done in the event (the plan is to have a 1 to 'n' configuration in terms of redundancy) we wanted to make sure that all of them could work.

The next step is to rig up the equipment either side of the encoders, so the modulator and the presentation equipment (bug burners, WSS coders etc).