London-based VSC Design provided systems integration, project
management and installation for BT Media’s upgrade to a Snell Sirius 830 routing system and three MV-series multi-viewers to support television outside broadcasting operations for the BT Tower facility in London.
Steve Bintley, TVOB Tower Manager for BT’s TV, Media and Content division, said: “In upgrading our routing equipment, we focused on technology that would be capable of providing carriage for a range of high-
performance video services, such as 3G HD, HD SDI, SDI, and DVB ASI without impacting the signal.” Within BT Tower, BT maintains a multi-standard switching network infrastructure that provides routing capabilities for DVB ASI, SDI, HD SDI, analogue video, and audio signals. Replacing BT’s original TVOB routers, which had reached their end of life, the 3G- compliant, 288x288 Sirius 830 is used to manage OB feeds from BT as well as external clients. Snell’s Centra Workbench provides a unified environment for control and monitoring of the routers as well as the three MV-Series multi-viewers. 7.K25
D4 cleans up for HD DSLR Nikon
By David Fox
The Nikon D4 is a star performer in low light
Sentry guards video quality
Tektronix By Monica Heck
Visitors to the Tektronix stand can see new additions to the Sentry family, which provides content monitoring solution for cable, terrestrial, satellite, IPTV and content providers. The new Medius alerts dashboard aggregates performance information from all the Sentry units registered to it in a video quality network monitoring system. It provides three views to help manage performance information across hundreds of programmes simultaneously, providing a denser visual presentation of alert status. For file based QC, the company is showing release 7.5 of content verification tool Cerify File-based Content Analyzer, which features automated audio loudness correction. 10.D41
Nikon’s flagship DSLR, the D4, offers video users very shallow depth of field, thanks to its full frame 35mm sensor, but it has the flexibility to also record an APS-C (Super35) crop or a native 1920x1080 crop (making a normal lens a telephoto). It also has clean,
uncompressed HDMI output, for use with external recorders and monitors, so that users can make full use of the possibilities offered by the sensor. It offers a comprehensive variety of frame rates. Full HD (1080p) can be recorded in 30p, 25p and 24p, with 60p, 50p, 30p and 25p available at 720p. Movie clips can be up to almost 30 minutes long. For audio it has external stereo microphone input and
headphone output. It has been tested by the EBU in the ‘BBC test’ and is recommended for broadcast use. Helpful video aids include: power aperture, enabling smoother aperture control via assigned buttons on the front of the camera; index marking so that important frames can be tagged in the timeline during recording for easy location during editing; and for time-lapse
Tower of power: The Main Gallery at BT Tower
photography it saves images as a movie file. It also, of course, has all the photographic features you’d expect from a top-of- the-line camera, with a 16.2-megapixel sensor, wide dynamic range, extremely high ISO capability (from ISO 50 to 204,800), powerful Expeed3 image processing engine, and two card slots – one for high-speed Compact Flash and one for high-speed, high-capacity XQD cards. 9.B14