My LA RED EYE adventure... - Page 2

Special US version. Here in Euroepe, they stuck to Deutsch MW, KW, UKW, KW, Sometimes even LW. And the Mittelwelle dial was plastered with dozens of names of foreign cities.

Just another Hollywood back street. Nothing famous.


The building front, currenty under renovation.


Cafeteria / lounge.


We set this up back in 2007. Sony Bravia on left and Pioneer Kuro on right. This was about the time the great LCD/Plasma debate started. This was to show our clients,TV show producers, the differences between the two technologies and why their material looks different on different technology displays. At one time we even had a CRT under the LCD & Plasma montitors. The video source material is mostly Dish. We have to be very careful showing unaired material publicly. Even if the show has aired, we cannot show it in the public areas of the facility.


A new mid sized color correction theater under construction. Primarily for home video mastering however it can be used for DI as well.

Projection booth of the previous theater under construction. This will house an NEC IS8 DLP projector, A Kineton 35mm film projector, and a special 35mm projector that can be left on a still frame for long perorides of time. It has a water cooled gate to keep the film from burning up. This is use to match the video grade to film or just visually analyze the origional color makeup of a print.


The is a TV color correction room. Not much to see as it's kept dark when operational.


Another home video color correction suite. This room also has a projection scrfeen with an NEC IS8 DLP. No film projection however.


One of many small work rooms. These have various monitoring facilities and KVM access to most of the production computer platforms.


The central storage SAN. 880 TERAbytes across five volumes. Combination of 8gb fibre channel and SATA. It can play out up to seven 2K uncompressed streams at 24fps - realtime. And yes I did say UNCOMPRESSED!

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The other end of the central SAN.


Here are two Baselight 8 systems. These have their own 96TB storage RAIDS and can play out 4K in real time. We don't have 4K projection yet but that is on this years budget.


SDTV's last stand. A group of Sony Digital Betacam VTR's. Thios format is still widely used for ingest into Avids and other non-linear platforms. Also cable networks that have not moved to HD still require air masters on this format.


Another work room. Note the three dark LCD monitors on the wall. This is one of four rooms used to make dailies deliveries for shows in production.


Another view of the SD tape area. Sony DVCAM is another popular format to feed offline systems out in the field and at producer's offices.

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This work area is where show and feature dailies are uploaded to the internet (very securely) and also where DVD's of dailies are made. Just a few years ago all these racks were crammed with industrial VHS machines. You would be surprised how many people at a studio get screeners of a day's shoot. Makeup, legal, advertising, even accounting, and a lot of others people beyond the director and DP.


A close up of a DVD burner. It sits on a network and downloads DVD images made from the dailies processing SAN (next picture)


This is another SAN with about 200TB of storage. Daily shoot material is loaded into this, selected takes assembled into a reel, audio sync is performed, and the DVD menu authoring is done. The input used to be strictly film but today there are many digital camera formats we have to ingest as well.


Central video patch area. This is all 1.5 and 3gbs HDSDI. All signals come into these patch bays before entering the central switch. This is done for emergency bypass of the switch if needed and for rare special setups the switch is not programmed for.


A 3gbs HDSDI patch cable.

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This is teh central HDSDI matrix. It is 576 inputs by 576 outputs. We are currently wired for 388x388 and cards are installed to 288x288. Now go to DirecTV or Dish's uplink facility and you will find these switches 2000x2000. Still this size is one of the largest in use at a post production facility.


Inside the 3gbs HDSDI switch. Next to it but not in view is another 256x128 SDI switch that handles SDTV feeds.


The AES audio matrix. This is fully wired for 512 inputs by 512 outputs stereo. So that's essentially 1024x1024 mono. The routing system software is designed for 12 mono audio channels or more accurately 6 stereo pairs. However the central switch operates on stereo pairs with the ability to split those down further into discrete mono channels. The entire plant is AES digital audio at 48K, 24bit (not all sources are 24 bit however). There is no analog audio distributed. Analog conversion is done at the source or destination where needed such as an amplifier and speaker setup. In the next rack are matricies for timecode and RS422 data switching at 38.4K baud. Most machine control is still over dedicated RS422 ports. Only within the past few years has Ethernet gotten fast and reliable enough to take over this hardwired matrix system. Yet the legacy RS422 system will be around for many more years.


Just like the main video router matrix, the audio router is also surrounded by a patch system to isolate failures. These are old fashioned telephone TRS connectors, similar to a headphone plug, but still widely used. Some may ask why we don't just use the AES audio embedded in the HDSDI stream. Well we do at times since it's already there but in a production facility you need the flexibility provided by seperate audio routing. Broadcast facilities however generally don't have dedicated AES routers like this as they generally don't need to swap around audio channels. We do it for them when making the air masters


Also in this routing core area of the plant is a large KVM switch comprised of six Avocent 5000 series matricies. This allows any keyboard/monitor/mouse station to connect to any production computer. There are over 200 computers and 100 workstations. According to Avocent we are their only customer that installed a patch system around the switch matrices. Well what if one of those switch frames fail? And they are not plug in card based so repair/replacement is a long difficult process. We have to have a way to jump around them in an emergency. And one of Glimmie's mottos is there are basically only two types of switching power supplies. Those that have failed and those that will!

Analog NTSC routing! 128x256. Yes we still use NTSC for non critical confidence monitoring. For example in a film transfer suit, we have small LCD monitor banks that show the return feed from the VTRs or disk recorders in use. This is just to make sure the recording is being made and there is additional information keyed over the video. Again, dirty old NTSC is just fine for this purpose.


Hardware based processing systems and local storage for the software based color correctors. This rack area is behind the central routing core. Cold and extreme fan noise so it's not a people work area.


One of the hardware based Davinci color correctors. Still these are the only boxes that can do color correction in real time. The software based systems are much more feature rich but require render time on the order of seconds per frame at times. So for basic TV drama work where you don't have a lot of special color grade requirements, the real time color corrector is much faster.


Four Final Curt Pro systems used for this and that!


One of six Spirit 2K film scanners. The 2K is a bit of a misnomer. They are really 1920x1080 24p or 60i. They can do true 2048x1556 with a data option. These are used for television film transfers. This is a dying area of teh facility as more and more TV shows go to digital acquisition. And 1920x1080 10bit is not considered good enough for DI feature film work.

Glimmie,
Did you guys do any transfers of classic TV shows like Hogan's Heroes?

wow, that is cool!

I assume you are using KVM control because latency and network congestion from terminal services and VNC/RDP would be too much especially considering the process intensive tasks of video/audio????

Matt

Very interesting, thanks for sharing

i'm sure they are using KVM because the facility has been around a lot longer than reliable gigabit+ ethernet.

my guess would be that vnc/rdp/one of those flavors would be using in the future as internal network speed and switching continues to progress.

right?

I'm a little surprised to see a Tezro in one of the racks... Is this used for Flame?