NAB Products from Tektronix
We talked with Richard Duval from Tektronix about the latest releases in the TV and broadcast product lines. The test equipment and software releases cover all areas of technical work from field, to post, broadcast, and cable.
For production, they have waveform monitor WFM7200 and rasterizer WVR7200—a waveform monitor without a display for rack use—to provide a visual display of the electrical signals for white balance, gamma levels, and camera matching. These tools help to verify the quality of the video and make precision adjustments. Both tools support an extensive list of Dual Link signal formats as standard and have upgradeable options to add support for high frame rate (1080P 50/60) formats and 3D formats.
For edit, the waveform monitors can monitor the I/O box and provide high-end color correction information for functions like logo insertion and color matching. Software has too little accuracy and resolution, so the waveform monitor can contribute information at the artistic level.
In the broadcast areas, the rasterizer monitors the SDI signal path in areas like the master control and playout gamut. As an analyzer, the tester monitors eye patterns, tracks metadata and measures cable loss. In addition, they have an updated sync pulse generator. Even as the industry moves to file-based flows, the same measurement needs exist. Only now the test and measurement tools are also checking for proper syntax in encoded fields.
Automated QC helps to integrate the flows into the server farms and to the editing stations to work with other software tools. Along with the hardware, they released Certify 7.4 to automate the QC of file-based content. The latest release is much faster than the previous version and supports more standard codecs and wrappers, including supports testing of DNxHD and JPEG2000 mezzanine formats. The addition of teletext and DVB subtitling strengthens the existing 608/708 caption support.
Even as the video changes from analog to digital, content repurposing requires checking for a number of characteristics. Unfortunately, this QC data, along with other metadata, does not always stay with the files before shipping. Both satellite and terrestrial broadcaster need to monitor the transport stream for video and audio quality. Production needs to check quality before broadcast and the same requirements apply to cable.
For field work, the WFM 2200 portable waveform monitor assists the technicians to find, diagnose, and fix signal or content quality problems in the field. The battery operated unit also pairs waveform analysis with signal generation to verify link performance between facilities. The tester also supports ANC Data and SDI data monitoring, including closed caption and subtitle decoding, active format description detection and decoding, and VANC (vertical ancillary) data testing.
The new signal generator TG8000 offers SD/HD and 3G-SDI signal generation for design and evaluation of professional video equipment such as routers, servers, encoders and transcoders. The SDI7 module supports a wide variety of formats and standards, including 3G-SDI, HD-SDI and SD-SDI
The Sentry Edge monitor is targeting the CALM Act compliance. The audio loudness module (ALM) enables broadcasters to meet the monitoring and reporting requirements for CALM.
Cable operations can benefit from the MTS4000 MPEG analyzer. The analyzer helps in the analysis and troubleshooting of audio/video and transport problems in 10G networks for fault isolation and root cause analysis. Network interface options include full line rate 1 Gigabit Ethernet, 10 Gigabit Ethernet, ATSC 8-VSB, QAM-B, DVB-S2 and a Quad port ASI interface.
Cross-layer and cross-domain analysis of the video and audio quality is possible through a software suite that includes real-time video and audio quality of experience (QoE) analysis, picture quality analysis (based on the human vision model), and advanced Elementary Stream analysis including H.264/AVC intra profile and SVC support.
The upgraded Sentry provides H.264 Perceptual Video Quality (PVQ) metrics and thumbnail support for QoE monitoring. PVQ, also known as eMOS (effective mean opinion score), detects errors related to over-compression, such as blockiness. For content destined for OTT applications, it enables QoE and PVQ checks at ingest as well as before the transcoder (pre-fragmentation step). Sentry Assure for cable post-splice ad verification monitoring is able to monitor up to 1Gbps on a Gigabit Ethernet interface. This provides a way for validating SCTE-35 message integrity, and also for closed captioning carriage requirements by monitoring the SCTE-608/708/20 specifications for Closed Captioning compliance.
If you are going to NAB, check out this latest equipment at the Tektronix booth N1023. If not, see more details at their website http://www.tek.com/.
