February 2010 – JAY VERSLUIS

This Month in My Life

February 23, 2010February 22, 2010 by Jay Versluis

I hadn’t seen my good friend Dave Lee in a while and thought I’d connect with him via email today. When I was finished typing, I realised that it would make an excellent update on this site as well – so let’s have a look at “What’s happening in Jay’s Life” 🙂

With many of my friends, colleagues and Internet acquaintances getting into blogging, I find it hard to keep track of who’s writing an update and when. With Twitter and Facebook it’s so convenient to scan through the headlines if and when I have the time – hence I’m currently looking for a system that lets me check out my friends blogs from a single interface.

Tutorial: Getting “The Grunge Look” in your photos

April 13, 2017February 15, 2010 by Jay Versluis

Fly-TLR-square (13 of 14) — Blackbird, Fly!

This is an article in response to a comment I received on my Golden Half camera review, in which a poster asked me “How do you get THAT picture quality?”

Henceforth known as “The Grunge Look”, featuring harsh grain, strong contrasts and vivid colours (where available), I’ll give you a rundown of what you need to achieve it. This article is aimed at advanced beginners, plastic camera fanatics, film shooters and everyone else interested in going “beyond the clean holiday snap”. I may cover more than you want to know, but please bear with me.

So grab a coffee, sit back and let’s get started 😉

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What’s the difference between HDCAM and HDCAM SR?

June 2, 2015February 5, 2010 by Jay Versluis

Let’s take a look under the hood of two broadcast VT formats: both are called HDCAM, both do some form of HD, but apart from the operational differences, the funky coloured flap and two extra letters, what is the real difference between them?

Let’s find out.

HDCAM (non-SR)

HDCAM was introduced by Sony ages ago in 1997. No other tape based HD broadcast format was around at the time, and it quickly became clear that one was needed for HDTV to succeed.

The HDW-M2000 machines are based on the DVW-2000 series of VTRs and record with a datarate of 144 Mbps (that’s a 50% increase compared to Digital Betacam’s datarate of 96 Mbps).

HDCAM features 4 audio channels and can handle all common framerates between 24 and 30Fps.

Making Television History in 32APSK with NFL Football

August 25, 2010February 2, 2010 by Jay Versluis

This is how nPSK works...

We made some television history the other night: in a test for the NFL International Distribution, Adrian from TV2Go and us folks at IMG Mediahouse have successfully brought a 32APSK encoded signal across the Atlantic, with a datarate of 30Mbps using a 9MHz carrier!

Since the start of the current NFL season in 2009, part of my job is to bring in feeds that originate in the US for an uplink stateside to NSS7. Our clients then downlink these feeds in Europe. In North America, DirectTV offers the NFL (and nearly 200 other channels) to domestic customers via their fleet of ten satellites. Using MPEG2 and H264 encoding, QPSK and 8PSK modulation are commonplace in satellite transmissions.

25012010676 — Ray was looking after this year's NFL season (I was behind the camera of my mobile phone)

However satellite bandwidth is expensive, and we’re dealing with demands of ever increasing datarates. Compression alone will only get us so far, so the only other way to increase throughput would be to increase phase modulation on the TX path. Lucky for us, the DVB-S2 spec has another trick or two up its sleeve.