One of the things that makes your heart sink when doing integration projects is when the client says "oh, can we re-use our existing routers?" - it makes sense (from their perspective at least!) but represents a lot of work. I worked 'till nearly midnight a couple of days ago getting an old (read late 90's vintage) Leitch XPlus router to talk to it's control panels. Leitch is probably my second choice for routers - my first is Quartz - they only do routers and they are a small English company - you can talk to the designer if you have an issue and their tech support guys are entirely focused on routers and their control systems. Their networking is good as well - you can do a configuration download from any attached device - even the control panels allows you to talk to the mainframe over the QLink network - it made a recent job at MTV a lot easier being able to do programming table changes by hooking my laptop up to the XY panel rather than having to shlep back to the machine room every time. I don't know Probel very well anymore - they were all over the Beeb - but that was back in the late eighties/early nineties and so I'm very out of date with Probel.
Anyhow - back to the Leitch - I could get the video level control panel to talk to the chasis and route but every time I attached an audio panel it wouldn't route both sides of the stereo pair - in the end I set the audio panel to issue commands on all levels bar the video and that did the trick. It's a bit of a bodge but works - until they try and attach an RS422 level (and then I'll get the call - probably at night!). I'm thankful I paid attention to the ESAM protocol when I was building Oasis's machine room - once you have a feel for how that works you can pretty much understand how any modern router's control system operates.
Back to inheriting old gear - monitors are the worst because the client expects them to look as good as the rest of the install - even with soft ten-year-old tubes they think the new setup will bring life back to those displays that should either be re-tubed or retired! A job we did earlier this year was a good example - the client had origional series 16x9 PVMs - even when new they weren't colour accurate but ten years down the track - well. Suffice to say Sony no longer make the SDi input board for that monitor and so we had to feed them analogue component (which in most instances is my prefered method - the analogue output of an Adrenaline BOB, for example, is a better picture than the 8-bit conversion done in the monitor input card) but the YUV was from a Decklink card! I'll stop now before my blood boils!
Anyhow - back to the Leitch - I could get the video level control panel to talk to the chasis and route but every time I attached an audio panel it wouldn't route both sides of the stereo pair - in the end I set the audio panel to issue commands on all levels bar the video and that did the trick. It's a bit of a bodge but works - until they try and attach an RS422 level (and then I'll get the call - probably at night!). I'm thankful I paid attention to the ESAM protocol when I was building Oasis's machine room - once you have a feel for how that works you can pretty much understand how any modern router's control system operates.
Back to inheriting old gear - monitors are the worst because the client expects them to look as good as the rest of the install - even with soft ten-year-old tubes they think the new setup will bring life back to those displays that should either be re-tubed or retired! A job we did earlier this year was a good example - the client had origional series 16x9 PVMs - even when new they weren't colour accurate but ten years down the track - well. Suffice to say Sony no longer make the SDi input board for that monitor and so we had to feed them analogue component (which in most instances is my prefered method - the analogue output of an Adrenaline BOB, for example, is a better picture than the 8-bit conversion done in the monitor input card) but the YUV was from a Decklink card! I'll stop now before my blood boils!
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