Epeus' epigone

Edifying exquisite equine entrapments

Wednesday, 20 February 2002

Can the nature of an industry can be derived from its underlying technology?

TV engineers' problem is locking a picture to another picture to allow them to be cut without glitches. This requires timing video signal one to another very accurately. If the signals are not timed within a vertical frame, you see a roll on a cut.This requires an accuracy of one vertical line, about 1 part in 600. To prevent a horizontal shift on a cut, you need a lot finer accuracy, about 1 part in 250,000. Doing this with valve technology in the 40s was impressive work, but it did require devoting over a third of the video bandwidth to synchronisation pulses.

To prevent a colour shift in composite video, you need to preserve colour phase, which means you need to be locked to a fraction of the 4.3 MHz colour signal. To do this, every playback device in the professional broadcast world is locked to 'station sync' which is driven from a very tightly-locked crystal signal.

When I worked at the BBC, I saw the Rubidium clock at TV Centre that drove the station sync pulse generator, and hence every camera and video tape machine in the building, and on out to the microwave towers and transmission masts, and through the ether to the millions of TV sets across the British Isles, all of their electron guns sweeping across the phosphor dots together as one, beating in time with this central heartbeat.

How could they give up all that order for the chaos of the net?

Posted by Kevin Marks at 01:22

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About Me

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Kevin Marks
Kevin Marks works on IndieWeb and open web tech. From 2011 to 2013 he was VP of Open Cloud Standards at Salesforce. From 2009 to 2010 he was VP of Web Services at BT. From 2007 to 2009, he worked at Google on OpenSocial. From 2003 to 2007 he was Principal Engineer at Technorati responsible for the spiders that make sense of the web and track millions of blogs daily. He has been inventing and innovating for over 25 years in emerging technologies where people, media and computers meet. Before joining Technorati, Kevin spent 5 years in the QuickTime Engineering team at Apple, building video capture and live streaming into OS X. He was a founder of The Multimedia Corporation in the UK, where he served as Production Manager and Executive Producer, shipping million-selling products and winning International awards. He has a Masters degree in Physics from Cambridge University and is a BBC-qualified Video Engineer. One of the driving forces behind microformats.org, he regularly speaks at conferences and symposia on emergent net technologies and their cultural impact.
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