Barco color issues with Mac

[Ryan Gallagher]

Why not just use a PC and move your content over to it? Would be interesting to see if the color space problem goes normal with the PC, or stays with the content.

I expect the simpler way to check that would be slap an external monitor on the mac, if colors are good there you know it's not the content.

The biggest problem we would have with intending PCs to serve as backups, is often live shows are built around mac-only software. Namely QLab. A great tool but alas mac only still.

Fortunately for us *most* live shows don't use the cinema screen or DCI projector. But on occasion some will. Last example was Ira Glass. There was a host of video issues too, but none caused by anything other than OSX itself. He had some slightly older Macs as his primary and backup, and made the mistake of updating OSX versions before the tour stop. None of his ProResHQ files played back smoothly anymore or kept audio in sync in Qlab. He spent a good 3 hours before doors transcoding 90% of his show content down to ProresLT, which cured 98% of the issues.

PS, he was a true gentleman and scholar through it all. Touring with no support, only him. And he took it all in stride with a little phone support from his Qlab guru back in NY. Most people would have had a meltdown!

[Leo Enticknap]

In arthouse and college campus type theaters, telling arty/professor types that they can't use their Mac laptops for presentations ranges between highly problematic (they will meow and hiss like crazy to programmers and managerial) and flat out impossible. Both in my projectionist/venue tech days and more recently as a service tech, I've encountered a number of Mac-specific problems, the HDCP and low power HDMI ones being the most frequent. Another is that on some older Mac laptops with HDMI jacks, an horrific ground hum on the audio is present if they are operated with their chargers connected. A perennial problem with Apple stuff is that they deliberately make it as difficult as possible to interface an Apple product with a non-Apple product, from the HFS+ filesystem through to the various dongles that many Mac laptops need to get HDMI out of them. But there is a cult of Mac-worship that seems to have taken strong root in the academic and arty/creative communities, and woe betide any venue tech who doesn't bow down before it.

[Steve Guttag]

In areas where I know there will be significant laptop and BYOD uses, I use Extron stuff. It allows for a lot of EDID management as well as things like having a scaler on the receiving end so that regardless of what resolution the "thing" that gets plugged in...including Apple, it comes out in a manner that the projector will deal with. Additionally, the color space issue is avoided as the Extron (XTP) receiver will handle that too. It doesn't do frame rate conversion but it can present an EDID to the device that should handle telling the device that we'd like 60Hz please (or whatever you want things to run at). You can configure the EDID to tell Apple to disable HDCP (not bypass it but to turn it off and simply not run HDCP content, if you have non-HDCP displays in use).

The Extron XTP series is not cheap and you won't find it at "box stores" or Amazon but it "just works." Honestly, I wish they had the Scaling receiver for their DTP series as that is more suited. XTP is a whole family of switchers and endpoints (sort of their answer to Crestron's DM stuff).

We are starting to move to AV over IT as that seems like a better fit for theatres that want to be flexible. It is always the exact right size "matrix switcher" as you just buy the endpoints you need for your worst case situation. That is, if you want to have, at most three theatres showing HDMI content, buy three "Decoders" and move them to the theatres that need them. Likewise, you just need as many encoders as your worst case of inputs...put one in a lectern, one or two for Blu-ray players...and send the video/audio to whatever destination that needs it. It all travels over standard copper* Ethernet and "standard*" network switches.

* Standard in the sense that it follows non-proprietary IT infrastructure unlike traditional twisted-pair based AV stuff. That said, you do need a LOT of bandwidth for moving video, particularly 4K. Each encoder is going to want 1G to itself...likewise on the decoder...so your switch no only has to have that speed but the internal bandwidth to hande MANY gigs at once...so they are not the cheapest of switches. Netgear has a line of A/V switches that meet the needs and are easy to configure via preset "profiles" for known needs.

This sort of method also seems to address, HDCP, resolution and frame rate/refresh rate as I've see it take a 4K/24 source (Blu-ray) and output simultaneously 4K/24 and 1080p/60 (preview monitor using a conventional computer monitor). Everybody in the right color space for the display device.

But yeah, if traditional HDMI and not wanting to mess around or worry about it working, Extron XTP is about as solid as I've found. The company is also 2nd to none in support.

[Marcel Birgelen]

The biggest problem with this "Video over Ethernet and IP" stuff is that it often uses compression to get the job done. If you want to do 4K60, then you already facing 12 Gbps of raw video data, most IT networks cannot cope with this kind of data. While this compression may be fine for your average PowerPoint presentation, it's another thing if you want to play full-motion video without severe degradation.

In the broadcast industry, NDI and several newer "HD" variations have become popular to replace the good-old SDI interface. The thing is, NDI is a heavily compressed protocol. The newest iterations actually employ H.264 and H.265 compression. While those formats look good at high bitrates, I shiver at the idea that incoming camera feeds nowadays are already compressed with a lossy codec. Also, all those compression/decompression cycles increase latency. Combine this with buffer bloat and other latency on your IT network and people are wondering why that "live image" on the big projection or LED screen is visibly delayed compared to the real thing...

The documentation with my Vertex states that it can convert between HDCP version 1.X and 2.X (thus enabling a source that is fixed to 2.X to play into a sink that only supports 1.X), but not between either and no HDCP at all. It could well be that with a firmware version not available in the USA it can, and that this is easily available if you go looking for it, but I've never had reason to do that, and so I don't know. It has been a life saver for me in connecting HDCP 2 sources to the DVI inputs of Barco and NEC Series 2 projectors, which can only accept up to HDCP 1.4. The bottom line is that the HD Fury Integral 2 and Vertex boxes are pricey, but what they can do justifies the cost.

Apparently, Warner Brothers sued HD Fury in 2016 regarding the then new HD Fury Integral. The reason was because it allowed HDCP 2.x to be downgraded to 1.x, which has long since been broken and can be removed with something as simple as a Chinese HDMI splitter. I have a few of those. When I bought them, I didn't even know they strip HDCP...

But apparently, HD Fury actually won the case.

[Steve Guttag]

We are starting to use Visionary Solutions form of AV over IT and they do use a JPEG2000 compressor. Typical latency is 17ms. Worst case (4K/30, HDR, 12-bit) is 33ms...so, not quite a frame for 24Hz stuff.