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And because it is dying, as is Grass Valley Group itself.

Let's be clear, reports say that Thomson is in trouble and needs to sell Grass Valley Group to sure up its balance sheet. GVG appears to be doing fine, they are still selling plenty of switchers and servers.

On the server side, GVG recently sold K2 servers to NBCu O&Os, a large FOX installation, PBS station WTTW, and CBS Television Distribution. So I expect to see a lot more GXF in the near future!

And because it is dying, as is Grass Valley Group itself.

Let's be clear, reports say that Thomson is in trouble and needs to sell Grass Valley Group to sure up its balance sheet. GVG appears to be doing fine, they are still selling plenty of switchers and servers.

On the server side, GVG recently sold K2 servers to NBCu O&Os, a large FOX installation, PBS station WTTW, and CBS Television Distribution. So I expect to see a lot more GXF in the near future!

Scans at 2k lines of resolution have to be "degrained" (probably depends on the quality of the film). I can't tell you exactly how they do it, but I'd bet it's something similar to anti-aliasing, which I guess is similar enough to defocusing. All I can say for sure is it's done in software.

Here is the public site for the datacine they're using. Maybe you can glean more information from the online documentation.

OT, but one interesting thing about the Spirit is that it uses Linux for the UI. I don't know any specifics, other than the update format is .tgz.

Until recently I was supporting some machines that we would do just about anything to avoid rebooting, mostly because the hard drives were old and sometimes we had to smack them around a little to get them to spin up. Once they spun up, they were fine though.

Of course, we didn't have to worry about patches, as they were running NT4 and not hooked up to a network (well, a video distribution network, but that's hardly the same). For those who care, product details can be found here. The easiest description is a $100k Tivo.

I work for a company that used to be part of Tektronix (now part of Thomson). Those guys put Windows on everything. It sucks, and it's unstable, but it beats the crap out of whatever they used on their older equipment. Try using a Tek VM700 sometime. We "affectionately" called it the Vomit 700 because it was always puking. Of course then there was the VM700T, the 'T' standing for "Turbo", which just means it pukes faster.

Seriously, there were some test suites that were so bad that we wouldn't call the Unit Under Test bad unless it failed 3 times in a row. By comparison, Windows isn't so bad.

In their defense, though, this isn't a consumer electronics company. Their product lines have a long developement time, and to a large extent they're constrained to what was available at the start of the project. For many of them Windows was about all there was if you wanted a nice gui, and in most cases Windows is just the user interface, with all the work actually being done on something like VxWorks or Phar Lapp. The alternative on the ex-Tek products I deal with, which first hit the market in 1996, would have been something like QNX4 or Xenix: functional, but certainly not pretty.

Sounds like you're doing some fun stuff there. I work for MNN cable access in NYC. We just finished rebuilding our studio where we just got done dealing with these same issues. I understand joo.

1> Lighting. This is probably the most important part of making a show look good. I think I'd be doing you a disservice to say "get two inkies, three 5K fresnels, blah blah blah." You should really consider bringing in a good lighting designer who can not only recommend some good fixtures, but who can also put together some stock light plots that will look good for 95% of all productions. Never sleep on good lighting for a studio. It really makes all the difference.

2> Cameras. We went with the Hitachi Z3000W as our studio camera. It's digital, it has great resolution, and a wicked nice lens. They provide a lot of bang for the buck (can't remember how much we paid, tho.) Take a look at Triax cabling for connecting the cameras back to Control. It's flexible, the signa's clean, and they're a lot easier and cheaper to replace. For a teleprompter, we're just using QTV with WinCue. Works fine.

3> Audio. We had some Behringers around but they didn't stand up to the abuse we put it through. Then we found the Sony ECM-55B. It's our workhorse lav. I've had nothing but headaches with wireless so I'm not going to comment on them.

4> Decks. There are a ton of Good Broadcast Reasons to go with BetaSP but it's just so damn expensive. I love DV. Because we're public access, we have to work with civilians who can't afford $20 per tape. Let them master to DV at $4 a pop and they can go home, finish in iMovie or Premiere on their home computer and bring it back in to us all clean and digital like. Sure, it's compressed and of course it might artifact, but working with analog in post is a system bandwidth hassle. Meanwhile DV works at full-res on my mom's iMac. Until Thompson decides to make the Filmstream for $3K, I'm sticking with DV. I say go with DV if you can (DV, DVCAM, DVCPRO, whatever.) You can't beat the price.

5> I'm not a big fan of the Streaming In A Box solutions. What you get for your streaming really depends on what you want to deliver. Do you want to provide video on demand? Bring the video into a Mac or PC via FireWire, use Discreet Cleaner to convert the file to MPEG4, Real, whatever, and drop it on a streaming server with lots of storage, hordes of RAM, and some fat ass bandwidth. Just looking to simulcast your broadcast? Even easier: run the program output of your master control switcher to a video capture card on a superfast PC. Start up some live encoder software (QuickTime Broadcaster, Helix Producer, MPEG4IP) and have it send a unicast stream to a replication server attached to the net. With live streaming, you don't need any storage at all (unless you need to archive.)

6> Newsdesks. Check out uniset. They make good looking inexpensive sets and CYC panels (for doing green screen). We've been very happy with their stuff.

One last thing: check out DVLince - an all-DV server based production workflow for under $300K. Sony just bought them to rebrand it as their own gear. It might not be exactly what you need, but it's worth checking out.