Media Engineers Limited

01/09/2025

Looking forward to joining my friends from Barnfind Technologies on booth 8.D87 at the RAI in Amsterdam from next Friday.
We have a couple of new additions to the BarnColor range (so new they haven't made it onto the website yet) - the audio units can carry hundreds of channels on a single fibre without being encumbered with the problems of latency and cost you suffer with IP.
Come and see the whole range and discover why Barnfind has broken out of broadcast and is being used widely in theatre, AV and event-spaces for synchronous (SDi, audio, HDMI, etc) and asynchronous (ethernet, fibre-channel, serial etc) signal transport.
(oh, and I'll also have an eyePower intelligent PDU to show after you've had a Barnfind demo!)

30/07/2025

Our "Fundamentals of Networks for Broadcast Engineers" has proved very popular. We always did an hour at the end of that day showing fibre cable types, splicing methods, testing etc. but we've decided to expand that to a full course.
Get in contact if this or our electrical-safety or colourimetry/calibration courses are of interest. By engineers, for engineers.

12/06/2025

What value-add should resellers bring to hardware sales?
Media Engineers are pleased to represent a small number of manufacturers and as part of that we keep demo stock which we will bring to you so that you know exactly what you're buying and if it fits well with your needs. If it's a £1,500 Barnfind Technologies fibre unit or a £30K EIZO mastering monitor you can only really check it out if you've used it in anger - a half hour demo at a trade show or in a dealer's offices is not adequate.
We have recently formed a closer relationship with eyePower because for many years I found it to be the best intelligent PDU available. If you need to remotely control and monitor power usage in your MCR or data centre racks I have yet to find anything better (and I've tried them all). Media Engineers are now the contract assembly/test house for eyePower and my wiring guys are loving the more structured/disciplined process of assembly wiring.
So, in an effort to "know your enemy" I contacted a couple of resellers to ask about purchasing the big name competing product (bear in mind this unit is £1,000 more expensive than the eyePower) and I was met with complete dissinterest - our relationship was going to go no further than them taking a purchase order off me. No suggestion of a conversation with an engineer who knew the product or (heaven forfend) see a demo unit.
Now we have one and we're tearing it down to see how well they've done current monitoring (the eyePower uses current-monitoring transformers with such precision that they accurately read instantaneous current draw to 1mA over 60A range) along with all the other environmental monitoring and how well it exposes all that data over the network.
So, if you need intelligent power control/monitoring we'll bring one over in the Peli case for you to assess. If you're going to buy one it's because you're convinced it's the product you need.

20/05/2025

This photo is a genuine example of a Commando C16 connector I found in a London facility when fault-finding an "Edit 1 has lost power..." type complaint. It was wired by the staff engineer.
If you are any kind of support-tech/engineer you will often find yourself as the most technically qualified person in the studio/set/edit-facility and it behoves you to have at least a passing familiarity with electrical safety and even the 18th Edition. Mains voltage is one of the few things left in film/TV that can kill people by electric-shock or fire and if you were in court M'Lud would take a dim view of an engineer who had not done everything to protect their colleagues from danger.
Media Engineer's one-day electrical safety course can be run at your studio/facility or at our workshop in leafy Finsbury Park.

16/05/2025

What a fantastic couple of days at meeting old pals and new customers.
However, the highlight of the week was realising I've joined an illustrious cohort of industry colleagues who have come under the steely gaze of the master caricaturist Mike Watson - Mike has been a good friend since our days in BBC TV News back in the 1980s....!

09/05/2025

It's arrived sooner than you thought! Next week Wednesday and Thursday is the Media Production and Technology show at Olympia. Media Engineers will be there on booth G.23 - come and talk to us about;

- Barnfind Technologies complete product range - we will have BarnOne, BarnMini and BarnColors on demo.
- EIZO monitors - including the CG1 Prominence, the gold standard for film and TV mastering,
- System Design and wiring
- Equipment service and repair
- Colour Calibration

We also have the best giveaways!

29/04/2025

What's on the repair bench today? It's a Dell Precision 3930 Rack Workstation which (although obsolete by Dell's standards) is still a very powerful 1u rack server. This one had a minor fault on the motherboard that meant it was stuck in a boot-loop never making it to Windows.

If your reseller/tech-support provider does not offer electronic repair/rework then maybe give us a call.

Media Engineers - keeping equipment out of landfill (and money in your Capex-budget!) one server at a time.

25/04/2025

Media Engineers Ltd are very pleased to be at on booth G.23 - we'll be showing the full Barnfind Technologies range of products as well as talking EIZO monitors and display calibration services.
In addition we can discuss installation projects as well as training.
We also have the best giveaways!

https://www.mediaproductionshow.com/exhibitors/media-engineers

31/03/2025

https://philtechnicalblog.blogspot.com/2025/03/belden-4505r-and-other-12g-capable-coax.html

Results of some recent testing.

12G SDi over coax is a hard problem to solve; my normal practise is to not run 12G over distance (you can find all my original figures for m...

13/03/2025

New monitor day!
It's been a couple of weeks since EIZO's Dominic Gaughan dropped off the new EIZO CG1 Prominence HDR mastering monitor at the workshop (first one in the UK?) but it's taken until today until I've had a chance to get it ready for customers' scrutiny. So, the jobs are;

1. PAT test it - althought it's a modern device manufactured to the highest standard once it's unboxed the electrical safety becomes our responsibility,
2. Build a profile for the Klein K10A "tri-stim" probe using the CR250 spectroradiometer - remember, without a spectro profile your probe is not accurate and the CG1 uses a brand new dual-IPS panel assembly and the spectral power distribution of backlight will be different to previous models,
3. Calibrate it for customers' use - out of the box it was pretty close in rec.709, DCI-P3, HLG 1.2 and PQ/P3-D65/2020 (AKA "DolbyVision") modes but serious users will expect this to be absolutely correct.
4. Corelate the internal calibration sensor to allow the monitor to keep itself in spec.

Observations - the previous model CG3146 pretty much nailed the spec for an HDR grading/mastering display and so it's hard to see where they could have improved matters, and in truth if you have the previous genaration of Prominence upgrading would be pointless, however, what I've noticed;

1. Weight - the internal aluminium chassis means this is several kilograms lighter. For the middle-aged engineer this is welcome!
2. Off-axis colour shift. The CG3146 was marginally better than it's contempories but this guy improves on that.
3. Light Illusion's ColourSpace software knew about it already! Clearly the API integration is solid.
4. The GPI port offers some more options for remotely triggering functions,
5. SMPTE-2110 support; all my arkona technologies demonstration parts are out with customers so I have not been able to test this new feature; dual SFP+ ports which will appeal more to the OB crowd rather than anyone in post.
6. Uniformity - Prominence has always had much better uniformity that other mastering displays (due to their DUE technology) and this one is no exception.

As ever, you should never spend this many thousands of pounds on a monitor until your colourist has sat in front of it for days; a demo at a trade show or in a reseller's office will not give you the confidence you need for this kind of purchase and Media Engineers are ready to ship to your grading suite/studio for evaluation.
Additionally if you buy from us not only will you get full setup/calibration/training as required, but we will provide a year's worth of additional calibration support gratis.

11/03/2025

Although VTRs are very much of historical interest now we sometimes have to make them work with modern industrial serial controllers.

My word - two years since I last updated this blog; I'm covered in shame... So - currently configuring a workstation that needs to capture f...

28/02/2025

The newest member of the Barnfind Technologies family, the BarnColor-Native-4K is almost available having undergone extensive testing at customer sites and at the Media Engineers workshop in leafy Finsbury Park.
Most high-bandwidth HDMI extenders rely on underlying optics that convert the signal to SDi internally with the following problems;

1. Only SMPTE video rasters/framerates are carried reliably,
2. 12Gbit/sec is the maximum data rate, limiting use to 4K, 4:2:2 and 60P,
3. EDID not faithfully returned to the graphics card/LED processor.

If you need to take square or even portrait-shaped signals to video-wall elements then you're out of luck with most other manufacturers. Look at these measurements to see how well BarnColor-Native-4K handles these signals.
Like all the BarnColor boxes these do not touch any of the wavelengths used by others in the multiplex allowing you to combine SDi, Ethernet, Audio (analogue and MADI) as well as other signals types via the SFP-Flex variant. You can even combine BarnColor with third party optics - a recent customer example is allowing four bi-directional 12G video signals to sit happily on the same dark-fibre as the client's existing 100Gig network over QSFP to their data centre (many kilometers away from their studio).
Get in contact for a demo as Media Engineers holds full evaluation stock.
(oh, the LG OLED could not make sense of 640 x 1440P...)