Ultra 3.2 Release For BVE

The new year looks like being an exciting year for the Omnitek Ultra range of products with new features and improvements scheduled throughout the year. The first being V3.2 in time for BVE.

The Ultra 4K Toolbox has been in production for over two years now and there are over 120 customers worldwide with multiple units at multiple sites. With over 20 units in Japan alone, the Ultra 4K Toolbox has become the de facto standard for 4K / UHD testing for interfaces up to 12G. With Ultra a well-established product range, the V3.2 release harnesses more of the power the Ultra platform has to offer by adding new and improved performance and functionality, thus ensuring that customer's initial investments are returned many-fold.

With an exclusive clientele in post houses around the world, the Ultra XR is now an established solution in the market. It too benefits from Omnitek's on-going Ultra platform development. Features such as O-Zone™, Closed Caption and Logging are making the Ultra XR even more attractive to those already working with 4K and HDR material. These new tools complement the existing high-resolution waveforms, CIE colour charts, vectorscope and Gamut meters that have become essential for everyone working with HDR content up to 4K resolution.

HDR O-Zone Display
Whether working with Hybrid Log Gamma or PQ material, one of the most important challenges of HDR production is knowing which areas of the image have standard dynamic range and which areas have high dynamic range. Omnitek's O-Zone system now allows you to visualise the SDR and HDR areas within the picture itself which complements the comprehensive HDR monitoring already available within the Ultra.

Logging for TB and XR
Logging is an equally important part of manufacturing testing as it is in program QC and Compliance and being able to track how often an error or non-conformance occurs is a day to day requirement. In addition to knowing that something went wrong, it is important to know when it went wrong. The Ultra family now provides full logging of all physical and functional parameters of the video signal. Logging against timecode is essential and all events are captured against VITC, ATC VITC 1, VITC 2 and ATC LTC so that any issues can be tracked back to the specific frame, wherever it was created in the production process.

Closed Captions
A standard requirement of Quality Control and Monitoring is the ability to decode, display and log Closed Captions / Subtitles, whichever format is being used. Version 3.2 now supports OP47, 708 and 608 as standard and is available across the Ultra family with the V3.2 release.

Global Presets
The Ultra 4K Tool Box and Ultra XR have always had the ability to save system configurations as presets for ease of recall. In version 3.2, presets have now become 'global' and the whole configuration of the system can be recalled, anywhere within the user interface, with a single mouse click. We have also increased the number of presets to 99 to satisfy the need for flexibility and automated testing.

Timecode Generation
To ensure that data paths through any unit under test, the Ultra 4K Toolbox Generator can now output timecode on the SDI outputs as VITC, ATC VITC 1, VITC 2 and ATC LTC. This functionality is also essential for anyone that wants to check for discontinuities in the video sequence, caused by editing, encoding, transmission, etc.

Improved Jitter Measurement
The Ultra 4K Toolbox now benefits from a lower Noise Floor. The Noise Floor of a piece of T&M equipment is the inherent noise (or intrinsic jitter) introduced by the equipment itself. The level of inherent noise affects the accuracy and repeatability of jitter measurements that can be made, especially when measuring low levels of jitter. It is therefore essential for manufacturing environments where units are tested to stringent limits and dependable results are required.

Overshoot & Undershoot Measurement
The Ultra 4K Toolbox PHY Option now includes overshoot and undershoot measurement on all SDI video standards. Although not actually essential at this stage of 12G-SDI driver chip set development, it is useful for lower clock rate signals to ensure the quality of the signal. This small feature improvement complements the sophisticated physical layer analysis tools already available within the Ultra 4K Toolbox. The PHY and Advance PHY options allow the analysis of SDI signals from SD to 12G and provide signal and jitter analysis tools that are normally only available on high-end, high-cost storage scopes, but required both in development and manufacturing environments.

Article by Alan Wheable FISTC, MITOL – Communications Manager at Omnitek.

www.omnitek.tv

This article is also available to read at BFV online here, page 22.

(JP/LM)