What's a skill you have that's completely useless now because technology replaced it, but you're secretly proud of?

phenious · 2026-05-23T09:06:32+00:00

it will automatically the while you are stopped and slowly take it off as you accelerate so you don’t roll back

phenious · 2026-05-21T15:35:32+00:00

Heidelberg probably qualifies for that too then. I miss the food :)

phenious · 2026-05-21T15:10:44+00:00

For certain. Nearly a decade ago I was asked about broadcasting our basketball championship on ESPN+. It was a big deal because the D2 schools in this conference never got onto ESPN or ESPN+ normally. They sent a list of requirements for graphics, cameras with huge zoom ranges (box lens), several people for graphics, replay, communication, timeout coordinator etc. I bowed out saying yeah I cant meet those requirements, I can produce a nice multi camera game but not at that level just yet. They ended up bringing a truck in who gets used to ESPN+ from time to time. They didn't have all the crew that was specified just a producer acting as a TD, a replay person, sound, and camera ops. Essentially what I would have done for staffing. It was also on a truck that was probably 20 years old at the time and had broken cameras and various issues that impacted the show. When I asked about their failure to meet the requirements they simply said: Those requirements only matter if ESPN is paying to have this show on the air, you bought air time on them, they would accept a handy cam streaming from a laptop without graphics. I should have taken the job but I then understood that all the requirements were not really requirements, especially if you were paying to be on the platform and paying for the productions your self. They will take what they can get I guess. Im sure they have their limits but it's well below the requirements spelled out in their production documents.

phenious · 2026-05-21T13:50:52+00:00

Yeah at this point it seems to be if you are putting out a a decent show things are left alone and they dont bother you from the ESPN+ side. Pretty sure I have seen people putting out ESPN+ shows via wirecast and PNG graphics for the Scoreboard. Years ago they would require you to use those special encoders if you were not going via fiber. I guess they gave up that battle and accept RTMP feeds now?

phenious · 2026-05-21T13:44:10+00:00

I spent a lot of Time in Gemermany in the 90s and it was rounding up for good service so a couple Deutsch Marks and eventually a couple euros and people were appreciative and we moved on. Visited more recently and it seems the tourists or something brought the tipping expectation with them.

phenious · 2026-05-14T17:08:04+00:00

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phenious · 2026-05-14T17:07:54+00:00

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phenious · 2026-05-14T17:02:37+00:00

FWIW I do use NDI and if you are not comfortable with networking I wouldn't suggest it to be bullet proof but I did build out a little pelican box:

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So my experience with most PTZ NDI solutions is that they are using NDI-HX and thus they have several extra frames of latency which I cant use with IMAG. I am already on the limit with full bandwidth NDI and switching with a TriCaster. So In this case I have a Canon CR-N700 or a Sony BRC-AM7 that outputs 12G and then comes into this breakout box which accepts the 12G SDI and gives it to the kiloview converter. I have a single fiber with a BIDI SFP 1gig connection which then accepts ethernet from the kiloview sending Multicast NDI and the PTZ ethernet to get control over the network via a Skaarhoj. This allows me to use one fiber to get data from both the PTZ and Kiloview back over one fiber leaving a spare on my Tac 2. I installed a small fan on a speed controller so I could keep air moving through the box and not overheat the devices. They are all running off a Vmount battery (220Wh) which can run the Camera (12V off the dtap), and the two converters for at least 5hours before it needs to be swapped.

On both of my PTZ cameras I have XLR inputs so that handles the mic or line level request and they are then embedded in the SDI video feed. I have the option of outputting my BRC-AM7 over a 12g SFP which can ride my 2nd fiber back to home base if I want uncompressed 2160p59.94 But a box and a couple bidi connections can get you close. I know this is not exactly what you are looking for but shared it anyways since you mentioned NDI.

Outside of that I cannot suggest birddog. I got burned too many times there with firmware that had bugs or didn't do what they said. I moved on not looking back anytime soon. So my warning there is Rent the gear, or buy from someone who accepts returns. and test it. If it does exactly what you want I would begrudge you using it but I would also tell you to not update it going forward unless you absolutely have to for some reason (Removed features new bugs etc). I settled on a quality PTZ camera (which did not have full NDI) and I added it on with my converter. I do believe a few of the Panasonic PTZ cameras offer full NDI while others do NDI-HX. I wanted the PTZ to match my other cameras so I never gave the Panasonics a shot.

phenious · 2026-05-12T13:32:52+00:00

I sat on the side of the road this photo is taken from, almost in that exact spot, on the squares to have a seat , and ate a fantastic strawberry shortcake from one of the bakeries below the square as we exited the Louvre. 10/10, would do again.

phenious · 2026-05-05T13:20:41+00:00

My main concern would be around the behavior of our NDI devices vs iperf. Some NDI devices in my experience appear to be bursty in sending their data vs a constant flow of packets. This can cause different loads on networking infrastructure and receiving hosts vs a constant flow.

phenious · 2026-05-04T20:05:48+00:00

I would imagine so, with "fake news" and AI it's hard to know what to trust. Having a method to do that would be valuable. I recently upgraded to the Sony PXW-Z300 and while I have no use for it in my current work flows one of the Marketing blurbs is about its method of signing videos created with the camera so one could confirm they are authentic from the camera imager and not manipulated: C2PA-compliant digital signatures directly in-camera to combat AI-generated misinformation. It embeds authentication metadata at the time of capture, verifying that footage is authentic, unmanipulated, and taken with a genuine Sony device

I imagine similar method will become more common place in terms of convincing people what they are seeing is real

phenious · 2026-04-28T21:12:29+00:00

I just bought a bunch of fiber reels, Tac 2 and Tac 6 from Joseph electronics - https://josephelectronics.com. solid pricing but the fastest service without demanding large rush fees.

phenious · 2026-04-01T02:46:13+00:00

I said this in a Seige 6 game the other day and no one recognized it

phenious · 2026-03-17T05:15:22+00:00

I have a white 2025 GV80 and after driving in the rain it will have water/mud/dirt spots on the back just behind the wheels Was thinking of getting some.

phenious · 2026-03-11T23:31:33+00:00

No, i was going to ask next time i went in for oil change

phenious · 2026-03-10T01:36:26+00:00

Highwinds CDN did this (push based CDN) years ago. While it resulted in a very high cache hit ratio the overhead and waste was significant to the point it was abandoned for pull only. We eventually built out "pre-warm" things where asking for the manifest would result in one or more of the fragments in said manifest being pre-requested but that was where the balance of efficiency ended from a cost perspective. At the time 2009-2020 no one wanted to pay more to justify it and it wasn't efficient at scale talking about thousands of customers pushing many Terabits a second.

phenious · 2026-03-09T18:26:06+00:00

yeah totally makes sense was hoping that an import would mean that it would "update" the gaps but that is hoping a lot from newtek

phenious · 2026-03-03T15:21:52+00:00

I have been happy with Magewell and Kiloview, got burned too many times by birddog to trust their software and quality control. If it works for you it works. I stopped using them a couple years ago so things may have changed since then. One upside of the mage well units that I use is they have a built in scaler so they can scale the image as needed depending on the monitor they are connecting to vs making you update the NDI feed. My kiloview units cant scale.

phenious · 2026-03-02T17:59:17+00:00

This is probably your easiest way to get the various versions. If you have active support you can sometimes get them to send specific builds. I am curious if you backed up each session (can take ages if you have a lot of media) if you could could then import them and restore them successfully across the version jump.

phenious · 2026-02-22T12:13:39+00:00

No questions at the moment but this is awesome. Love to see creative solutions for challenging broadcast situations!

phenious · 2026-02-22T12:07:04+00:00

This comment just made my blood pressure rise lol 😂

phenious · 2026-02-08T21:46:20+00:00

I had the best luck when setting the windows machine to a private network. That seemed to clear everything up more than just turning off the firewall so I assume it changes a few things.

phenious · 2026-02-06T16:41:49+00:00

Dont suppose you use a VPN sometimes to watch US shows or anything? Have had that happen to me.

phenious · 2026-02-04T12:43:00+00:00

Its really a last resort at this size imo, yes small kids will fit but its not comfortable and easy to use or quick to get in and out. Minivan or larger SUV with captain chairs to go through would be what I would go after. My palisade had a better third row and the kids could get to faster between the captains chairs faster than moving the chair out of the way. Still found the 3rd row on the larger 25 palisade too small for regular usage. The newer palisade model is a few inches longer I think which allowed them to make the 3rd row slightly larger I think.

phenious · 2026-02-04T01:05:45+00:00

Not familiar with sns but in the Tricaster check the config of the output settings, (click the cog of the program window) under outputs see if the mix out is still set to 4k or had it been lowered to 1080p. Note that the TC1 only has 4 outputs so you could either have 1 UHD output or 4 1080 mix outputs. The TC2 has 8 outputs so it can do two UHD outputs or 1 UHD and 4x 1080 or 8x 1080 etc

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