HD For Indies

I spent some time this weekend on a non-HD4NDs related work project - getting my own home studio in order, so that I can actually, you know...DO STUFF rather than merely sacrifice my house to the tidal ebb and flow of gear coming in and out.

I'd long ago run heavy duty coax underneath my house* by the bucket load (I don't know how many hundreds of feet of it), but I'd never really gotten it all going and hooked up.

(* I have a rarity in Austin, a pseudo-basement, since I live on a hill - my pier and beam house has what would be a crawlspace under any other home, but since I'm on the hill it is 18" on the uphill side and about 6 feet tall on the other....thankfully the living room surround channel speakers were the only thing that had to be run to the 18" side)

I made a push back when I pondered and then got my first HDTV to get it all hooked up to/from the studio - I bought a 50 foot HDMI to DVI cable and a 50 foot toslink in addition to the 8 heavy coax cables (RG-6 I think it was) that ran from the living room into the wiring closet.

So while I'd finally got studio to living room wired and working, I'd never gotten the living room to studio setup working - and after having put it down a couple of months ago, identifying which cable was which that dissapear into the floor in one room and pop up in another can be a bit daunting. So through trial and error I got it all working by spending half my Sunday on it.

Just for kicks to show what's involved to get this kind of stuff going, here's a few photos walking through my setup. Click for a larger view, but command-click (Safari w/tabs enabled) to open in a new tab, or possibly open in a new window if you'd prefer. I'm too lazy to provide proper links, so deal. ;p

Also, please realize this is a work in progress - yesterday I spent many hours running cables over the floor etc. testing, and this ain't purty - it is just where I have it at the moment figuring it all out and getting it working. This is my house/mad scientist lab, not set up at the moment as a client presentable space! This is just me sharing my geekery with you folks, not trying to show this off as a final result.

Here's the back end of the home theater setup:

Hooked into that I've got
-the big HDTV (Sony SXRD rear projection)
-an Xbox (original, aka Halo Injection Device)
-an Apple TV
-an HD cable box
-a Toshiba HD-A2 HD-DVD player
-an S-VHS deck whose apparent fate is to gather dust
-and a 5-8 year old Onkyo 5.1 receiver, that doesn't have enough ports on it.

Therefore, with the new toyz, I got a 4-in-1-out HDMI/toslink/digital coax switch with a remote. I literally ran out of remote commands available on my Onkyo's universal remote! I need to deprogram all the CD changer's commands to free up some buttons and squeeze the AppleTV's and HDMI switch's commands in there (yes Logitech universal remotes are nice, but I don't want to spend that much). Figuring out who has toslink vs. digital coax vs both and how to allocate my limited digital audio ports was quite an undertaking - DON'T be one port shy, else MAJOR hassles ensue.

The HDMI/toslink/digital coax audio switch flips between the HD-DVD player, the AppleTV, the HDMI feed from the studio, and a 15 foot DVI cable if for some reason I want to connect a laptop or computer into the living room to the HDTV (makes a helluva desktop, and Macs can underscan to avoid the "I can't see my menus!" dilemma). The switch was was also necessary because I only have two HDMI ports into the HDTV. A bit irksome considering this was Sony's top or near top of line last summer.

All that routes into the HDMI switch and/or receiver and/or directly into the TV. The wiring does get a bit dense...

...and you can't even see 2 or 3 devices & their wires in that pic. One nice tidbit - the HD digital cable box has both digital coax and toslink audio outputs, and they're both hot at the same time - so I have a 50 foot toslink running under the house to get the living room's audio into the studio - that way I can hear the same TV channel while working (good for CNN). For all other digital audio, that's an M-Audio CO2 sitting on the corner - I pass the HDMI/toslink/digital coax switch's audio output through the CO2, and send a digital coax audio signal (the CO2 is configured as a signal repeater/converter) to the studio - since the two rooms are on separate audio legs, if I send analog stereo pair from one to the other I get an annoying hum. By going digital, I skip the hum and get pure digibitty goodness. As is wise in any endeavor like this, label all your cables! At both ends! Makes life MUCH easier when you find a stray later or are trying to troubleshoot.

The stray grey cables with barrel adaptors are from the HD-DVD player - I can route the analog component outputs simultaneously with the HDMI output to get HD picture/sound into the studio for when I'm back&forthing living room to studio. (Incidentally, I've tested & verified I can use the "analog hole" approach to capture video this route if I want to put my HD-DVD content on my AppleTV...but it doesn't look nearly as good, that's another post).

If you look at that first picture closely, you'll see what looks like a white rag on the floor (it is) - that is actually a rag wrapped around and stuffed into the little hinged hatch I oh-so-carefully drilled and hand cut in the floor (about 2x4 inches) carefully and exactly into a single board of my original hardwood floors. (A side benefit of old house - ZERO insulation underneath - drill through 3/4" of wood and you're seeing the basement.) That runs a few feet under the house (carefully crossing electrical lines under the house at a 90 degree angle and a wide looping berth) and comes up through an even bigger hole in the wiring closet (the closet is immediately behind the TV through a wall, closet opens into the studio). The Master Hole has about 32 RG-6 cables, all the Ethernet drops for the house (about 15 or 20, this done before ubiquitous cheap/fast WiFi), all the phone lines, etc. You can just see part of it at the bottom right of this picture (the blue/grey/black cables lower right):


What you see here is (bottom to top) GigE & 100Base-T Ethernet switches, cable modem, router, S-video/RCA stereo pair duplication amplifier I picked up on eBay and not got quite working/installed right, and my recently simplified patch panel.

Below is a detail shot of the patch panel:



You'll note in the high res that a bunch of these cables are properly/professionally labelled underneath clear plastic - these cables were scavenged from a facility that went out of business (Big Old Heavy Iron Avid for lower end work, ahem), so their labels were a HUGE time saver when configuring and connecting all 32 of them into the studio head end.

While technically I "shoulda" run all the labelled Studio In & Out lines into the back of the patch panel and then patched to the Living Room Ins & Outs, I realized the way I've got it set up now is how I'll probably use it 99.9% of the time (I've got 4 BNCs running to breakfast room aka meeting room and also to the bedroom, but I'll probably rarely use'em that way...haven't yet, unless I get that DA properly set up). Since it is an analog signal path, I didn't want to go through several more signal degrading physical connections, so I just connected them as directly as possible.I can always redo it with studio ins/outs into the back of the patch bay if I want/need to. This is ugly but cleaner signal path.

So that is the bridge between living room and studio, with the option to route it elsewhere in the house, with the option to duplicate an s-video video source with stereo analog audio and send that to the 4 zones of the house all at the same time (my Whole House Audio/Video Dream).

Also coming out of the floor in the closet are a big gob of cables that lead under the house to the back corner of the studio with another little hatch:


You can see the hatch flipped up, can't see the cute little brass hinges and knob I suffered to install so if I. The other hatches just like this. The purple is an old t-shirt I wrapped tightly around the cable gob and tucked up tightly into the hole to tighly block it - I learned the hard way that wasps like to set up camp in cool dry underhouse environs....and then crawl up. I also heard black widows and other Ickies do this, so I'm glad I've got it sealed off pretty well (I sit barefoot sometimes with my toesies right down by that...bad bad scene). it is loose at the moment until I'm sure my wire pulling is done and then I'll secure it again.

All that gob leads up to some cable guides I made out of some Home Depot J-hooks I bent to mount under the desk to keep all the cables tidy, out of sight, and away from any electrical interference. All of those then leads to...


...what I call my half-rack. Bottom to top:
-Apex DVD player (which can disable Macrovision for quickie DVD rips of client stuff or for creative rip-o-matics)
-Kenwood stereo amp/receiver I've had for a loooong time
-Toshiba S-VHS deck...it sits here or gets thrown away...
-Blackmagic Multibridge Extreme - which can be used either as primary HD I/O for my Quad G5, or as a standalone converter (which will soon be its primary task)
-home configged BNC patchbay - here's where three Macs worth of HD I/O, two component monitors, and the living room feed can all get routed to each other. I spent hours figuring out the layout of those 32 ports, as I had about 50+ possible connections I could have made to it
-AJA Kona3 breakout box
-AJA Kona2 breakout box

I have more HD-SDI I/O cards than I have Macs (have BMD & AJA gear), so I config as needed to the project at hand - the AJA stuff has convenient breakout boxes, I've remoted the cables from three Macs so when set up with BMD gear the panel acts as a breakout box - HD-SDI, audio & component I/O can be routed/patched through there. When I'm done wiring it all, I'll be able to slide this in under the desk out of the way.

If you thought the front was a big messy cable gob, the back is even busier:


I am still not finished setting all this up - note the receiver's audio I/O is looking a little lonely down there. I also hard-mounted a power strip on the shelf that the A/V gear sits on, to simplify wiring and have "one switch for off" simplicity. The one thing I have to be careful of - if the Multibridge is hooked up to computer, it essentially is a PCIe card, so I have to be careful about my power up/down order with that.

Here's a detail shot of the half rack:


Note once again all cables labelled - HUGE time saver down the road! I can't stress how important it is to label all the cables in what is to be a permanent install - label both ends of EVERYTHING. I used to quibble about labelling power cords as they are interchangeable, but if you've got 10 of them hanging down the back end of a desk and one is loose, or you need to unplug something non-vital to plug in yet another FireWire drive or whatever...you need to KNOW, and not accidentally unplug the computer. And once labelled, PUT 'EM IN THE RIGHT PLACE! Only thing worse than an unlabelled cable is a mislabelled one. Anyone, back to cable central - and all that feeds into my monitoring options:


-the 23" Apple is connected to the Multibridge Extreme for pixel-for-pixel accurate monitoring of 1080p/i signals
-the "Mon1" is a 19" JVC HD broadcast CRT, LOVE this thing - does EVERY SD/HD standard, including PAL & 23.976 frame rates. I have a component HD analog board in it
-the silver one is a 20" consumer SD CRT - lets me see what signals will look like on a "normal" TV (and I have cable hooked up to it as well for watching bad SciFi Channel stuff to half-ignore when working late)
-I can also connect the Multibridge to the 50 foot DVI-HDMI cable that runs under the house to the living room - one nice thing about using the Multibridge as a standalone converter is that ANY of the 3 HD stations can feed it either HD-SDI (single/dual link) or component analog and I can monitor SD/HD as well as HDMI in the living room...all at the same time! Nerdly schweetness...but also truly convenient for clienty stuff as well if they want to know how it'll look in a variety of viewing environments and types of viewing tech.

Next up, I need to get this guy all set up:


...so I can more readily monitor audio from any of the three HD stations in the room, as well as listen in on living room's AppleTV feed (got 50 days of non-repeating Shuffle Luv all queued up). So this is as clean/tidy/lonely as it'll ever get.

So maybe that'll be next weekend's task, getting all the analog/digital audio in/outs figured out in the studio. Then get a passel of color coded not-too-short and not-too-long patch cables so I can route everything quickly/easily. I got these patch panels from that defunct production company and from a friend, if I were starting from scratch BNCs on the front aren't the quickest/easiest way to go as they are slow to get on/off.

All of this has probably totalled into the hundreds of hours of cutting holes, mounting racks, pulling cable, planning, testing, etc...I wouldn't go to all this trouble if I didn't own the house (been here 8 years), and actually got secret geeky joy out of getting it all working. Sometimes, it isn't playing with the toy, it's just BUILDING it that is a ton of the fun. Because I LIKE being able to say, whenever anyone says uncompressed HD editing & routing is a huge undertaking, "Well, HELL - I've got THREE of'em set up in my house, all talkin' to each other and with a triple monitoring setup...its no big deal."

...and get my metaphorical propeller beanie all spun up to 7200rpms.

:D

Your geeky friend,

-mike

PS - and a note for anybody else embarking on such a setup - as I figured out when running the BNC cables (RG-6 & RG-59)originally, the distance above floors has little to do with how long cables need to be under floors. While the HDTV and the Multibridge are perhaps 15 linear feet apart, by the time I factor in going from the Multibridge to under the desk with slack, across the room under the desk, down to where the hole is in the floor, through the floor, under the house following the cable guides I'd already built, dodging around electrical lines to prevent interference, up through the floor, slack, and connecting to the HDTV...a 50 footer was exactly long enough - I have maybe 6 feet of excess slack in the whole thing, and I wanted that anyway to reach the furthest possible computer I might want to directly drive the HDTV with. And if you do want to set up a similar studio or home studio setup...I am available for consulting on such things. This was done somewhat on the cheap as I'm pretty comfortable patching things around by myself, and didn't want to pour a ton of cash into this endeavor. If I really wanted this all to be completely simple and slick, I coulda/woulda spent a bunch more on things like matrix routers, different patchbays & racks, newer/better equipped receivers, proper professional amps, etc. This was scaled to my comfort level and budget - I went out to Fry's to buy a rack and rack shelf and hacksawed it down to fit under my desk, etc. It sits on a cheap blanket to slide it around my wood floors until I come up with something better for it to roll/slide on, etc. I'd previously spec'd out a professional studio for the color correction business I was in, and much of the gear to achieve the same functionality was going to cost thousands and thousands more.

So yes this is an UNGODLY MESS as is, a work in progress- first Thou Shalt Make It Work, and then later Shalt Thee Make It Tidy. Someday, hopefully soon. And then maybe I'll have tidy, client presentable pics to show. As I said at the beginning, this is must me sharing my geekery with you folks.

Another reason to label all cables - after you've got it all working, going to have to unplug/replug/re-route a ton of those cables to tidy it up - and you don't want to be holding a toslink in each hand wondering which one went where...

-mike

Labels: hardware, post equipment, workflow