Roundabout Entertainment, one of Hollywood's most highly respected film and television production support companies, has invested in a LEADER LV5490 SD/HD/4K waveform monitor in response to accelerating interest in ultra-high-definition content creation.
   

"Given the rapid fall in price of UHD home video displays and the stunning quality they deliver, 4K is now the logical resolution for any new production project," comments Stuart Clark, Roundabout's technical manager. "4K cameras have become very affordable. Because it transcodes to clean HD, shooting in 4K is the best possible way to ensure a long commercial life for new productions.

"Expanding our 4K services required a high quality test instrument that we could apply across our entire field of operation. LEADER's LV5490 is the ideal tool for today's SD/HD/UHD world, allowing careful evaluation of video and audio content in practically any signal standard. It also enables us to make very precise checks of the transcodes to ensure a clean signal throughput from start to finish.

"Incredibly compact, the LV5490 can be carried easily from one suite to another and used across a wide range of tasks. It has proved highly reliable, providing consistent display of video waveforms and vectors, SDI-embedded data and audio channel dynamics. It really is the test-and-measurement equivalent of a Swiss Army knife."

Equipped with eight input connectors, the LEADER LV5490 accepts up to two 4K signals simultaneously. Two sets of HD-SDI dual link signal can be displayed at the same time. In SDI mode, up to four signals can be displayed simultaneously. In 4K video format mode, 3G-SDI dual link or quad link are supported. Up to four 3G-SDI dual link 4K video inputs or up to two 3G-SDI quad link 4K video inputs can be displayed .

The LV5490 can be operated in a very wide selection of test and measurement roles. These include waveform, vector and picture monitoring, SDI signal data analysis, cyclic-redundancy-check error, embedded-audio error, event log, data dump and timing display. Leader's CINELITE® II toolset also comes as a standard feature, allowing easy assessment of relative exposure and overall luminance.

Waveform, vector and picture display can be viewed simultaneously on the LV5490 screen. Simultaneous display and overlay display of multiple SDI inputs is possible. Size and location of individual channel displays can be adjusted using a USB-connected pointing device.

In addition to its video test and measurement capabilities, the LEADER LV5490 incorporates a versatile selection of audio monitoring and analysis tools. These include 4 x 4 channels of SDI audio de-embedding, lissajous display, surround sound display and volumetric display. Up to 16 channels of de-embedded SDI audio can be output as discrete AES3 feeds.

Additional features of the LV5490 include video frame capture, instrumentation screen capture, timecode display, tally light and ID display.

Eye pattern display, jitter waveform display and Dolby decoding can be ordered as optional facilities. A rack mounting adapter is also available.

The LV5490 is equipped to handle the video signals via two-sample interleave as well as square division. In square-division signal mode, the entire image is split into four quadrants and each quadrant is transmitted in turn as a sub-image. In the case of two-sample-interleave, two consecutive pixels are transmitted at a time. The first pair goes to sub-image 1 and the second pair to sub-image 2. The first pair of the next line then goes to sub-image 3, the first pair of the next line going to sub-image 4, and so on. Each sub-image is transmitted separately to the monitor. This type of two-sample interleave is the approved standard for 4K.

An additional feature of the LV5490 is Focus Assist, a LEADER innovation that allows easy checking of low-contrast content and fine image detail. Other capabilities include a CIE 1931 color space chart generator. The LV5490 can show 4K signals in the standard's full ITU Recommendation BT.2020 color space.

LV5490 operators can adjust the size of up to four displays on the screen to suit specific tasks. This allows easy magnification and inspection of detail on the instrument's 9 inch 1920 x 1080 HD LCD display screen instead of being limited to fixed size quadrants.

Fully portable, the LV5490 has a footprint of just 223 millimeters wide by 360 mm deep and a height of 189 mm.