Abekas A-20 Digitizer

A20

Usage

The Abekas A-20 transcodes from analog RGBS to SDI (digital) video.

Connection

The A-20 is physically located in the machine room.

Additional notes

The A20 used to be the main digitizer in the old system. There are now multiple digitizers. The A20 is set up so it works exactly like it did before - converting from RGBS to SDI. Since the main component pathway is now CAV instead of RGBS, it's not used as much anymore.

The A60 is directly connected to the A20 via a parallel SDI cable, since that's how they used to be connected and we had the cable lying around. The main SDI backbone is serial, so they each have a parallel->serial converter box in front of the output and a serial->parallel converter in front of the input. Note that parallel SDI cable lengths are extremely limited, so those converter boxes can't move far away from the Abekas boxes. They're all located in the same rack in the machine room.

At one point in the past the A20-A60 connection was the only way to get from streaming video to frames on disk. Now we have more convenient ways to do this, with multiple transcoders and the digitizing capabilities of the nonlinear editing systems which are directly connected to the main filesystem.

Troubleshooting

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Last modified: Wed Nov 4 16:23:32 PST 1998