Review: Progressive Image Dual TBC

PRELIMINARY EVALUATION OF THE "KITCHEN SYNC" Dual TBC Jan. 5/92 Made by Progressive Image & marketed by Digital Creations

This review is based on a quick initial look at this unit without the benefit of a vectorscope (only a waveform monitor). It does not pretend to be complete, infallible or to mention all of the unit's features. It is intended to highlight notable findings or thoughts that came to mind when I was testing it. More thorough reports than this can be commissioned on a paid product evaluation basis. These comments are copyright & may not be used in any publication or for advertising without written permission.

*This is a dual Time Base Corrector (TBC) on one board which means you can get twice as many TBC's in a computer as you would if you were using Digital Processing Systems DPS II. However the price is roughly twice as much as the DPS II so you may be forced to buy 2 TBC's even if you only needed one. The price for either brand is quite reasonable though compared to what TBC's formerly cost.

*The Kitchen Sync is transparent enough to handle SVHS (400 lines). I did not test to see how far past 400 lines it would go or to see if there were major differences between composite or Y/C in & out.

*While I didn't really have time to put this TBC through its paces, I did notice that it did handle certain unstable input signals without hiccuping; something my Hotronics AH91 TBC does not. I did find one section of tape that did a quick judder/freeze though.

*The ability to store 3 additional user selectable proc amp settings is nice & more than most TBC's offer but you can quickly use up those 3 & the DPS II has 10 programmable set up settings. Furthermore, because Y/C in requires a selection of a different input & for some reason was 3-4 IRE higher than its composite counterpart, it requires 1 of its own set up settings.

*Unlike the DPS II there are no unity gain settings to which one has to reference the hardware, but it does come with factory settings in position 4. The factory proc amp settings are not set at unity gain but should be. Pedestal for example was very high. I can only assume that these settings do not change when put in a different computer as the board does not interface with the computer but only draws power from it. I would strongly recommend that an end user have a technician save a user definable program setting using a signal generator & scopes until such time as Progressive Image starts setting these up so you can depend on the factory settings to be accurate.

*This TBC handles either NTSC or Pal video signals. That is a feature I don't recall seeing in other TBC's. This could be very handy if you wanted to Time Base Correct the signal when doing a foreign standards translation using a cheap translator such as the Panasonic AGW-1. It is also a smart marketing feature since they only need to make one unit to supply most countries. The operators manual did not mention if it would handle PAL-M or PAL-N.

*The proc amp controls on this TBC were good although they had arbitrary reference numbers rather than IRE, percentage & degree numbers like the DPS II had. There is a very limited range to the hue (tint) control. Most TBC's have a range slightly in excess of 360 degrees so that you can correct hue no matter how far out it is. It would have been very useful if the video (luma) level control could have gone all the way to black as this would have benefited those who were doing cuts editing without a downstream switcher so that they could do a fade to black.

*After several discussions over the past couple of years with people at Progressive Image & at Digital Creations, I have come to the conclusion that these two companies have a paranoia about anyone else out there tuning up their equipment. This is also evident in this product as there are no abbreviation descriptions on the board to indicate what the pot adjustments are for, as in other TBC's & the operator's manual threatens a $150. an hour service fee to set it right if you tamper with the adjustment rather than the usual $35. As of the last conversation I had, they do not authorize dealers to tune up their equipment. These two companies made it very clear to me when I was tuning up one of their Supergen 2000 Genlocks that they don't think there are very many competent service technicians out there & they don't want to publish a service manual with schematics lest the competition get hold of it. I described how I had tuned up the Supergen 2000 without a manual & it turned out to be exactly how they did it. All they really needed to do was publish a 4 page document describing what each of the 23 adjustments were for & any technician with scopes who had tuned up the encoder stage of a broadcast camera could tune up the Supergen 2000. These two companies put out some very respectable products, but it would be refreshing to see them publish a basic service manual for their products & to recognize that there are some competent technicians out there & that sometimes a piece of equipment can only be tuned up properly in the customer's location when it is interfaced with other equipment that it will be working with. They say in their operator's manual that they really do listen, so let's see if they come up with a tuneup document.

*There are several jumpers on this board but the operator's manual doesn't mention what most of them are for. I, for one, like to know what the full capabilities of a product are.

*Unlike the DPS II TBC the Kitchen Sync TBC's have a usable freeze frame or field. I did notice, however, that on color bars from the camera there was a slight horizontal chroma jitter on any of the freezes (chroma oscillates horizontally). This chroma jitter wasn't apparent when I froze a shot from video. You can proc amp a freeze after it is captured which is something you can't do on my Hotronics AH91 TBC. There appears to be no ability to GPI (General Purpose Interface) trigger the freeze from another source. There is a mention on page 8 of a serial port connection but it doesn't say anywhere what it is for. Perhaps that is intended to give a GPI trigger & other options. The freeze menu is confusing since there is no freeze when it says "freeze" & it is frozen when it says "run".

*It would have been quite handy to have a rewhite balance adjustment on this TBC. Hardware manufacturers don't always realize what users need or that a simple addition or change could make life so much easier. A rewhite balance would allow you to salvage footage that you had not or could not properly white balance when shooting. This happens frequently with totally automatic consumer cameras in dual color temperature light sources such as incandescent lighting with a strong backlite daylight window. You cannot correct a white balance problem with the hue (tint) control.

*The unit I tested did not have the Y/C out option, however I would strongly recommend it as there are lots of other downstream devices other than the Toaster that do use Y/C & most recording VCRs work noticeably better with a Y/C input. I would like to test it to see if it does a good job of transcoding from composite to Y/C. The Supergen 2000 does not use a comb filter & has severe dot crawl on chroma edges when transcoding from composite to Y/C. The break out box has the Y/C out connections but they do not work unless you have purchased that option. I was quite surprised & disappointed to find that you can't have composite & Y/C plugged into the input at the same time or you will get an impedance mismatch & therefore a distorted level in your video. You can select composite or Y/C inputs & outputs with the remote control, but you must also physically change the cable too. I was also disappointed that you could only use composite or Y/C out at one time but not both. I don't recall seeing any other devices that don't allow both outputs to work at the same time. With only one output, you may be forced to route (loop) the signal through a device (such as a monitor) before going to the recorder thereby potentially affecting your signal integrity. Ideally I would have liked to see 2 composite & 2 Y/C outputs all active.

*There is only a 90 day warranty which says to me that the manufacturer doesn't have a high degree of confidence in this product. If you're a busy person, 90 days can pass quickly before you have had a chance to recognize that the unit has problems especially if you have had to send it in for service already.

*I liked the idea of an external breakout connector box so you don't have to double up on the use of a connector like on the DPS II TBC.

*When the source VCR fast forward scans, the picture is not very stable & vertically rolls. Perhaps there is a fix for this or a setting I did not have right.

*It was good to see the provision of both horizontal & vertical Y/C alignment adjustments. This could be very useful on 2nd or 3rd generation tapes to realign the chroma & luma images.

*Some pages of the owners manual were not very well bound & tended to come loose. The diagram on page 7 should indicate that button B is the "shift" button.

*I have adapted my 3000 to use the Newtek Toaster & it works just fine. Interestingly when I installed the DPS II & Toaster together it would not even turn on, however the Kitchen Sync & Toaster do turn on. Presumably the Kitchen Sync doesn't tax certain voltage levels of the power supply as much. Since the Kitchen Sync has its own remote control & only relys on the host computer for power, it would make good marketing sense to make a box with a power supply to host the TBC's so that a user without the need for a computer could buy & use this unit.

*I like the idea of an outboard remote control rather than computer software control but it could end up being less updateable & less versatile. The cable should have been another 2 feet longer although I'm sure you could easily use a high density DB15 extension cable to extend it. When saving a setup program, there is no indication on the LCD screen that it has actually saved.

*The luma gain adjustments respond by the number on the remote control LCD but it doesn't necessarily respond on the video signal. This means that you cannot be sure that the same luma setting will always give you exactly the same luma output. In other words, the left & right toggle buttons don't always make a difference to the luma level when pushed but they do always indicate on the LCD that a change has been made.

*There appears to be some chroma differential gain problems as you vary the chroma saturation control. This means that all colors do not increase or decrease linearly.

*Very little heat is actually generated from this board.

*Genlock ability is an option that should be a standard feature. There are all kinds of situations that you might come across where you might need to genlock to another stable source. For example you might have a non-genlockable consumer camera feeding input 1 of the Toaster & looped through to genlock the Kitchen Sync so it can use inputs 2 & 3 of the Toaster. When you already have a full frame sync TBC it shouldn't cost much more to make it genlockable.

*Some other products from Progressive Image & Digital Creations like the Supergen 2000 have impressed me with their price/quality performance. This unit is no exception & may be just what some people are looking for. This dual TBC has an average number of features. Future models might include features such as drop out compensation with or without the need of an RF input, chroma noise reduction, Faroudja rise time enhancement, more outputs, 3.58 feedback, etc.

Yours truly,

Doug Hembruff  
Product Evaluator