The Farm Chooses Leader LV5490 4K Monitors

The Farm Group has purchased three Leader LV5490 4K 3G/HD/SD-SDI waveform monitors with HDR capabilities as part of a 4K/HDR upgrade to its ‘William’ post-production facility on Marshall Street in London’s Soho post-production community.

“We evaluated the Leader LV5490 waveform monitor earlier this year after increased demand for more UHD/4K and HDR capabilities” says The Farm’s Engineer, Paul Chapman. “A Dutch facility company, United, introduced us to the instrument as they are using LV5490s on their location productions for Amazon. We did some evaluation and found the LV5490 to be the ideal test and measurement tool for UHD/4K production. Once customer demand reached a tipping point, it was a simple choice to select Leader.”

Colleague engineer Ben Beard confirmed that The Farm has deployed all three of its LV5490s. One is located in a traditional grading suite where the real-time false color HDR display and CIE color space display complement the traditional waveform display, allowing colorists to maximise the impact of HDR images.

The second LV5490 is being used in a quality control suite where the real-time false-color gamut error display ensures that finished programs conform with broadcast standards.

Installed in The Farm’s central equipment room, the third LV5490 feeds its HD-SDI rasterizing display to the facility’s central router. From there the LV5490 can be routed to any edit suite in the facility and controlled remotely via a web-browser interface.

The test instruments were supplied via Leader Europe UK channel partner Jigsaw24.

“Leader’s LV5490 has by far the most advanced and easy to use 4K and HDR measurement tools currently available,” says Jigsaw24 Chief Engineer Phil Crawley. “We recommend that any production and post-production companies involved in 4K and HDR take a serious look at this instrument.”

“It is great to see the initial interest in 4K/UHD TV and HDR production finally starting to turn into real projects,” says Leader’s European Regional Development Manager Kevin Salvidge. “Once broadcasters have delivered HDR programming, their customers don’t want to go back to SDR content. HDR is a game changer, drawing viewers in and getting them engaged with programmes in a whole new way. We are pleased that The Farm Group has selected Leader’s LV5490 for use on its most high profile and exciting projects.”

The Leader LV5490 offers 4K, UHD, 3G, HD and SD test and measurement features in a compact portable unit. Waveform, vector, five-bar and picture display can all be viewed at the same time on the instrument’s nine-inch LCD monitor. The monitor is full 1920 x 1080 HD resolution with a wide viewing angle and high quality color reproduction. 1920 x 1080 HD DVI and HD-SDI feeds are also provided to feed a larger monitor. Simultaneous viewing of up to four 3 gigabit/s SDI inputs is possible, including overlays. The size and location of individual channels can be adjusted on the display using a USB pointer so the user is not limited to fixed-size quadrants.

Recent additions to the LV5490 feature set include the world’s first direct-digital 4K noise analyzer. Measurement of noise in luminance or RGB component chroma channels can be performed in IP/12G/3G/UHD/HD/SD. Data obtained from the input SDI signal is converted directly without intermediate analog processing, allowing highly accurate and highly stable measurement.