Tuesday, July 31, 2012

I mentioned previously that the Panasonic WJ 545P special effects generator does not supply the necessary power to run the WV-3250 camera through the 10 pin connector. I had, at the time, shrugged this off as the external power supply works just fine.

What I didn't factor in was the element of sync, which happens to be quite crucial for legible video. As it stands, it would appear as if the WJ 545P cannot lock to a composite video signal at the PL-259 input (my abilities as an operator may be at fault here). At any rate, having the option to power the camera at the SEG is enticing, whether or not this will sort out my sync issues remains to be seen.

I believe I've already taken pictures of drilling metal, so let's just skip to the result. +12 volts at roughly 500 mA is fed at pin 10 (pictured with the blue wire sans heat shrink), referenced at pin 9 (behind the blue wire). Naturally the surrounding pins are to be left alone.

Not a whole lot of room to work here.

Here's the result. Some liquid electrical tape that was used to insulate the ends of the disconnected wires, since I have misplaced my heat shrink. The idea was that the end result would be cleaner than electrical tape which can unfurl over time. I wouldn't call this cleaner, so I'll just comfort myself on the permanence aspect.

A bit of heat & melt due to space constraints, could have been worse.

So there you have it, DC power input for camera channel 1. Since the SEG supports only two channels simultaneously I didn't see the point in modifying more than one input, as I have multiple SEGs that will cascade into one another (forming a loop if I choose) and the power supplies I have earmarked won't support more than a single camera. I'll just allocate channel 1 as a powered input for each.

1 comment:

crochambeau said...

While I can't yet conclude that there is NO way to deliver sync from the WJ-545P to the WV-3250, it is certainly looking that way.

It has proven simpler to feed composite video out of the camera into a TBC that is locked into another source (Y/luminance from a component video feed has worked nicely) that also feeds the SYNC input of the WJ-545P (as on board sync generator of the 545 has proven less than useful in the examples I've used)