mnfreelancer
Active Member
I'm surprised the idea of running video over CAT5 wasn't mentioned before the immediately above post. We did a lot of that back in highschool, since my building was new enough that every room had many CAT5 jacks. It wasn't bad quality wise considering some of the insane runs we did, mostly for monitoring purposes.
Sometimes we'd have to run video all the way from the gym or theatre up to the television studio on the other end of the building on the 3rd floor. The CAT5 link was decent for monitoring but nowhere near broadcast quality, so we often employed a Scientific Atlanta broadband cable modulator designed for "iNet" use (institutional network) that used to throw modulated video on a specially designed cable-company loop from school building to school building, sometimes distances of over 2 miles. With some o'scope and waveform monitor tweaking it drove a 750' run of RG-6 quad shield very nicely with broadcast quality results at the other end (broadcast quality relative to 7 years ago). We used an agile demodulator from Blonder Tongue at the other end to bring it back to a composite signal that was then run into a time base corrector to sync it to the outbound system.
Regarding running video signals on other lengths of cable not designed for it, been there, done that with very limited success. The box boom positions in my highschool theatre made excellent interest-angle camera positions but had absolutely no installed cable other than a/c and 4 wire speakon even close to them - like the ONE room in the school with no CAT5. In my experimenting days I decided to try and run y/c over the speakon figuring it had 4 poles and would be of decent quality considering the gauge of the speaker wire...nada - they only connected 2 out of the 4 poles...hmm 2 poles, sounds suitable for composite video...nope, couldn't even sync, not even with a gen lock return. FAIL. So I ended up pulling RG6 quad through a spare conduit run back to the booth and throwing compression BNC connectors on the end of it...and the camera position lived happily ever after!
Sometimes we'd have to run video all the way from the gym or theatre up to the television studio on the other end of the building on the 3rd floor. The CAT5 link was decent for monitoring but nowhere near broadcast quality, so we often employed a Scientific Atlanta broadband cable modulator designed for "iNet" use (institutional network) that used to throw modulated video on a specially designed cable-company loop from school building to school building, sometimes distances of over 2 miles. With some o'scope and waveform monitor tweaking it drove a 750' run of RG-6 quad shield very nicely with broadcast quality results at the other end (broadcast quality relative to 7 years ago). We used an agile demodulator from Blonder Tongue at the other end to bring it back to a composite signal that was then run into a time base corrector to sync it to the outbound system.
Regarding running video signals on other lengths of cable not designed for it, been there, done that with very limited success. The box boom positions in my highschool theatre made excellent interest-angle camera positions but had absolutely no installed cable other than a/c and 4 wire speakon even close to them - like the ONE room in the school with no CAT5. In my experimenting days I decided to try and run y/c over the speakon figuring it had 4 poles and would be of decent quality considering the gauge of the speaker wire...nada - they only connected 2 out of the 4 poles...hmm 2 poles, sounds suitable for composite video...nope, couldn't even sync, not even with a gen lock return. FAIL. So I ended up pulling RG6 quad through a spare conduit run back to the booth and throwing compression BNC connectors on the end of it...and the camera position lived happily ever after!
