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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Author
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Topic: Barco Recertification
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Phil Ranucci
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 236
From: Carpinteria,CA, United States
Registered: May 2006
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posted 12-11-2016 04:08 PM
Central (GMT -6:00) (10:08 PM Local)
Any body else get this from Barco? Is this necessary? I've never had the Barco NOC refuse to talk to me, even when calling about screens they're not maintaining.
Hello,
Our records indicate that your Certification as a Barco Digital Cinema Certified Expert has expired and needs to be renewed.
Recertification is now available online.
This online recertification course normally costs $500. But for the month of December we are offering this exam at a 50% discount!
Click on the link below, pay online, and take the exam. It’s that simple.
https://goo.gl/0AEWus
You will receive your renewed certification via email within a few short days of having completed and passing the exam.
Certification is good for a period of two years and once you are re-certified you continue the benefits of Certification:
· Immediate and continued support through our Help Desk and Network Operating Center (NOC)
· Validation of your mastery of skills, knowledge, and abilities
· Differentiation from competitors
· Demonstration to consumers that you are a skilled and experienced technical professional
· Recognition and a critical sense of confidence and achievement
· A public audience that is assured of the highest possible satisfaction in visual technology that is displayed in the most timely, efficient, and effective manner
Thank you for your participation in the Barco Product Training Certification Program and we look forward to you continuing to be a Barco Certified Expert.
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Warmest regards, electronic_signature_email_large Scott Nipper Director of Training, Americas
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 12-12-2016 10:40 AM
Central (GMT -6:00) (4:40 PM Local)
As someone who did the "installation and basic maintenance" course last week, +1 to Steve's comments. There were actually only four of us, so we all had a projector to ourselves. There were two C series and two B series machines in their training room, and we each spent a day on one of each.
I was doing it because it's a prerequisite for their laser course, which I'll be going back to do next year, in order to be able to look after our 30L. A lot of what was covered I knew already through unofficial, on-the-job self training, but a significant amount of it wasn't, and it was still a very useful week. Ironically, the day after I get back, I was able to fix an issue on one of our NECs that had been bugging me for ages (convergence was slightly out), but which I did not know the cause of or cure for.
As Steve mentions, the test is more than a mere formality. I thought it was well designed so that anyone who passes it can be relied upon to carry out an installation reliably, and ask for the right help from the right place if they encounter an issue above and beyond the routine.
I'm not sure about the ongoing recertification. If someone has been working with these machines constantly over the two year period, this seems to me to be pointless: a letter from your boss confirming that you've been working for the past two years in a role that involves regularly installing and maintaining Barco projectors should be all that is needed to renew the certification; but if that's not the case, then a recertification process is probably justified. Two years is long enough for new models to come onto the market, old ones to have dropped out of support, significantly different (at the front end) software to have appeared, etc. etc.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 12-15-2016 08:13 PM
Central (GMT -6:00) (2:13 AM Local)
I'd hope that they'd give you a machine that had been sabotaged in a way that simulates known, in-the-field breakdowns, rather than throw something bizarre that is almost never going to happen. Presumably Barco has lots of data as to what failures have happened to a given model and how they've been fixed (any complex machine has known weak points), and can use that to make the training assessment reasonably realistic.
I thought that the test I did last week (for the basic course) was thoughtfully designed. They built in one or two gotchas that weren't explicitly covered in the hands-on training, but were in the book (in my case, back focus was way out and the Dallas key provided in the tool cart hadn't been registered on the projector), and wanted to see if you could figure out how to deal with them. That is absolutely the sort of situation you could encounter when doing an actual installation.
Same for the written test. It wasn't a memory test, but you were expected to go through the book and drill down for detail. Again, if you're in a theater installing these things, it's not 100% vital that you know the maximum bulb size that you can put in every model in the product line without having to look it up online or in the literature, but it is vital that you know where to find the information, can get it right and double check what you've done.
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Marco Giustini
Film God
Posts: 2713
From: Reading, UK
Registered: Nov 2007
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posted 12-17-2016 01:59 AM
Central (GMT -6:00) (7:59 AM Local)
What Steve said, that feature lives in the ICP, NEC simply brought that into the communicator.
However, there is a bulletin from TI that recommends NOT to use (vertical? Horizontal?) electronic convergence as that will cause computational errors in doing some colour conversion - sorry, I haven't got the bulletin with me. Now, as Steve said doing convergence on NEC is not easy so that could be the lessen of the two evils, but I thought you should know. The issue should be highlighted on the latest release note, I'll dig it out later on.
And yes, even thought Barco convergence drifts more than the others', I like the idea that I can adjust that in minutes.
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Leo Enticknap
Film God
Posts: 7474
From: Loma Linda, CA
Registered: Jul 2000
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posted 12-17-2016 12:23 PM
Central (GMT -6:00) (6:23 PM Local)
Barco do the training courses in Mexico City (in English), too, which is probably where I would have gone if I couldn't have got my shifts covered for the dates of the Sacramento one. Ironically, when I was costing it out, it would probably have been cheaper to do it there, despite being over three times the distance away (flights about the same, hotels significantly less), but there might have been visa and additional travel insurance issues (I don't know what the visa situation is for a British citizen and US permanent resident/green card holder visiting Mexico on business, but I'm guessing that there would likely have been paperwork needed).
+1 to Brad's theory. My stomach felt a bit nauseous at the end of day 2 and I threw up twice during that night. Getting through day 3 was a bit of a struggle, and at the end of it I had to crawl into bed and was out cold from around 6pm to 6am. I was pretty much OK by the start of the final day, but then gave the bug to my wife and son when I got back, and they've both had it this week. And without wanting to sound arrogant, I have a pretty good immune system: it's a standing joke among my family and co-workers that when a bug is doing the rounds, I'm about the only one who manages to avoid it. So there must be something in the air and/or water in Rancho Cordova.
As for the convergence on my NEC, the vertical red was just a hair out (less than a pixel, I'd guess), and the software adjustment appears to have cured it, to my eyes at least. I've only ever used the TI software directly on series 1 machines (and even then, only to update it to 15.1); this was a series 2. As I haven't been trained and don't even have the service instructions for doing a manual convergence check on an NEC, this isn't something I feel comfortable attempting, but unless my eyes are deceiving me, nudging one value +1 in the software fixed the very, very slight fringing that used to really bug me on subtitles in particular. We probably need an NEC-certified tech to do it properly before long, though: it's been around four years since that machine was installed.
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