Field trip to Evertz in Burlington

On Thursday November 18th, our entire Broadcast Engineering program boarded an early morning bus and traveled three hours west to Burlington, ON.  There we spent five hours at the manufacturing plant and corporate headquarters of Evertz Microsystems. Evertz designs and manufactures cutting edge professional broadcast equipment for television, radio and internet-based media organizations. I had first heard of Evertz two months ago during a product demonstration given at Loyalist College of their HD2014 Video PassPort 1RU Multi-Path Video Converter, Frame Synchronizer and Decoder.

Shortly after our arrival, we were treated to a tour of their manufacturing facility. I was impressed that Evertz is among the few Canadian companies that do not outsource their manufacturing and assembly to other companies in other countries. The entire facility is extremely clean and has anti-static floors. Employees are required to wear wrist straps and must keep one foot on the floor at all times to prevent static discharge that can destroy tiny electromagnetically sensitive parts often found in integrated circuits (IC's). The Raw Stock room has an elevator storage system that delivers vacuum-sealed packages containing the parts used in the beginning stages when filling a work order. Evertz keeps product order turn-around times very short. Orders received early morning can be ready to ship to the customer by midday. We were walked through the many stages of the manufacturing processes, soldering machines fed with IC's in ribbon rolls, their testing and research and development departments.

During the afternoon, there were product demonstrations, and discussions about compression technology and employment opportunities at Evertz. For me, the compression technology discussion was the highlight of the afternoon. While I was already aware of where MPEG-2 compression is deployed, and where it is slowly being replaced by MPEG-4, I had only a vague understanding of how it actually works. It was explained to us as best as someone with a PHD level understanding in this area can convey to this first year college student. JPEG-2000 compression was also discussed which I was previously unaware of. The distinction between distribution codec’s and those used in digital cinemas was explained.

The afternoon's discussions put into perspective how much I have yet to learn about broadcast technology before I will have the skills and knowledge needed by a company like Evertz. I am only two and a half months into this three-year college program and Thursday's tour gave me a taste of what one potential career path actually looks like.