KitPlus | Articles

Peter Savage declares what happens in Vegas should stay i...

Peter Savage enjoys Vegas, as do lots of people, and sometimes he enjoys it too much. However, this time he came away from the world’s largest broadcast trade show more disillusioned than up-beat. The annual trip to the Mecca of American partying is over for another year and tired and emotional UK broadcast workers have wearily made their ways back...

Submitted by Jon Schorah

Published 01 June 2013

The intricacies of capturing phase-coherent surround soun...

By Pieter Schillebeeckx – Product Manager, SoundField at TSL PPLSince its acquisition of SoundField, TSL Professional Products Ltd, a leading manufacturer of surround microphones, audio monitoring, tally and power management solutions for the broadcast industry, routinely field a growing number of questions from the industry regarding the successfu...

Submitted by Pieter Schillebeeckx

Published 01 June 2013

Will Strauss captures some decent sound gear

Capturing decent location sound requires skill, experience and, as Will Strauss discovered when compiling a list of recent audio acquisition innovations, piles of expensive kit. Although some cameramen might disagree, audio is still the most important thing to get right when on location. The odd dodgy shot can, generally speaking, be sorted in post...

Submitted by Will Strauss#

Published 01 June 2013

Evolving the industry audio monitoring systems

With respect to monitoring, particularly for multiplatform content delivery, how can our facility straddle the divide between baseband and file-based signals?The media industry as a whole is moving toward multiplatform content delivery. This shift includes and affects not only traditional broadcasters and new media outlets, but the content creators...

Submitted by Don Bird

Published 01 June 2013

Building a live linear streaming channel to reach multipl...

The market for live and on-demand streaming video has exploded in recent years thanks in part to broadband connections and the proliferation of connected devices. A recent survey by The Diffusion Group showed that some 50 percent of online video viewers watch some form of streaming live video at least once a month, and 64 percent said comprehensive...

Submitted by Jennifer Baisch

Published 01 May 2013

Premiere 4K aquisition - LIVE

SIS LIVE recently put together a working group to explore the technology and workflows required to deliver live, 4K, multi-camera event coverage from an outside broadcast unit, which culminated in a field test at St James Park on 2nd February. Working with major camera and equipment suppliers, SIS LIVE has conducted proof of concept tests at base u...

Submitted by KitPlus

Published 01 April 2013

NAB is for soothsayers, trendsetters and people with road...

Unlucky for some…by Will StraussPrototypes, alpha products, demos and proofs of concept: NAB in Las Vegas is all about future innovation. Will Strauss picks 13 stands that you must visit this year. With the dust from BVE barely settled, it’s already time to look towards NAB. I know, I know. Don’t shout at me. I didn’t arrange the broadcast industry...

Submitted by Will Strauss#

Published 01 April 2013

An unexpected debate

At the end of last year I went to a screening of The Hobbit, or rather the first volume of The Hobbit, as An Unexpected Journey is the first part of a trilogy. I say I went to a “screening” not because that is the way that we trendy media types talk, but because it was a private showing to some of the great and good of the industry in the UK, organ...

Submitted by Robert Howard

Published 01 March 2013

4K or not 4K, that is the question

Peter Savage goes all literary to show how our industry draws on Shakespeare and Keyne. 4K or not 4K, that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of a much larger workflow Or to take arms against a sea of other formats And by opposing end them. 2K, to sleep No more--and by a sleep to say we end That format,...

Submitted by Robert Howard

Published 01 March 2013

Finding a Flexible Post Workflow

In the heart of London's Shoreditch is the award winning post-production house – Splice. Specialising in broadcast, commercial and corporate post production, the boutique studio is home to forty full-time employees and a grand display of state-of-the art technology spanning three floors including: two Baselight grading theatres, Avid DS suites and...

Submitted by KitPlus

Published 01 February 2013

Technical Testing Joins Forces with Visual Monitoring

In the past, test and measurement equipment was designed exclusively for broadcast engineers. Vectorscope and waveform read-outs sketching out shapes on a scope were readily understood by technicians fluent in the language of signal analysis. Today multi-camera digital acquisition is not merely the domain of the broadcaster; television production i...

Submitted by Kieron Seth#

Published 01 December 2012

Building a digital archive

The search for specific content within masses of stored videotape once required a visit to the archive librarian, a great deal of patience, and some luck. Even if one was able to explain successfully the footage you needed, and if the librarian proved able to locate that content, there remained the possibility that tape degradation or generational...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 October 2012

Addressing SAN Allocation and Permission Challenges

Facilities today face a number of management complexities when allocating storage resources, especially as frame-based and 3D workflows increase in popularity and the amount of multi-format media that professionals are managing continues to grow. Camera acquisition formats are various, many workflows employ proxy generation to save space and bandwi...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 October 2012

Metadata rules

Regular readers of this column will know that I am frequently tasked with covering the sexiest of broadcast industry subjects. Indeed, just two months ago I got to discuss test and measurement (T&M). Well, if you thought that was intense, just wait for this month's topic. Not only is it potentially even less glamorous than T&M, it has the potential...

Submitted by Will Strauss#

Published 01 October 2012

Ask the Experts - IT and Broadcast converge

Q. ‘Convergence’, specifically the convergence of IT and broadcast technology, appears to be one of those themes that endures. Why does the subject still garner so much attention in 2012? It must be 15-years since the term was first used in this context, are we not a fully converged industry?No, I don’t think we are fully ‘converged’, far from it;...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 September 2012