KitPlus | Articles

Key Grip Woolf Secures the Gear for GUILLERMO DEL TOROS P...

Jonathan Woolf has gathered a wealth of trade secrets from half a century working in the motion picture industry. His recent chapters have led him to key grip the miniatures unit on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings Trilogy and act as a lighting technician on the 2022 Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio. Woolf’s big job on Pinocchio was to find reliable...

Submitted by Kathryn Ferentchak

Published 08 September 2023

The Cloud - a measured approach

With the buzz of ‘cloud’ everywhere in our industry it would be natural to think that cloud is the only game in town. Isn’t it time to step back and consider very carefully how, or whether, you make that journey to the cloud?The pandemic has been front and centre in our minds for close to two years now. Overnight, facilities had to either shut down...

Submitted by Ciaran Doran

Published 07 December 2021

AJA Video Systems - Ki Pro GO User Review with Spellbinde...

For most of us 2020 enforced a step change in the way we work and the kind of productions that our businesses have been delivering. Back in March as the pandemic struck, I took a leap of faith and invested in some switching and streaming kit, in the form of a Tricaster Mini, encoding and NDI kit and some extra cameras. Fast forward nine months and...

Submitted by Ben Sherriff

Published 22 December 2020

MEDIAPRO leads across the audiovisual value chain

MEDIAPRO is a leading independent production company in Europe’s audiovisual market. Offering a full slate of technical and creative services, our portfolio includes everything from content production, to post production, to media and digital asset management, to the acquisition of sports TV rights, and the distribution and broadcast of television...

Submitted by Marc Andreu Valls

Published 14 November 2019

Solving Rigorous Digital Workflow Challenges

Headquartered in New Zealand, The Rebel Fleet offers digital workflow services to top film and television production companies. Clients address broad creative needs and retain total image control across multiple shooting units with fast turnarounds. Recent projects include The Meg, Adrift, Ash vs Evil Dead, and The Shannara Chronicles. The company...

Submitted by Michael Urban

Published 03 November 2019

Live Streaming Workflows Examined

In today’s hyperconnected world, audiences expect accessible, high quality content across the displays they see every day, whether at home or on the go, at a concert or church service, or even in the board room. There are a number of approaches professionals can take to deliver live content, but each workflow ultimately varies depending upon the de...

Submitted by Bryce Button

Published 03 November 2019

State of the Nation - Drama

If you can remember as far back as the 1980s, then you probably remember a Saturday night drama called Hill Street Blues, written and developed by Steven Bochco. Made for NBC in the States, it was widely shown around the world, including in the UK. It was a pioneer ensemble drama, with no star characters but a lot of individuals – the police office...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs - new

Published 21 March 2019

State of the Nation - January 2019

I’m writing these thoughts on the morning of 20 December. From my desk in Tunbridge Wells I am normally gently aware of air traffic at five thousand feet, lining up to land at Gatwick Airport. Today it is silent: since 9.00 last night some idiot has been flying drones across the runway. An airport is a finely tuned machine, with all the interconnec...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs - new

Published 24 January 2019

Sony PWS-4500 Live Production Server Reviewed

Available since 2016, the Sony PWS-4500 is a solid-state UHD/HD live production server designed for use in applications such as sports, studio or stage events. The target applications are master recording and advanced replay operations for live production companies for whom the server's ability to record the output from high frame rate cameras and...

Submitted by Andy McKenzie

Published 24 January 2019

Accelerated Workflows with eGPU

Customer:Creative BlokeIndustry: Media & EntertainmentChallenges:To enable a small independent visual effects facility, Creative Bloke, with a versatile GPU that contains a combination of portability and performance to cater to their wide and varied portfolio of clients. Solution:Creative Bloke utilized the AMD Radeon Pro WX 9100 graphics card in t...

Submitted by Mike Griggs

Published 09 November 2018

Panasonic EVA1 and Atomos Shogun Inferno ProRes Raw Revie...

Filmmakers all over the world are embracing an affordable new route to higher-than-4K video recording. It’s just a few weeks since Atomos enabled support for 5.7K Apple ProRes RAW recording from the Panasonic EVA1 with the Shogun Inferno monitor/recorder, but filmmaker David Fernandes and DP Gregory Bennett have already become the first to use 5.7K...

Submitted by David Fernandes

Published 18 July 2018

G-Teching Storage to another level

That heart-dropping, cold-sweat evoking moment your external hard drive fails to connect to the computer and you realise the precious project you’ve been working on for weeks is lost for good (unless you want to spank hundreds on a recovery service that may or may not retrieve some of the mangled data!)Ah, the fun of video storage - it may not be t...

Submitted by Phil Vinter

Published 18 July 2018

Twenty Years of Transcription

In 1998 Dom Bourne dropped out of university and started a business providing transcriptions to production companies. The company operated from his childhood bedroom and Dom hoped it would keep him in beer money for a year or two before he decided what he really wanted to do with his life. Twenty years later and, this year, Take 1 celebrates two de...

Submitted by Dom Bourne

Published 18 July 2018

Run Leaner, More Agile and Scalable OTT Operations

The migration to Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) for media processing is underway and growing as broadcasters and content service providers explore new ways to increase agility and operational efficiencies. With media processing SaaS, content and service providers can quickly and easily deploy new channels, deliver a better quality of experience (QoE)...

Submitted by Olivier Karra

Published 18 July 2018

Capturing the spirit of Mexico

Filmmaker, director and editor, Leonardo Dalessandri first came to fame with his stunning video ‘Watchtower of Turkey,’ which with more than 200 million views, garnered the accolade of Best Vimeo Video in 2014. His vibrant images are combined with a unique editing style, incorporating slow motion, hyper lapses and invisible match cuts to produce ge...

Submitted by Leonardo Dalessandri

Published 12 February 2018