KitPlus | Articles

Intelligent linking - answering some key power questions

with Steve EmmettWhat makes a safe Li-Ion Battery?Recently, the Boeing Dreamliner story has added to the perception of the Li-Ion battery as a potentially dangerous item. However, the reality is that Li-Ion batteries are a safe and robust source of portable power, when they are designed and constructed by a recognised battery manufacturer that has...

Submitted by KitPlus

Published 01 July 2013

The Cloud, a big hit at NAB with Bob Pank

NAB 2013 will go down in history as the event where the broadcast industry took to the Cloud in a big way. Perhaps it was the number of smaller companies and start-ups that have been successfully operating cloud services for a year or more that persuaded the big names to join in but, more likely, these moves have been in the pipeline for a while. T...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

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

Live from the supermarket car park

What’s Cooking? is the new daily daytime TV show beamed from a temporary studio in the car park of a supermarket. As chefs prepare dishes live on air, a roving camera crew relays pictures from the aisles of the shop while Channel 4 viewers interact with the presenters and cooks via social media. Produced by Superhero TV, technical integration and i...

Submitted by Kieron Seth#

Published 01 May 2013

Mobile news gathering with Will Strauss

by Will StraussSo, here’s a scenario. You’re a TV news editor and a story breaks. Your reporter and cameraman (or reporter/cameraman) can get to the scene no bother. But all your satellite trucks are someplace else. What do you do? Umm…. Thanks to developments in transmission technology the ENG scenario described above is pretty much redundant thes...

Submitted by Will Strauss#

Published 01 May 2013

Live production for multi-platform delivery

by Steve Burgess, technical director, Megahertz Broadcast SystemsLive event television, whether it is sport or music and entertainment, has always made serious demands of production technology. At Megahertz Broadcast Systems we have been building outside broadcast trucks for some of the world’s most demanding customers, for more than 25 years, so w...

Submitted by Steve Burgess

Published 01 April 2013

Bob Pank busts the cloud!

Too may of us can remember the Eyjafjallajokull volcano incident that stopped thousands of Europeans travelling back from NAB 2010. After a long show in the desert many were looking forward to home, real beer and green green grass. But the transport system that had always worked so well was out of commission, and suddenly it was clear that nothing...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 2013

Creating the illusion: Green screen lighting

The illusionIf good cinematography is about creating the illusion of three dimensional reality, on a two dimensional screen. Working to create reality using background plates offers a whole new variety of technical issues that need to be addressed with skill if it is going to be successful. In this article I will touch on some of the basic issues t...

Submitted by David Morphy

Published 01 March 2013

The way forward for lighting control

High Quality LED Fixtures are the Way Forward for Lighting ControlPat Grosswendt, Co-Founder, LitepanelsThe majority of directors of photography (DPs) work by the motto that if anything looks lit then it has been done badly. Whether on the set or in the studio, lighting directors strive to create images that look as natural as possible. The key to...

Submitted by Pat Grosswendt

Published 01 March 2013

What you see is what you get? Doubtful!

by Robin PalmerThe colour you see is not necessarily the same colour experienced by someone else looking at the same thing. It all depends on the viewer and the viewing conditions as well as the actual colour of the thing. In some professions having perfect colour vision is a matter of safety as in the case of airline pilots and those in railway si...

Submitted by Robin Palmer

Published 01 March 2013

Three legs good... better, best

by Kieron SethFluid SticksWhy do exhibitions and open days still exist in the social media mad world? Why do manufacturers and resellers maintain show rooms when information is immediately accessible online?Simple: no matter which ‘celebrity’ DOP endorses a particular product, there’s no way to log on to assess how any camera balances on the should...

Submitted by Kieron Seth#

Published 01 March 2013

Will Strauss gets a grip!

By Will StraussOf all the many areas of television technology that tv-bay Magazine covers, you might think that camera support is the one that appears, on the surface at least, to move the slowest. Take the tripod for example. Fundamentally, the design hasn’t changed for a hundred years. Or how about the dolly? The wheels and track device that Alfr...

Submitted by Will Strauss#

Published 01 March 2013

No more pizza for Dick Hobbs!

A couple of months ago I used this column to talk about geeks and nerds. Our industry depends upon them, whether we like it or not. Re-reading the article, I was struck by the fact that I quoted four people in the article (five if you count Christian Louboutin). All were male. According to a recent survey just 17% of the people in the technology se...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 February 2013

Is it time to review your colour grading toolset?

One important step for all budget levels of post-production is the colour correction or grading tools you use to match the colour of different shots in your edit, to give a consistent look and feel. You may already be doing basic colour grading without really thinking of it as a separate process in your edit, or you may be sending off your edited t...

Submitted by Mark Brindle

Published 01 February 2013