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A brief history of television graphics


Thirty years ago, television captions were routinely created by sticking white Letraset characters onto black card. Credit rolls were possible using special devices which used long strips of black material onto which the Letraset was stuck, and which were literally rolled, either by an electric motor but sometimes even by hand. There were, of cours...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie
Published 01 October 2008

Mixing with the wildlife on Springwatch


As the 5th series of ‘Springwatch’ draws to a close I’d like to share with you an insider view of one of my favourite vision mixing jobs. As a freelance vision mixer I work across the board on all sorts of programmes: quiz & chat shows, sports, drama, music & Light Entertainment, recorded & live, studio-based or Outside Broadcast. But for four week...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie
Published 01 October 2008

Fancy a trip from Beijing to Paris in our Landrover?


That’s more or less how it happened, not months of planning or deciding I needed adventure in my life, just “Fancy the trip”. Of course no money in it (when is their ever?) but who could pass up such an offer. Dave at Broadcast Services in Chertsey had been preparing a Landrover for the journey for some months having acquired a left hand drive mode...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie
Published 01 September 2008

Flexiscope from Hamlet


A number of years ago Hamlet gave itself the impossible task of developing the worlds first HD and SD video and audio measurement and monitoring instrument that could be packed into one small handheld device. The new instrument would need to provide waveforms, vectors, audio bar graphs, measurement cursors, a range of error detection, decoding of b...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie
Published 01 September 2008

IPTV in 21st Century TV


The radio and television networks born and raised in the last century are a consequence of a medium in which broadcasting is the natural way of working. From one to a fickle many it has been a matter of finding material with mass appeal which has occupied generations of commissioners. Recently, I went to the exhibition of the IPTV World Forum 2008...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie
Published 01 September 2008

tv-bay interviews Malcolm Robinson


How long have you been with Sony?Just over 4 yearsAnd where were you before?I originally trainedat Ravensbourne before moving to CNN where I worked on stories such as the Russian Coup. I then worked for Cine Video where amongst others covered the West Indies cricket tours. After working for Visions I contracted for 4 years before moving to Sony. Wh...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie
Published 01 August 2008

Dont Drink from the Mainstream.


Here’s the note pinned on the studio door of Undercurrents productions in South Wales. To do list for 20081) Make 10 new video series on topics ranging from Woodland skills to Technology reviews and from Political news to investigative documentaries. 2) Develop a desktop video player application based upon the open source software. 3) Launch an Int...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie
Published 01 August 2008

Getting up to speed with IPTV


Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) has been gathering pace around the world for the past few years and is major competition to cable and satellite broadcasters. As a satellite subscriber its something I seem to have largely overlooked and the recent IPTV World Forum prompted me to get up to speed on this emerging format of TV delivery and called f...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie
Published 01 August 2008

Everything you ever wanted to know about lighting Part 1


Anyone starting on the long and winding road of lighting might well be baffled at the number of very different approaches that he or she might find in books and articles. I certainly did, and that was probably because my training in Television had been engineering based, where the very nature of engineering provides specific answers to specific pro...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie
Published 01 August 2008

Calzaghe Fight with Input Media


Sports production company Input Media faced a series of technical, logistical and creative challenges when they were commissioned by fast rising broadcaster Setanta Sports to cover one of the biggest live Boxing events ever staged in the UK. The main fight during the 8-hour long broadcast was the world unification fight between WBO/IBF Super Middle...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie
Published 01 July 2008

CTV OB Truck


Responding to the growing demand for HD broadcasts and with a fleet of already overworked outside broadcast trucks, CTV Outside Broadcast’s newest addition to its fleet, OB 9, is a fully-equipped production facility with the latest in High Definition production, mixing and recording equipment. Targeted squarely at major entertainment and sporting e...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie
Published 01 July 2008

OB HD and budget constraints


In a perfect world every OB would be built on a brand new chassis and filled with the latest state-of-the art equipment, all funded from a limitless budget. But, in the real world, where budgets and timescales are limited, often far tighter than might seem practical, more realistic solutions have to be found. One approach, for which E2E has already...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie
Published 01 July 2008

Royalty Free Music Can Save You A Fortune


How important is music to your production? Think of the two notes John Williams used in Jaws to signal danger and to sometimes mislead the audience into believing that a great white shark was lurking in the hidden depths. Music plays such a crucial and powerful role in the visual world to be overlooked at your peril. Notice how suddenly your edit c...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie
Published 01 June 2008

The Benefits of Lens Add-ons


Zoom lenses on broadcast and professional video camcorders are wonderful tools for the videographer, allowing quick and easy focal length change. But ultimately, a zoom lens is limited on both the wide and telephoto end of its zoom range. On higher-end camcorders there is generally a choice of lenses, and thus zoom range, when the camera is purchas...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie
Published 01 June 2008

The Reflecmedia Chromaflex portable chromakey system


The use of keying a foreground image over a background image to form a composite is an established and widely used technique in film and TV production. For most cameramen this will usually involve them in shooting a subject against a coloured background, typically green or blue. Sounds simple but reality can be far from it, anecdotes abound of nigh...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie
Published 01 May 2008