KitPlus | Articles

Investing in the Future of Broadcast Media

At the time of writing, the summer World Cup is providing its usual challenge to camera crews trying to televise the bright sunlight of the stadium without losing detail in shaded areas such as the covered terraces. It is a perfect demonstration of the need for high dynamic range. Several broadcasters are experimentally covering this year's tournam...

Submitted by Clive Northen

Published 18 July 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

Slow Motion Video Techniques

Well, those kinds of higher frame rates still pretty much belong to the big guns. The Phantom Flex will give you 2,000 frames a second at ultra HD or 1,000 fps at 4K. It produces truly stunning images, but at a price that is beyond the reach of all but those with the biggest budgets. The camera retails at a cool £100,000 (I’ll have three please) wi...

Submitted by Phil

Published 07 June 2018

Tips and Tricks to Giving Sci-Fi a New Look

From Terminator to Blade Runner, Alien, and even E.T., science fiction is a genre that will never fail to capture an audience’s imagination. It’s also a genre that encompasses so much more than just space crafts or time travel: frequently providing filmmakers with a platform from which to not only highlight social and political issues, but also exp...

Submitted by Mathieu Marano

Published 07 June 2018

Listening to the needs of audio engineers

Monitoring SDI video content within an installation is and has always been straight forwards. If you have a monitor, and you can see the image correctly, all is well. This is not necessarily the case for metadata and especially not for audio. Assuming a SMPTE 352 payload packet is present on the SDI signal, this metadata determines how the video co...

Submitted by Alan Wheable

Published 07 June 2018

Tried and tested: DPA d:vice

KitPlus recently took delivery of an interesting piece of equipment for review. We like our iPhone gadgets here. For us, useful iPhone gadgets started when the Olloclip lens gave us a wide angle adaptor. This was a good start, finally evolving into a proper tool when Ziess produced the Exolens system for the 5,6 & 7 series iPhones. Around the same...

Submitted by KitPlus

Published 26 March 2018

VR and the importance of tracking

I would like to begin this article by clarifying what we at Shotoku mean when we talk about VR in live production. It’s not the production of immersive, 360 content where you need to wear a headset; we are talking about virtual studio (VS) and augmented reality (AR) work, such as placing graphics into a green screen environment or physical set. The...

Submitted by KitPlus

Published 26 March 2018

Interview with Peter Rowsell, Polar Graphics

If you don’t recognise the name Peter Rowsell instantly you no doubt would recognise him in person, from the famous ‘Pink Coconut’ parties during IBC (Brighton) in the 80s or the name ‘Polar Video or Polar Graphics’ both companies which he’s built up over the years. Entering his 43rd NAB (yes 43rd, that is NOT a typo!) who better to catch up with t...

Submitted by Polar

Published 26 March 2018

Empowering connectivity choice in the field

Reliability, flexibility and ease of use are the key requirements when covering the news and live events, especially when the location could be anywhere. Connectivity is one of the biggest concerns in the field when the pressure is on to capture a key event – if you cannot establish a reliable transmission path to send your video back to the broadc...

Submitted by Yvonne Monterroso

Published 12 February 2018

Somewhere down the latency river

Some people have been, understandably, getting fairly excited over the prospect of being able to deploy wireless cameras to capture and transmit 4K UHD. Manufacturers and developers are closing in on the ability to deliver systems that will offer up almost endless creative options at the highest – to date – possible picture quality. But they’re not...

Submitted by Ben Hawker

Published 12 February 2018

Innovation in cameras moving to 4k

For a number of reasons, wireless camera links needed time to migrate to 4K. However Broadcast Sports International, BSI, designs their own cameras and builds their own hardware and their transition to 4K is already complete. In an industry where innovation is key, hire companies buy what is on offer from the manufacturers, however BSI has taken a...

Submitted by Tony Valentino

Published 12 February 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

When a lens is more than just a lens

Matching shots between different cameras can be tricky at the best of times. But how do you match lens characteristics between a live action shoot and a CGI composition? The CP.3 XD lenses from Zeiss offer an efficient solution to this with their frame accurate meta-data. The ZEISS CP.3 Cinema Primes have all the characteristics that have made ZEIS...

Submitted by KitPlus

Published 02 November 2017

Supporting broadcast quality control

With the ever-increasing number of program channels and range of different program distribution formats, the process of ensuring program quality has become a complex one for contribution/capture, production, post production, server ingest and content distribution. Add to this the complexities of HDR and WCG gamut, it is essential to ensure that the...

Submitted by Alan Wheable

Published 02 November 2017