KitPlus | Articles

Flexible Connectivity Hits Europe

The low-latency Dejero CellSat network was launched in Europe in January of 2019, which is excellent news for European broadcasters who can now benefit from the same flexibility CellSat provides North American Dejero customers, such as World Racing Group (WRG). The production teams at WRG, the premier sanctioning body for dirt track racing in North...

Submitted by Yvonne Monterroso

Published 21 March 2019

Future proofing post production storage

Advancements in NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express), the storage protocol designed for flash, are revolutionising data storage. According to G2M Research, the NVMe market will grow to $60 billion by 2021, with 70 percent of all-flash arrays being based on the protocol by 2020. NVMe, acting like steroids for flash-based storage infrastructures, dynam...

Submitted by Josh Goldenhar

Published 25 January 2019

21st Century Technology for 20th Century Content

A big challenge facing owners of legacy content is rationalising and archiving their tape and film-based media in cost effective and efficient ways, whilst also adding value. Normally the result of this is to find a low cost means of digitising the content – usually leaving them with a bunch of assets on HDD. But then what? How can content owners h...

Submitted by James Hall

Published 25 January 2019

Switching to Internet Based Distribution

"An IP status check for the broadcast industry", "Resistance is futile", "IP points the way forward for the broadcast industry"... Yes, we've read the headlines too. But rather than force you into submission, scare you, or leave you feeling like you have no other choice, we want to give you the information that helps you to make a sensible decision...

Submitted by Chris Clark

Published 25 January 2019

The making of The Heist

Shine TV has never been one to shy away from a challenge, be that in terms of using new technologies, filming ideas or overall formats: we pride ourselves on being ambitious and risk-takers. We make Hunted and The Island with Bear Grylls for Channel 4 and we’ve just made The Heist, this time working with Sky One. These are all huge, ambitiously for...

Submitted by Tom Hutchings

Published 25 January 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

The impact of drone incidents on the industry

Cast your minds back to December, when commercial drone operators were on the verge of breathing a sigh of relief having made it through another 12 months without a major drone incident. Then, came ‘The nightmare before Christmas’ when those reported drone sightings in the vicinity of Gatwick Airport grounded planes for 36 hours and caused more tha...

Submitted by Phil Vinter

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

New developments in remote broadcast cameras

Small, specialist broadcast cameras are doing more work than ever before. David Bradley of BR Remote explains how the operation of cameras is changing to deliver much greater volumes of content, and outlines some of the creative possibilities that next wave of remote technology will bring. Perhaps the greatest challenge facing broadcasters and prod...

Submitted by David Bradley

Published 24 January 2019

Battery Power Management

There are many obvious ways a modern battery is better than one that would have been common just a few years ago and is light years ahead of what was available a generation ago. In everything from form factor to battery life to charge time, things have vastly improved. Consider cycle ratings, an indication of how many times a pack has or can be use...

Submitted by Ross Kanarek

Published 24 January 2019

State of the Nation - November 2018

There is an interesting seminar called Size Matters at the KitPlus Show – organised by the publishers of this fine magazine – at MediaCityUK in Salford on 6 November. It’s a talk by cinematographer Alistair Chapman on the way that camera technology is changing, and in particular the size of the electronic device which creates the image is growing....

Submitted by Dick Hobbs - new

Published 09 November 2018

An Obituary to Timecode

A stoic and persistent character that stubbornly refused to change with the times, Timecode has finally passed on, but no-one has noticed. A long-lasting industry veteran, Timecode was brought into this world at an uncertain date in the late 1960s due to the needs of analogue tape workflows and the demand for synchronisation between audio and video...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin - new

Published 09 November 2018

Sony HDC-4800 Review

First announced at NAB 2016, the Sony HDC-4800 is a studio camera system capable of shooting 4K/UHD at up to 8x or full HD at up to 16x. With a price point upwards of £250,000 it is a very high-end product with a wide feature set. In Sony's own words, "This is the future of live production, designed to satisfy the storytelling aspect of modern spor...

Submitted by Andy McKenzie

Published 09 November 2018

The Wireless Way to 4k

DTC’s AEON group of products have been specifically designed for the 4K market. We encode with the more efficient HEVC algorithm, which means we are taking a 12G signal and compressing it to a bitrate that can be managed over an RF link. So what makes this a leading idea in the 4K revolution?For a start, sport continues to drive technical innovatio...

Submitted by JP Delport

Published 09 November 2018

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