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Digital, server-based systems in production, post-production, news gathering and playout bring increased efficiencies and productivity. Nonlinear editing and news gathering allow users to access the same material across a data network. Digits are here and are now dictating the form of cables and connectors, from camera through to playout. What qual...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 May 2010

Eye to Eye: Whats even newer in test and measurement 2010

A year is a long time in broadcast test & measurement, which is just as well because that is when this column previously focused on it. Given the current push to establish 3D as a permanent feature of the broadcast landscape, one might reasonably expect T&M kit designers to be heading along the same road. Hamlet and Omnitek certainly are but it see...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 April 2010

Location test equipment

What to look for…. SizeRuggedFast switch on timeLight weightMultiple applications from one unitDaylight readable displayLong Battery lifeSound monitoring as well as videoMountings (when you need both hands!)A number of years ago Hamlet gave itself the impossible task of developing the world’s first 3G, HD and SD capable, video and audio measurement...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 February 2010

Robotic cameras on location

Television is such a natural extension of the human senses that I doubt if more than one viewer in a thousand gives much thought to the effort put into modern programme production. Much of the original push for creative freedom came from outside broadcast crews, initially using turret-mounted optics and later zoom lenses to obtain close-ups of dist...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 February 2010

Broadcasting Audio in 5.1 Format

One of the positive consequences of digital television transmission is the ability to include fully embedded multi channel audio with suitable metadata to control both channel displacement and even sound levels within the domestic environment. While at the receiving end of the transmission chain there are many innovations and protocols to make life...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 January 2010

Eye to Eye: Whats new in audio 2009

Part of my day at SATIS recently was sent discussing with Neutrik the dodgy issue of sexual compatibility, a subject not mentioned in my report from the show for TV-Bay last month. I had recently invested in a Roland Edirol R-44 solid-state audio recorder. Used in conjunction with four Rode phantom-powered capacitor microphones, it makes an excelle...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 January 2010

Eye to Eye: Content Protection 2009

In the early days of audio and video recording, the limitations of analogue devices provided a fairly high level of content protection by ensuring that any captured signal was either inferior to the original or fairly soon became so. Optical digital media changed all that, allowing practically perfect copies of speech, music, still images and movin...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 November 2009

The importance of measurements for eye and jitter

‘If it hasn’t got eye and jitter measurements, it’s about as useful as a chocolate teapot’ recalled Paul Nicholls, PHABRIX sales and marketing manager. ‘This was one comment made by a prominent broadcast engineer that stuck with me when we began to research the critical toolset required on the new eye and jitter PHABRIX SxE’. Having taken this to h...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 November 2009

Converting for displays

Behind every great display there’s a great converter. Ever since television started to go digital in studios and post production, the number of digital formats has grown. For a while the television standards bodies got a grip and succeeded in pulling nearly everyone along the ‘SDI’ track; now itself expanded to HD-SDI and 3G-SDI – carrying a multit...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 September 2009

Modern multiviewers

The monitoring of multiple video sources has been simplified and costs greatly reduced by the use of multiviewers. These make use of two principle technologies: large high-resolution video screens and the real-time resizing of video. The market is now well developed and provides a wide choice of specifications such as the number of inputs and their...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 September 2009

Brand New School Makes the Move to Uncompressed HD

What did you do over Christmas 2008? I spent the whole two-week break rebuilding the post production workflow at Brand New School, the prestigious commercial production and design firm in Santa Monica, CA, and the experience let me stretch every technology muscle I had built up in 10 years as a video engineer. At the time, Brand New School was usin...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 August 2009

NAB 2009 report

By general consensus, this year's NAB Spring Convention, or 'NABshow' as it styles itself, was one of the best ever. Wider aisles and a respectable rather than manic level of attendance made the event, in the words of one exhibitor, 'Business Class'. NAB was always the prototype show where you could sense the directions in which manufacturers were...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 July 2009

Eye to Eye. Whats new in test and measurement 2009

The transition from analogue to digital programme production, storage and delivery lulled some innocent folk into anticipating a world without need for test equipment. If required at all, so the thinking went, all signal analysis would be performed in software. Maybe someday. For now, the T&M sector remains alive and well. The following summary out...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 May 2009

Audio acquisition and production

Remembering the days when the average 'portable' sound recorder was heavy enough to induce a hernia, I have high respect for the capabilities of modern digital audio devices. Not least the solid-state recorders that have emerged as successors to the Sony-originated DAT and MiniDisk formats. But avoid anything that lacks XLR connectors unless you ar...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 February 2009

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