KitPlus | Articles

3D in 2011

Another year and it’s time for a fresh look at the S3D market. Each year the CES Show that occupies the Las Vegas Convention Center with, in 2011, an unexpectedly high number of attendees (140,000) keen to see what’s new. At CES 2010 S3D was THE thing, but a year later the excitement had moved on to the nebulous market of mobile devices OTT and, pr...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 2011

Ask the experts - Monitoring

What are the latest innovations in monitoring?For both film and broadcast work, in addition to the fact that the picture must be true, without motion artifacts or aliasing, for a lot of applications you can also add that the picture must be processed in real time - less than one frame or one picture in progressive mode – so the main innovations are...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 2011

BBC Academy

Today’s broadcast industry depends on a mobile workforce of skilled professionals. And in the YouTube age where anyone can upload a film, what distinguishes the professional from the amateur? In short - great training!A recent survey of industry freelancers reveals that more than half rank training as one of the most important factors in developing...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 2011

Watching Television

The pictures on this page give you a small insight into my life. The first is a picture of the television in my living room. At the time of taking the picture I was watching the English cricket team losing in high definition. The second picture is of my desk. Again you will see that it is dominated by a large screen (I’m afraid I still have a sneak...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 2011

Neither a borrower nor a lender be....

Much has been written in the press recently about access to, or more frequently, the absence of funding for small businesses, otherwise known as SMEs (small and medium enterprises). But how do we define a small enterprise and when does a company transition from a small to medium enterprise?The official definitions are as follows: a small company ha...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 2011

Production Spotlight

On Friday 10th September, Fluidmoves Video Productions, filmed a new outfall pipe leaving Shoreham Harbour on the Sussex coast. The 1.8 kilometre pipe was towed out to sea through the open lock gates round to Newhaven Harbour, a distance of 15 nautical miles, on behalf of Southern Water and its contractor 4Delivery. The outfall is part of Southern...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 2011

True Colours Shine Through With CCS

When you are a broadcast engineer working in front of a stack of LCD monitors, seeing a significant difference between the brightness and colour of each monitor can be both annoying and tiring on the eyes. Worse still, if you in a Master Control Room and the pictures have taken on a sickly green hue, how do you know that it is just the monitors at...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 2011

Using Multipoint Monitoring to Ensure Reliable Digital Vi...

Because the quality and bandwidth-efficiency advantages of digital over analog methods have made digital transport preferred, the world continues its migration to an all-digital approach to delivering video signals – from the studio through distribution networks to the end-viewer. As with any new technology, adopting and integrating digital video d...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 2011

Expert battery advice

1. Why do some manufacturers sell NiMH batteries?NiMH batteries have a number of clear advantages versus other cell chemistries and we believe and see that this cell chemistry complements the standard Li-Ion range. Indeed some customers choose to use only NiMH. The main areas of benefit are weight and balance. A strong minority of cameramen see cam...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 February 2011

Camp, ash, irritation and embarrassment

I am writing these words in the last days of December and you are reading them in the first days of January, so it seems like a good opportunity to look back on 2010 and see what we toilers in television have learnt. Against the odds there were some good programmes on the box. Astoundingly, ITV delivered a drama series that was just like the good o...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 February 2011

Eye to Eye, Portable power supplies

The true portability of modern HD mini-cameras and flash-RAM video recorders is encouraging programme makers to go way beyond reach of tethered power supplies. But are the battery-makers living up to the demands being placed on them?Recommendation 1 in portable power supplies is so obvious it almost doesn't need stating: rechargeable batteries are...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 February 2011

Ring out the old, ring in the new

At the start of a new year many of us will look back on the highs and lows of the last 12 months and try to predict what’s in store for us in the coming months before seeking advice on how to protect our business against the unknown. Before making predictions for 2011 I thought I’d take a look back at key industry and business milestones over the p...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 February 2011

Television, the limits of the possible

When I was a young scribbler in 1970, my then employers allowed me to launch and run on their behalf a magazine called Studio Sound. It was one of my better career moves and survived (mainly thanks to me leaving it in 1974) for about 35 years. Fairly good going for a trade publication. The upside of editing Studio Sound was being invited to a bean-...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 February 2011

Broadcast Batteries, Today and Tomorrow

As consumers, we all have experience of being let down by batteries (think rusty Italian cars in the 1970s!). But thankfully the world of batteries has moved on: the global battery industry is today worth $71 billion and is estimated to be growing at nearly 5% a year. Of this, broadcast batteries make up a tiny fraction but the manufacturers that s...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 February 2011

TV Bay Questions

Who are you? (about yourself and Online Creative)I am the owner of Brighton based post production facility, Online Creative Ltd. I started the company in 1999 primarily as an edit facility which has since developed further into a production company and training facility. We have recently invested in a fully equipped grading suite to add to the serv...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 January 2011