KitPlus | Articles

POV cameras explained

John Chambers is Managing Director of Drivedata (UK) Ltd, which specialises in minicam solutions for broadcast, military and extreme-sports applications. Minicams, also referred to as POV cameras, are becoming increasingly popular as they get smaller, cheaper and easier to use. The POV camera is now a firm favourite in reality TV, sports coverage a...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 March 2010

Note Perfect

Live music events are big business. Major artists can expect millions of pounds to be poured into full scale productions where the ticket prices are as high as audience expectations. As the artist takes to the stage the atmosphere is electric and for the poised camera operator the pressure is high. He needs to acquire the best shots, capture the im...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 2010

AVCHD and NXCAM

I’ll be honest – up until recently I had not been a big fan of AVCHD. It promised great things but, having hired out consumer AVCHD cameras for the last few years, we knew there were still a few hurdles for it jump over. For corporate customers, to just ‘plug and play’ in terms of simple playback was impossible – some form of software was always re...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 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

Surround technologies

Throughout the world, in a wide range of broadcasts, surround sound has become a vital tool for easily and effectively capturing real-life recordings. Playing an equally important role in developing advanced surround sound microphones is Holophone®, with its patented audio recording devices designed specifically to address the challenges audio prof...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 January 2010

The Prism Sound Effect

The Prism Sound Effect. When Prism Sound took over the SADiE brand last year, it embarked on a fact-finding mission to discover why the brand had such a huge and extremely dedicated international user base. This process has been extremely enlightening and has enabled Prism Sound to respond with SADiE 6 - a new product for professional sound editors...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 January 2010

A Guide to Testing IPTV: Technologies and Challenges Par...

Throughout this article series we have seen that IPTV network operators face many challenges and explained that effective test and measurement is key to overcoming these challenges. The majority of IPTV networks are still in the early stages of development and operators are therefore primarily concerned with optimising QoS parameters in order to ge...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 December 2009

LED lighting for image creators

Somehow I ended up on a growing number of LED Lighting equipment manufacturers e-mail mailing lists. Most of them were from China, some from the States and elsewhere. They must have thought that, as we supply broadcast, film and video lighting, that we would be interested in LED lighting. They were right. So I used to dutifully reply, asking them q...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 December 2009

SATIS in a day

Aware that several French distributors had pulled out of this year's SIEL & SATIS, I chunnelled to Paris on day two of the October 20-22 show with minimal expectations. The small size of the Guide de Visite (20 pages A5) added to my misgivings but the event itself proved respectably large, crowded and buzzing. Nearly 280 companies occupied stands i...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 December 2009

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

Implications of a Tapeless workflow

The rise of ‘Tapeless Workflows’ is dramatically changing the way broadcasters and post-production facilities protect the content they are working on or own. The traditional workflow relies on tapes to record and protect information, usually stored on a shelf to be used again if necessary. However, due to changes in technology and the demands of an...

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

Five Best Practices for Securing Your Content during Coll...

That is the sound of your content leaking into the hands of pirates – costing the industry billions. Wolverine, Iron Man and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull are just some of the movies reported to have been leaked. The same holds true for TV content – though some argue that when a pilot or season premiere leaks – it falls into th...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 November 2009

Digital Vision case study

The Edit Store, based in London’s W1, is one of the last few independent facilities in the city. Spread across two buildings, the Edit Store provides many of the world’s leading broadcasters with offline, online, grading and audio dubbing facilities primarily for broadcast factual programmes. At the heart of its HD grading suite, introduced in 2008...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 October 2009

Eye to Eye New post-production kit at IBC 2009

This alphabetical overview of new video and film post-production kit at IBC 2009 was going to start with Apple but the company pulled out of both NAB and IBC in 2008. I begin instead with Avid which has certified its Media Composer, NewsCutter, Symphony and DS software to run on the new HP Z series Workstations – the HP Z800 and HP Z400. Avid custo...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 October 2009