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Eye to Eye: Lighting and lighting control

In 1985 I visited the Paris HQ of France Regions 3 with Arthur Garratt, a freelance science broadcaster who worked mainly for BBC World Service. FR3 was one of the first European television networks to make full use of high-efficiency ENG and EFP. We learnt a lot and were able to offer one recommendation in return. Watching a news presentation by t...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 December 2009

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

Tv-bay industry recruitment special

The last 12 months have proved to be challenging times for businesses in our industry and there has been mixed reactions on the best way to tackle the issues facing companies. Having been a part of the most difficult economic climate within the last decade a number of businesses are simply focussing on survival, staying afloat and consolidation. Ha...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 December 2009

New Light in the Forbidden City

IBC 2009’s Production Village was the venue for the launch of a revolutionary new lighting product, the Rotolight ‘Stealth Edition’ RL48 ring-light. Although the show had more than 48,000 visitors and over 1200 exhibitors, Rotolight was listed in the TV-Bay lighting category, featured in the IBC News and the ‘Eye Catcher’ technology report on Amste...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 December 2009

DFX filter software

Tiffen has been manufacturing photographic filters and lens accessories for consumer and professional imaging for over 70 years. Now the company has developed Tiffen DFX, software that offers a range of filters for use with digital images. We believe this makes DFX unique; benefiting from a deep understanding of what glass filters actually do as we...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 December 2009

3D Movie Making: Stereoscopic Digital Cinema from Script...

Having indulged for several years in stereo photography of the hand-held cross-your-eyes variety, I was interested to watch the broadcast industry respond to the availability of increasingly affordable flat-panel 3D displays. A critical point in the price threshold has finally been crossed: fast-refresh-rate 22 inch 3D computer monitors using circu...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 November 2009

CADLOCK - securing the future of broadcast.

When absolute CAD, the Soho based broadcast installation experts released their range of rackmount products in 2007, it was to improve the way equipment was installed within a facility. But the client feedback indicated that the products were not only being purchased to solve the rackmount issues, but also to increase the security of the assets. Th...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 November 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

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

Testing IPTV NetworksThe Technology LifecycleThe deployment of new technologies tends to follow a similar lifecycle that begins with early research, development and standardisation and ends with full deployment and service management. The lifecycle diagram illustrated in Figure 5 shows a number of different technologies moving through the design an...

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

3D Post

The state of 3DRewind a couple of years and 3D was a hot topic but there was very little production and few companies able to offer suitable support for efficient 3D post production. Many people thought it would fade, as before. A few even hoped it would go away! Now many are supporting stereoscopic 3D. The most activity is in the DI (digital post...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 October 2009

Automation in Uncertain Times

In light of the unfavourable economic outlook broadcasters need to protect their investment in technology like never before. There is a high chance that some products designed to make the broadcast environment more efficient will become obsolete and this in turn will have a knock-on and negative effect on workflow in transmission suite. Although br...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 October 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