KitPlus | Articles

Putting the Realism into Reality Television

“Reality television’ as a category of programming emerged in the late 1990s with the introduction of shows that attempted to portray real people responding to real challenges under more or less continual public gaze. Unlike sport, where the focus is primarily on physical skills and endurance, reality television shows place their participants in a w...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 January 2012

Without training will there be future for the TV Industry...

It might come as a surprise to you but do you know that there in the UK 80,000 people working in the TV industry. That's 10% of the work force. And some more facts:The UK has overseas programme sales of £980 million. Non-terrestrial TV spends £193 millions on content whilst terrestrial TV spends £2.6 billion on content. Independent producers in the...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 January 2012

Austerity Cuts What do they mean for you and me

Whichever newspaper you read (or several, if you are a news-junkie like me), last week the big story was all about austerity cuts, Greek haircuts and numerous other types of cuts that don’t sound particularly pleasant to the uninformed masses – you and me. So I thought I would cut through the jargon to look into what it really means to the man in t...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 December 2011

How the mysteries of Library and Archive have changed in...

As I walked into the ATV Bridge Street studios in Birmingham in November 1974 I could not have known what a revolutionary time I would experience in my career as a “Library Guy”. Since 2” tape became the recording medium for television in the late fifties nothing much had changed in its cataloguing, storage and usage. A few stickers on the tape, a...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 October 2011

Apple Final Cut Pro X The Critic

So we're finally here, one of the best-loved companies in the world has just launched the successor to its hugely popular video-editing program, which of course, is Final Cut Pro. Final Cut Pro X has just been launched. The previous edition cost over £600, so with the latest version costing under £200 and offering over 250 new features, you'd think...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 September 2011

THE RISE AND FALL AND RISE AND FALL OF POST PRODUCTION

I was sitting in the pub the other day and met an old editor mate of mine. We started chewing the cud about post-production and, inevitably, the glory days. When I first met him, in the early 80s, I hadn’t even started my career in broadcast leasing. He, meanwhile, had a money clip full of £50 notes and was the talk of the town. He didn’t have enou...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 August 2011

Why IPTV is essential to the effective delivery of local...

The broadcast industry has already evolved dramatically in recent years with the increasing dominance of the internet. In the beginning, the internet was largely focused on the potential global audience and having global reach to enjoying global revenue. However, consumer use of the internet has already started to mature and it has become increasin...

Submitted by Kieron Seth#

Published 01 August 2011

Mobile Cameraman Extraordinaire

I had wanted to work in television since my teens and, at 20, started as a trainee assistant cameraman at Mersey Television on 'Brookside' in Liverpool and then joining Thorn-EMI Facilities in London. Thorn-EMI put me in charge of a studio used to shoot links for companies like Children's Channel using very bulky early tubed Betacams. Five years la...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 April 2011

Will Youview and IPTV change the face of TV Broadcasting

Youview, and the evolution of Internet Protocol TV (IPTV), are set to have a major impact on the UK broadcasting industry. Youview is the latest evolution of Freeview and Freesat, the Set Top Boxes (STB) that give access to additional channels without a monthly subscription. Freeview gives viewers access to terrestrial broadcasts, while Freesat ena...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 April 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

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

Tape goes West at UWE

Three years ago a convoy of white vans arrived at the Faculty of Arts at the University of West of England in Bristol. An hour later its entire stock of SVHS camcorders, linear editing decks and analog tape were history. In came Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro and Panasonic digital camcorders. Now 20 professional tapeless HD camcorders have taken up...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 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

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

Test Chest 3G and the Baptism of Fire

Murraypro recently received a request from Manchester's Granada Studio Complex to borrow a Test Chest 3G for an evaluation they wished to undertake. While Murraypro were delighted to lend them a demonstration unit for their technical testing, they had no concept of any of the background story developing at the TV Centre. Mr Steve Craddock, Technica...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 February 2011