KitPlus | Articles

Infrastructure boost with single node storage solutions

i Like other market segments, the motion picture and video production industry is dominated by smaller productions and facilities. Until now, the only option for this portion of the market to take advantage of the performance, fault-tolerance and ease of management of a modern scale-out storage platform was to invest in a storage cluster consisting...

Submitted by Lee Griffin

Published 07 September 2017

IP-Based Intercom Solutions

i The broadcast market has experienced a huge change over the last decades, resulting in the need for larger and larger intercom systems. As the demands of broadcasters have grown, the central factor for manufacturers keeping up with demand has been IP. A company at the forefront of this development is RTS. In the new millennium, the company has es...

Submitted by Jon Ridel

Published 01 August 2017

Navigating Unfamiliar Territory

The traditional broadcast model - where TV networks play content on a linear schedule, and viewers tune in on their TV sets - is under siege. Linear TV is not going away anytime soon, but the model is becoming less and less relevant. Thanks to the rise of OTT services, viewers have become accustomed to watching content when and where they want, on...

Submitted by Vijay Sagar Vinnakota

Published 19 May 2017

More than just selling cable

Choices facing technology decision-makers are becoming increasingly complex due to rapid changes in the industry like broadcast and IP technology convergence, multiplatform demands, and the rise of 4K and 8K. It is now a constant challenge to balance the need to maintain already-installed equipment and fulfil the desire to provide the highest resol...

Submitted by Chris Smeeton

Published 04 April 2017

6 Misapprehensions of MAM

Implementing a media management system is considered to be a risky business. The perceived complexity, upheaval and perception of failure can be so daunting that the risk may seem to outweigh the reward. But, like so many business technologies, MAM have been transformed in recent years and it\'s time to debunk some common MAM myths. Perception: MAM...

Submitted by Julian Wright

Published 15 February 2017

The Future of LED Lighting

From the moment the LED light entered the broadcast, media and entertainment world its key differentiator was its energy efficiency compared to traditional tungsten studio lighting. LEDs use far less energy in the region of 90% less than tungsten lights and produce less heat. In addition, they are far more portable and generally have a longer lifes...

Submitted by Rod Aaron Gammons

Published 25 August 2016

The future of timing and timecode

It is SMPTE\'s 100th anniversary! I hope that all readers have had a chance to view the Centennial Video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN2yYrEFMFQ) and to contemplate that 100 years ago we were in the dawn of the cinema era, where different equipment used different frame rates, different sprocket sizes, different frame sizes and the concept of d...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin

Published 24 August 2016

Test and measurement in a multiformat world

The evolution of television technology since the days of 525-line and 625-line standard definition has left a large legacy of standards which modern broadcast systems now have to recognise and process. In today's video and audio business, creatives and technical staff have to be ready to handle a multiplicity of signal types. In its standard form,...

Submitted by Kevin Salvidge

Published 24 August 2016

Ask the experts - Transitioning to IP

1) What has been the broadcast industry's feeling about the move to an all IP workflow?Transitioning from conventional signal transport to an all-IP environment in broadcast or content production operations seems to be a matter of "when\" rather than "if,\" as it brings a great number of advantages with it. IP is touted as offering numerous benefit...

Submitted by Craig Newbury

Published 22 July 2016

5 Things I Saw At NAB

by Peter Savage Issue 113 - May 2016 ARRI Trinity stabilisationIt may look like something that was dreamt up for a sci-fi film but the Trinity stabilisation system is a truly remarkable bit of kit that is most certainly real. Available as an upgrade to the Artemis or a third-party camera stabiliser, it consists of a compact and lightweight two-axis...

Submitted by Peter Savage 2

Published 13 May 2016

A virtual world but call it cloud if you must

I prefer not to use the word "cloud". It's useful for eight points in Scrabble, but in broadcasting, if we can still call it that, what you're really describing is storing data on someone else's computer or, on an industrial scale, a whole lot of someone else's computers (data centres). Cloud is just a convenient way of saying "shedload of capacity...

Submitted by Jan Weigner

Published 01 April 2016

The 4K Conundrum

by Eric Achtmann Issue 108 - December 2015 2015 has confirmed once more that 4K remains the TV industrys Holy Grail. While 4K TV screens are becoming more affordable and Netflix, Amazon Prime and even YouTube are beginning to offer some 4K content, mass adoption is still sluggish as the increases in bandwidth required for distribution make 4K busin...

Submitted by Eric Achtmann

Published 17 December 2015

CLASS - Where do captions & subtitles live?

by Bruce Devlin Issue 104 - August 2015 Its not uncommon to see ability to insert/extract captions/subtitles as part of a tender requirement or product specification. But in a file-based world, what does this mean and where are we inserting/extracting to/from?For this article, well define captions and subtitles as text overlay that the user turns o...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin

Published 01 September 2015

The evolution of vision mixers

by Liam Laminman Issue 104 - August 2015 At the heart of any multi-camera production is a vision mixer or production switcher as some people call them. Its core role is the switching of different sources, primarily cameras, often VTs and sometimes incoming external sources such as remote feeds from broadcasters. Even for non-TV types, thats relativ...

Submitted by Liam Laminman

Published 01 September 2015

Keep memories safe at RWF

by Martin Bennet Issue 103 - July 2015 RWF World founders Gwynne Roberts and Sadie Wykeham have embarked on a 30-plus year mission with a single purpose: to tell the world about human rights violations through the eyes of its survivors. Through the course of their journey, these truth-seekers have informed the world of late 20th-century injustices...

Submitted by Martin Bennett

Published 01 August 2015