KitPlus | Articles

3D Film-making Goes Independent

James Cameron and Sky TV have stolen the stereoscopic 3D limelight. Events such as football cup finals and royal weddings have seemingly been produced with no expense spared in order to show 3DTV at its best. The Ryder Cup, for example, employed an incredible 21 3D Polecam rigs, supplementing the main camera systems. Beyond the world of Hollywood a...

Submitted by Kieron Seth#

Published 01 June 2011

Review of Rycote Portable Recorder Audio Kit

Pocket-sized digital audio recorders with integral microphones are ideal for capturing sound during a video shoot. Provided the start point is marked with a hand-clap, wild audio can be imported and synchronised quite easily during video editing. And there is always the option of feeding the live audio signal directly into the camera. Either way, t...

Submitted by Kieron Seth#

Published 01 June 2011

Either meet your listeners halfway, or get them to come t...

In TV Bay’s IPTV & Online issue, I spoke about how streaming video online enabled content owners to share their work with the world a lot more effectively, so although the end result is the same, what technical procedures are different for streaming pure audio content?The pace of technical advancements have now established distinct requirements for...

Submitted by Kieron Seth#

Published 01 June 2011

Working With Audio Signals

For most of the past century, working with audio signals was a very straightforward process. The audio information was converted to electrical signals in the form of a varying voltage between the two conductors in a pair (balanced) or between a conductor and the ground reference (unbalanced). The bandwidth, frequency response, distortion and noise...

Submitted by Kieron Seth#

Published 01 June 2011

Post Production Ask The Experts

IntroductionIt’s a familiar scenario: A client calls with an urgent transfer request. It may be a movie sourced at 23.98PsF that needs conversion for broadcast, and the client needs an HD version at 1080 50i with Dolby E audio and an SD program at 625 50i with PCM audio, as well. Or perhaps the content was shot at 1080 59.94i, but the client needs...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 May 2011

Hands on an IPad 2

It’s been near on 1 year since the Apple iPad landed on planet earth. No one knew if it was going to be a success, sceptics were sure that the tablet format would be nothing more than a fad and that true portable computing still lay in the realms of the notebook pc's. However after 9 months and 12 million units sold, Apple of course, again, annoyin...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 May 2011

Eye to Eye: Video Post-production

My first direct experience of video post-production involved hauling a heavy Sony U-Matic tape machine up a flight of stairs before going back for an equally heavy playback deck, a bulky CRT monitor and a large box of interface giblets. That was in 1978. 33 years on, an Apple Mac does the whole editing job a great deal better, faster and more econo...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 May 2011

A day in the life of a Royals videographer

Times have changed; no more phone calls, telexes or faxes, - remember them? Now it’s E-mails; what would we do without them?A quiet day in the office-come-edit-suite, the FCP rendering yet another set of archive clips, and the other Mac illuminated with Thunderbird, when ‘ping’ (the Mac version of “You got mail”) wakes one up from the hypnotic tran...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 May 2011

A decaying elephant...filmed

Assignment: To film 24/7 the six week decay of a dead five tonne adult elephant in the wild. Reason: to learn how the death creates six million calories of fat, meat and guts, feeding a whole new cycle of life. It was in early March 2010 when Tigress productions put in the call to TX for a meeting of minds, to discuss the idea of filming an elephan...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 May 2011

tv-bay questions

Name & TitleChristopher Pitbladdo, Creative Director at DB Creative TVWho are you? (about yourself and DB Creative)?I'm an editor who's been cutting broadcast television documentaries and commercials since 1997. Having spent time living and working in London, I decided to make a lifestyle choice, and go back to my hometown of Edinburgh. DB Creative...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 May 2011

Back to basics asset management

There are two things you should know before I start. One is that the strapline for my company’s product, Mediaflex, is “Beyond Media Asset Management”. And the second is that I hate the term “Media Asset Management” because it has come to be meaningless. Too many people have used it to mean too many different things. So what is Media Asset Manageme...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 May 2011

Jamies 30 minute meals are served up

The ChallengeTo shoot, edit, grade and conform 40 x 30 minutes episodes of Channel 4’s Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals within an extremely tight timescale, whilst ensuring that quality wasn’t sacrificed throughout the process. The SolutionAn efficient file-based workflow incorporating Avid Media Composer and Avid DS with RED and Canon cameras were used to...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 May 2011

What are the most important opportunities and challenges...

What are the most important opportunities and challenges facing the TV industry today?To answer this question we need to look more broadly at consumer behaviour and the changing way people are consuming content. Viewers no longer solely want a passive experience with a TV programme in their front room. They want to watch catch-up TV on a laptop, do...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 May 2011

AdVision TV: Editing... Live

Glastonbury - it's on TV. Premier League Football? On TV. Not subscribing to the right satellite channel? Worried about missing a big event? Try Googling it, try YouTube. You would have thought that live events would struggle to survive in the face of this wall of media coverage. But rock concerts, sports matches, conferences and venues across the...

Submitted by Kieron Seth#

Published 01 May 2011

3D Post at NAB, Wimbledon, and more

You may recall that last time 3D Diaries tackled the subject of post production in August 2010, it warned that the ‘fix it in post’ habit was definitely to be avoided. This means shoot it correctly in the first place, as trying to fix errors, especially the 3D ones, in post can get very tricky and, may be expensive. This remains the case even thoug...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 May 2011