KitPlus | Articles

The business case for media asset management

by Kevin Usher Issue 103 - July 2015 You could argue that, so far, there have been two stages of commercial justification for asset management systems in broadcasting. First, it was a necessary evil: if broadcasters, production companies and other media organizations wanted to store content as filesat least some of the timethey needed a means of fi...

Submitted by Kevin Usher

Published 01 August 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

From VoD to Linear TV

by Nikos Kyriopopoulos Issue 100 - April 2015 Content owners, broadcasters, and operators worldwide typically provide a sizable library of VoD content and a limited offering of live/linear programming. This unbalanced ratio between VoD and linear TV offerings is historically shaped by two factors:- The cost associated with linear TV production, a b...

Submitted by Nikos Kyriopoulos

Published 01 May 2015

Archiving as a service at BBC Studios and Post Production

by Kevin Shaw Issue 97 - January 2015 BBC Studios and Post Production (BBC S&PP) is a commercial subsidiary of the BBC that competes for work from both the BBC and the market at large. In the Digital Media Services (DMS) department, we provide an end-to-end solution for what we refer to as "post-post production.\" Our services include digitization...

Submitted by Kevin Shaw

Published 01 February 2015

Dialog-based search accelerates content discovery for any...

by Drew Lanham Issue 97 - January 2015 If you can\'t find it, then you can\'t reuse it. Those are a broadcaster\'s words to live by as media libraries grow at exponential rates. But the need to find and reuse media assets is not confined to large, traditional broadcasters. Organizations of all types and sizes are finding that the ability to uncover...

Submitted by Drew Lanham

Published 01 February 2015

Still unsure about cloud editing? Read this..

by Stephen Streater Issue 97 - January 2015 For all the talk about the cloud in the past couple of years, it can still be a bit of a mystery. When it comes to editing video in the cloud, some people still struggle with the concept. Is cloud editing secure? Do I need special knowledge? Why switch from traditional editing workflows? Won\'t cloud edit...

Submitted by Stephen Streater

Published 01 February 2015

Stability not short-term subscriptions

by Lewis Kirkaldie Issue 97 - January 2015 I\'ve been watching the prospect of subscription-based tools with interest. I talk to customers a lot, and they too are monitoring the situation. Some can see advantages; others are wary. I think it depends very much on what the tool is. Being able to switch a service on and off is attractive for some appl...

Submitted by Lewis Kirkaldie

Published 01 February 2015

Fixing it in parallel

by Daniele Siragusano Issue 97 - January 2015 Whenever something went wrong in television production, the cry was always "We\'ll fix it in post". Except that there was rarely enough time, in a broadcast schedule, to fix anything. Today we expect every programme - even routine television programmes like daily dramas - to look and sound perfect. But...

Submitted by Daniele Siragusano

Published 01 February 2015

Expanding Arqiva into HD playout

ATG Broadcast recently completed a major SD to HD upgrade for Arqiva broadcast transmission centre at Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire. The expanded system enables Arqiva to process and transmit four fully-operational 1080i HD channels as well as six new SD channels. It includes the installation and equipping of a server-based ingest suite, playout...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 January 2015

Emphasising Television in streaming television

by James Gilbert Issue 96 - December 2014 There have been all sorts of doom and gloom stories, over a decade or more, about how television is changing. Budgets are being slashed, workflows are becoming automated, and standard IT hardware is taking over from bespoke broadcast kit. But despite all this, television still looks good. If you watch telev...

Submitted by James Gilbert

Published 01 January 2015

EPG: Guiding content discovery

by Keith Bedford Issue 95 - November 2014 Digital TV is something that we\'ve become accustomed to, we don\'t think about how we search and select the vast volume of content that\'s now available to us, we just know that with the press of a button we can see what\'s on, record our favourite shows, series link them, select recommendations based on o...

Submitted by Keith Bedford

Published 01 December 2014

Manage and Monitor

Issue 94 - October 2014In the month that digital files become the preferred method of delivery for television programmes in the UK, it will come as a blessed relief to many in both post and production that one of the biggest bugbears of file-based delivery – how to deal with insert editing - may have been solved, just in the nick of time. It didn’t...

Submitted by Will Strauss#

Published 01 November 2014

Capture and Produce

Issue 93 - September 2014 Amongst all the new cameras, support and other production kit being touted prior to IBC, it was a less tangible announcement that really captured the imagination: Atomos’ announcement that it wants to standardize its Start/Stop Trigger connectivity for HDMI by making it available to other manufacturers. Locking SDI interfa...

Submitted by Will Strauss#

Published 01 October 2014

Manipulate and Edit

Issue 93 - September 2014 Company mergers can be no fun. Staff panic about ‘efficiencies’ and therefore their jobs. The press speculates about ‘what really happened?’ And there are always lawyers involved. And no one likes that. When DiGiCo revealed that it would merge with fellow audio console manufacturers Calrec and Allen & Heath, following a bu...

Submitted by Will Strauss#

Published 01 October 2014

Manage and Monitor

Issue 93 - September 2014 In less than a month’s time, British television producers will be asked to deliver their programmes to broadcasters as files rather than tape. Some have been doing it for years. For others, it’s a whole new world. Fundamentally, the change is just replacing physical items like tapes, labels and VT reports with their zeros...

Submitted by Will Strauss#

Published 01 October 2014