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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

Eye to eye: The changing face of video displays

Video display technology is progressing so fast that the phrase 'More revolutions than a banana republic' inevitably comes to mind. No offence intended if you have just taken over as president. From the 1930s to the present century, television display was dominated almost entirely by cathode ray tubes. Competition then arrived in the form of plasma...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 2011

Production Spotlight

On Friday 10th September, Fluidmoves Video Productions, filmed a new outfall pipe leaving Shoreham Harbour on the Sussex coast. The 1.8 kilometre pipe was towed out to sea through the open lock gates round to Newhaven Harbour, a distance of 15 nautical miles, on behalf of Southern Water and its contractor 4Delivery. The outfall is part of Southern...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 2011

Eye to Eye, Portable power supplies

The true portability of modern HD mini-cameras and flash-RAM video recorders is encouraging programme makers to go way beyond reach of tethered power supplies. But are the battery-makers living up to the demands being placed on them?Recommendation 1 in portable power supplies is so obvious it almost doesn't need stating: rechargeable batteries are...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 February 2011

Eye to Eye at the Wildscreen International Film Festival

Founded in 1982, the Wildscreen International Film Festival is claimed to be the world's largest event of its kind. It attracts several hundred delegates from more than 30 countries, all of whom (if they register early enough) get their contact details listed in the festival directory. The festival is staged every two years in Bristol and revolves...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 December 2010

Television camera lenses

This is a glass-to-glass report with a difference, starting at front-end of the video production chain and staying there. Given the speed of development in almost every other branch of television, it is easy to overlook the advances taking place in optics. Until, that is, you need a wider capture angle than your existing kit can deliver or you want...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 November 2010

Eye to Eye: Storage and archiving

In 1986 or thereabouts, I visited the London headquarters of a stripling company named Lightworks which had developed an innovative and relatively low-cost video editor based around a 1 gigabyte hard-disk drive. The drive was the size of a standard British housebrick and, bought in at £1,000, was considered mightily good value. A typical 1,500 giga...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 October 2010

Ask the experts on cable

Digital, server-based systems in production, post-production, news gathering and playout bring increased efficiencies and productivity. Nonlinear editing and news gathering allow users to access the same material across a data network. Digits are here and are now dictating the form of cables and connectors, from camera through to playout. What qual...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 May 2010

Robotic cameras on location

Television is such a natural extension of the human senses that I doubt if more than one viewer in a thousand gives much thought to the effort put into modern programme production. Much of the original push for creative freedom came from outside broadcast crews, initially using turret-mounted optics and later zoom lenses to obtain close-ups of dist...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 February 2010

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

SATIS in a day

Aware that several French distributors had pulled out of this year's SIEL & SATIS, I chunnelled to Paris on day two of the October 20-22 show with minimal expectations. The small size of the Guide de Visite (20 pages A5) added to my misgivings but the event itself proved respectably large, crowded and buzzing. Nearly 280 companies occupied stands i...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 December 2009

Eye to eye Picture displays and multiviewers 2009

The transition from cathode-ray tubes to flat-panel display devices for broadcast picture monitoring was a long time coming but is now almost complete. Grade 1 CRTs from suppliers such as Ikegami and Sony are still purchased in small numbers for monitoring in quality-conscious playout centres and post-production houses. For every other broadcast ap...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 September 2009

Edirol R-09HR records Obama inauguration

When sound recordist Alan O’Duffy was contracted to travel to the USA to record interviews and atmospheres for a “feature documentary” about Barack Obama becoming the 44th President of the USA, one of the first pieces of kit he packed was Edirol’s R-09HR digital recorder. Irish film company, Alpha Films, wanted Alan to record on location first in N...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 May 2009

New developments in mobile HD production

When widescreen HDTV was first demonstrated back in the 1980s, the pictures were great but the size and price of the kit left much to be desired. Two decades on, broadcast-quality 1080i/720p HD cameras and recorders have reached levels of compactness and affordability that would have seemed impossible in those early days. When I designed the origin...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 January 2009

CTV OB Truck

Responding to the growing demand for HD broadcasts and with a fleet of already overworked outside broadcast trucks, CTV Outside Broadcast’s newest addition to its fleet, OB 9, is a fully-equipped production facility with the latest in High Definition production, mixing and recording equipment. Targeted squarely at major entertainment and sporting e...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 July 2008