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Thinking of buying an OLED - read this first...

It may surprise some people that Autocue, known worldwide as the leader in broadcast, educational and corporate teleprompting, is also highly experienced in providing broadcast quality reference monitors. We’ve parlayed our experience in quality prompting screens to specify the manufacture of broadcast monitors for OB trucks, vision galleries and Q...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 December 2011

Whats new in video monitoring

The great majority of video monitoring displays in any modern broadcast presentation facility are LED-backlit LCDs. Reliable, space-efficient and economical on power, they produce excellent pictures for all but the most critical applications, usually in conjunction with one or more multiviewers to emulate a monitor stack. Domestic television began...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 December 2011

3D a Geographic Thing

It may just be coincidence but, in the last week, two stories about 3D in Scandinavia have landed on the 3D Diaries desk. Of course two swallows do not a summer make but maybe there is a trend here, with some nations embracing the third dimension more than others. Sony Professional is currently building what they claim is Scandinavia’s first 3D-rea...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 September 2011

IBC2011 must sees

Over 1,300 exhibitors will be supporting IBC2011, each bringing perhaps one, two or three new or enhanced products. My task is to distill these down to the 20 devices likely to be of greatest interest to TV-Bay readers, so far as that is possible several weeks before the show opens. As a recent convert to OS X, I note with gloom that Apple remains...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 September 2011

Navigating uncharted waters

I’m home again from the annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas. It must be something to do with getting older, but this year both key performance indicators (good dinners versus greasy hamburgers, and early nights versus late night carousing) fell on the conservative side. And my flight home landed 45 minutes early, rather than a week or so late. I was hea...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 June 2011

Ask the experts - Monitoring

What are the latest innovations in monitoring?For both film and broadcast work, in addition to the fact that the picture must be true, without motion artifacts or aliasing, for a lot of applications you can also add that the picture must be processed in real time - less than one frame or one picture in progressive mode – so the main innovations are...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 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

Evaluating Video Monitors

Video monitors have always been a critical component in any broadcasting operation — but they have evolved significantly as the industry-wide migration from analog broadcast to digital SD and HD has placed new demands on the monitoring function. Current products include feature sets that mirror the complexity of today’s monitoring operations, with...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 2011

Redefining Mobile, High Definition Recording With Cinedec...

IBC 2010 saw the official European launch of Cinedeck EXTREME v2.0, an ultra-portable cinema grade integrated High Definition monitoring, recording and playback device that has already won numerous awards and accolades since making its first public appearance at this year’s NAB Convention in Las Vegas. Cinedeck EXTREME v2.0 incorporates a number of...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 November 2010

tv-bay IBC2010 double takes

Tv-bay Double Takes..!Acquisition For-A VFC-7000 Camera HD Variable Frame Rate CameraASA1800 Sensitivity, Native 720x1280 resolution with inbuilt up-convert to 1920x1080 and will output at 50 or 59.94 frame rates. 120 - 700 Frames per second recording speed. Two HD-SDI outputs enabling live and recordings to be viewed simultaneously. Standard onboa...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 November 2010

OLED question and answer

Q: What is OLED?A: OLED stands for Organic Light Emitting Diode. OLEDs are relatively simple in structure, made up of an electrically active organic material sandwiched between an anode (a electron-releasing electrode) and a cathode (an electron-receiving electrode). When an electric current runs through the system, the anode sends electrons to the...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 August 2010

Eye to Eye: Video monitoring and displays

Given a decent stereo audio source and a pair of headphones, it is quite easy to imagine that you are actually attending a live performance. Not so with video; human eyes are much more demanding. Fortunately picture display technology is developing very quickly and along many different routes. OLEDsLED-backlit LCDs were about the best screens avail...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 August 2010

Film Affect

As shooting on film for TV applications is increasingly being replaced with HD, there is a growing tendency for people to wish to apply film tools and methods to origination when using the electronic medium. However, unless aiming for a specific look that cannot be achieved any other way, it can prove more time consuming and costly to work this way...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 January 2010

Eye to Eye: Whats new in audio 2009

Part of my day at SATIS recently was sent discussing with Neutrik the dodgy issue of sexual compatibility, a subject not mentioned in my report from the show for TV-Bay last month. I had recently invested in a Roland Edirol R-44 solid-state audio recorder. Used in conjunction with four Rode phantom-powered capacitor microphones, it makes an excelle...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 January 2010

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