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Boradcast playout on-site and in the cloud

Broadcasters come in many shapes and sizes, each with their own unique set of ambitions and their own preferred route to success. Some are happy to innovate, particularly if it increases staff efficiency or reduces operating costs. Others prefer to let their competitors do the innovating and then follow whatever path appears to work best. Thus the...

Submitted by Don Ash

Published 19 October 2017

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

Keeping it real

by Will Strauss Issue 92 - August 2014 With Sky buying into an immersive video start-up, and the BBC trialling content on an Oculus Rift headset, virtual reality could be about to move from simply sets and studios to a whole new realm. Once residing purely in the realms of science fiction and, latterly, video gaming, it appears that virtual reality...

Submitted by Will Strauss#

Published 01 September 2014

Monitoring: Cutting the Wires

Teradek began the wireless monitoring revolution at last year's NAB show. Its Cube wireless encoders are no bigger than a pack of playing cards. They compress a camcorder's video feed into an H.264 signal for transmission to either a WiFi-enabled laptop, iPad or tablet or to a Cube decoder. Straight-away live, remote and affordable monitoring was b...

Submitted by Kieron Seth#

Published 01 December 2012

A new era in slow-motion?

Those readers who watch sports programmes on a regular basis may have noticed that many productions now have high speed cameras providing so called “ultra-motion” replays as a part of slow motion sequences. These cameras have been in use for many years in such areas as crash testing and sports training, but until recently the quality of the image h...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 April 2012

True Colours Shine Through With CCS

When you are a broadcast engineer working in front of a stack of LCD monitors, seeing a significant difference between the brightness and colour of each monitor can be both annoying and tiring on the eyes. Worse still, if you in a Master Control Room and the pictures have taken on a sickly green hue, how do you know that it is just the monitors at...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 2011

Ravensbourne 21st Century Broadcast Education

Just over eighteen months ago, Adrian Scott of the Bakewell House Consultancy was commissioned to guide Ravensbourne through the EU Tendering process to appoint a Systems Integrator to transform the broadcast facilities of Ravensbourne as it moved into its new multi-million pound home at Greenwich Peninsula. Winning the contract, TSL rose to the ch...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 December 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

Eye to Eye: Getting a grip

Getting a gripCameras and camcorders are shrinking at such a rapid rate that a lot of today's established support devices are looking completely out of scale. In some aisles of the NAB 2010 Central Hall, visitors were at perpetual risk of colliding with excited demonstrators nipping hither and yon with hand-held stabilisers for DSLRs. Most were onl...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 June 2010

With Polecam to the Antarctic

Whale Wars is a documentary-style reality television series that airs on Animal Planet, and follows the activities of the eco-activist group, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Last year, I was aboard Sea Shepherd’s flagship, “Steve Irwin” as Director of Photography and, along with a 5-man camera team, documented the “war” between the Japanese whal...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 May 2010

Stereoscopic production and transmission

If ever there was a technology that has taken it’s time to mature, it is that of stereoscopic (3D) production and transmission. It is well documented that the mechanics behind the technology has been around almost since the inception of the moving picture itself and in fact stereoscopic stills technology was developed in the 1840’s. Until now, the...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 2010

EPIC HD Upgrade

EPIC-TV came into being in late 2006, after Norfolk County Council acquired the ITV Anglia Regional news and Network production studios at Magdalen Street Norwich. Since then it’s been re-developed as one of the technically most advanced production facilities in Europe, with three broadcast studies, two of the HD, one of them Virtual, linked direct...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 May 2009

Surround Sound For HD Broadcast

While 2008 may not be fondly remembered as a classic year if you work in certain industries, it's a fascinating time to be working in video media production or broadcast television. The steady move to high-definition at all stages of the video production process, is causing the biggest shake-up in technology and working practices since the introduc...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 February 2009