KitPlus | Articles

Review: JVC GY-HC900 Camera

JVC has a long history of developing relatively low price-point equipment, dating right back to its success in the 1970s with the VHS tape format. JVC products sometimes impact the broadcast mainstream but generally find greatest success in niche market segments such as news production where price and portability take priority over the no-comprise...

Submitted by Andy McKenzie

Published 16 July 2019

State of the Nation - If Winter Comes

Here’s an important fact that might get lost in all the noise of the moment. HBO’s Game of Thrones, which is relentlessly covered in the press as well as being talked about by its fans, is not actually terribly popular. The opener of the current (and last, thank goodness) series attracted a consolidated audience of about 3.5 million – that includes...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs - new

Published 04 June 2019

Lighting with Gurdip Mahal

Gurdip Mahal’s credits for lighting design are impressive. Including major Awards shows such as BBC Sports Personality of the Year, Children in Need, as well as The Voice, Top Gear and Crystal Maze, his CV would almost certainly include at least one show with which any one of us is familiar. In addition, he has applied his own particular style to p...

Submitted by Ian Muir

Published 04 June 2019

Behind the Scenes of Wild rose

Financed by BFI Film Fund, Wild Rose tells the story of a musician from Glasgow who dreams of becoming a Nashville star. The only thing in the way: her own penchant for crime and violence. Starring Jessie Buckley, the film begins just as its talented antihero, Rose-Lynn, is first released on parole after having spent a year in jail on a drug charge...

Submitted by KitPlus

Published 04 June 2019

The Latest Trend in Cloud Ingest Portals

The unique demands of the media industry have created an equally unique ecosystem. With high-resolution video constantly moving over the Internet during production, post production, and multi-device, multi-channel distribution, as well as the need for flexible storage and security at every stage — all under impossibly tight timelines — there isn’t...

Submitted by Megan Cater

Published 04 June 2019

Painting Performance Analytics with ChyronHego

By now, most people are familiar with the sport of mixed martial arts (MMA) and its leading organization – UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship). And while the sport and its leading promotion are only 25 years old, a great deal has changed in those 25 years, including the training of UFC athletes. Leading that training is UFC’s Dr. Duncan French, Vi...

Submitted by KitPlus

Published 21 March 2019

Future proofing post production storage

Advancements in NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express), the storage protocol designed for flash, are revolutionising data storage. According to G2M Research, the NVMe market will grow to $60 billion by 2021, with 70 percent of all-flash arrays being based on the protocol by 2020. NVMe, acting like steroids for flash-based storage infrastructures, dynam...

Submitted by Josh Goldenhar

Published 25 January 2019

Battery Power Management

There are many obvious ways a modern battery is better than one that would have been common just a few years ago and is light years ahead of what was available a generation ago. In everything from form factor to battery life to charge time, things have vastly improved. Consider cycle ratings, an indication of how many times a pack has or can be use...

Submitted by Ross Kanarek

Published 24 January 2019

Viva La Microphone Evolution

2018 marked the twentieth year of Sennheiser Evolution microphones - a range of wired and wireless live performance microphones and wireless systems that took Sennheiser from relatively small-volume broadcast manufacturing to a prime position on stages around the world. Last November, Sennheiser UK marked this auspicious occasion by holding an even...

Submitted by KitPlus

Published 24 January 2019

Shopping for lenses and more...

When it came to updating the studio at the University of Surrey, Andy Attwell was looking for manufacturers that would offer more than just a great product. It sounds like a dream job. With the funding secured to update the studio in the Department of Music and Media at the University of Surrey, Guildford, it was time for Television Studio Manager,...

Submitted by Andy Attwell

Published 24 January 2019

An Obituary to Timecode

A stoic and persistent character that stubbornly refused to change with the times, Timecode has finally passed on, but no-one has noticed. A long-lasting industry veteran, Timecode was brought into this world at an uncertain date in the late 1960s due to the needs of analogue tape workflows and the demand for synchronisation between audio and video...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin - new

Published 09 November 2018

Using Wireless Transmission

Wireless acquisition is a staple of live sports, entertainment and reality shows where cable free capture permits shots not previously possible, for health and safety reasons, and gives the camera-operator greater artistic licence to roam. The same is increasingly true of narrative drama where cinematographers are keen to work handheld or Steadicam...

Submitted by Jeremy Benning

Published 09 November 2018

Sony HDC-4800 Review

First announced at NAB 2016, the Sony HDC-4800 is a studio camera system capable of shooting 4K/UHD at up to 8x or full HD at up to 16x. With a price point upwards of £250,000 it is a very high-end product with a wide feature set. In Sony's own words, "This is the future of live production, designed to satisfy the storytelling aspect of modern spor...

Submitted by Andy McKenzie

Published 09 November 2018

The Wireless Way to 4k

DTC’s AEON group of products have been specifically designed for the 4K market. We encode with the more efficient HEVC algorithm, which means we are taking a 12G signal and compressing it to a bitrate that can be managed over an RF link. So what makes this a leading idea in the 4K revolution?For a start, sport continues to drive technical innovatio...

Submitted by JP Delport

Published 09 November 2018

Accelerated Workflows with eGPU

Customer:Creative BlokeIndustry: Media & EntertainmentChallenges:To enable a small independent visual effects facility, Creative Bloke, with a versatile GPU that contains a combination of portability and performance to cater to their wide and varied portfolio of clients. Solution:Creative Bloke utilized the AMD Radeon Pro WX 9100 graphics card in t...

Submitted by Mike Griggs

Published 09 November 2018