KitPlus | Articles

Expert battery advice

1. Why do some manufacturers sell NiMH batteries?NiMH batteries have a number of clear advantages versus other cell chemistries and we believe and see that this cell chemistry complements the standard Li-Ion range. Indeed some customers choose to use only NiMH. The main areas of benefit are weight and balance. A strong minority of cameramen see cam...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 February 2011

Broadcast Batteries, Today and Tomorrow

As consumers, we all have experience of being let down by batteries (think rusty Italian cars in the 1970s!). But thankfully the world of batteries has moved on: the global battery industry is today worth $71 billion and is estimated to be growing at nearly 5% a year. Of this, broadcast batteries make up a tiny fraction but the manufacturers that s...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 February 2011

HotTips on how to be a better lighting cameraman.

First up, don’t worry too much about HDFor most of my early career I shot with film, not video, so I usually approach things from a film point-of-view. This means I don’t see an awful lot of difference between SD and HD. In my opinion, the extra definition has more of an impact on the make-up team and the set designers because, regardless of what l...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 January 2011

Commonwealth Games Will Be All Right On The Night

Fans of Bollywood films will be familiar with the classic Indian wedding storyline in which complete chaos usually engulfs the event right up to the moment when the groom arrives, at which point everything comes together and everyone has a whale of a time and puts behind them the dramas that preceded the ceremony. The XIX Commonwealth Games (CWG) i...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 December 2010

TV Bay Questions Editor and Technical Manager at Astley B...

Who are you? (about yourself and Astley Baker Davies)I am Taig McNab, editor and technical manager at Astley Baker Davies. We are a small, multi-award winning animation studio based in central London. What do you do? What does Astley Baker Davies do?We are most famous for our involvement with the Peppa Pig series. Our other shows include Ben & Holl...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 December 2010

Around the globe with Q-Ball

The bicentenary of the birth of Charles Darwin was celebrated during 2009 by a variety of TV programmes studying the background to his 1859 book 'On the Origin of Species'. One of the most ambitious tributes was a 35-part series planned and produced by Dutch broadcaster VPRO. Rather than hire a studio, they commissioned the three-masted clipper Sta...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 November 2010

Television on television

Just at the moment I am receiving a steady, almost daily, stream of press releases from an American company called IVI. The service they offer is aimed at an American audience so I will not bore you with the details of their campaign. But it raised some thoughts in the back of my mind. IVI has developed some clever (it claims) software, for Mac, Li...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 November 2010

TV Bay Questions

Who are you? (about yourself and Sequence)My name is Ben Foakes,29 years old and founder/ majority owner of Sequence. I work as an editor and post-supervisor as well as jointly running Sequence with my co-manager Kevin Chapman and our fantastic team of staff. The company was setup in June 2004, starting as a single home FCP suite and rapidly growin...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 November 2010

3D to see at IBC 2010

IBC2010 marks the fourth year when the new wave of Stereoscopic 3D took hold at the show. That’s three years of time for development and implementation. While cinema is racing ahead, taking a good extra percentage of people at the door who pay a 3D premium price – television in Europe is only just beginning. Sky is the pioneer for the UK, going on...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 October 2010

GSOH

This will come as no surprise to anyone who has met me, but I like a laugh. After a hard day at the coal face of incisive insights into the technology of our industry, nothing chills me out quicker than a good comedy. There is a channel on my personal EPG to which I return regularly. I will not mention it by name because I am about to be rude about...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 September 2010

Business advcie from the football pitch

Much has been written in the press about the performance of the beleaguered England football team during the World Cup and particularly Fabio Capello’s management. It seems that Capello was the root of the team’s problems, so this month I have analysed our performance through some very simply management headings to see how we could take some key le...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 August 2010

A dream budget

As the coalition government prepares its emergency budget, Peter Savage looks at what is planned and tells us what he thinks the government should do. Apologies to avid readers of this column that there wasn’t one in the last issue. The editors decided on an article on the effects of the general election on our industries and, sod’s law, the deadli...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 July 2010

Enabling the fans

The days when a simple hotdog, a pint of beer, a score board and good lungs were the main ingredients of a great day at a football game are soon to be a thing of the past. Mike Arthur, general manager, sports and live events, at Harris Broadcast Communications, talks to TV-Bay Magazine about the advances in technology which will enable interactive...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 July 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

Exhibiting at CABSAT first time feedback

CABSAT started with a curious phenomenon. Rain in the desert. It was PHABRIX’s first time in Dubai exhibiting its test and measurement products at CABSAT and we’d obviously brought the weather with us. Now rain in Dubai is like a severe snowstorm in the UK – everything stops. As the Emirates plane, equipped with a front video camera, displayed our...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 May 2010