KitPlus | Articles

A box of delights

by Dick Hobbs Issue 101 - May 2015 In the immediate aftermath of NAB and its bombardment by new gizmos, I want to talk about Professor Noriaki Kano. In the 1980s, at the Tokyo University of Science, he came up with a simple model of product design for customer satisfaction. His original work was more complicated than this diagram, but fundamentally...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs.

Published 01 June 2015

Is it my eyes, is it in focus?

by Graham Reed Issue 100 - April 2015 Is it me or as I get older, and my eyes not as good as they were, are viewfinders getting smaller and less sharp?When I started as a cameraman the cameras were large (EMI 2001\'s) as were the viewfinders. They were large format cameras with a 30mm 4x3 sensors and the normal aperture was f 3.5, so a shallow dept...

Submitted by graham reed

Published 01 May 2015

Back in the day

by Larry Jordan Issue 100 - April 2015 Congratulations, TV-Bay, on your tenth anniversary; as well as the 100th issue of TV-Bay/KitPlus magazine. Very cool!Ten years ago seems like forever. Some of us were editing with Final Cut Pro 5. LiveType was still with us. Others were using Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 (CS3 was still two years in the future). Stil...

Submitted by Larry Jordan#

Published 01 May 2015

DOPs discuss minicams, lenses, 4k and all

by Mel Noonan Issue 100 - April 2015 If anyone knows about the practical reality of using minicams and lenses it has to be the DOPs who are out there using them. We are now seeing minicams used in all areas of production, some with 1080p and 4K capability at prices you would not have believed possible a few years back. I spoke to some of the DOPs I...

Submitted by Mel Noonan

Published 01 May 2015

Why video codecs matter

by Larry Jordan Issue 99 - March 2015 Video codecs confuse a lot of people. But understanding codecs is critical to just about every element of video production, editing and distribution. Codec is an acronym that stands for "COmpressor/DECompressor.\" It is easy to get intimidated by all the technical jargon surrounding codecs, but, at their core,...

Submitted by Larry Jordan#

Published 01 April 2015

How to read Video Scopes

by Larry Jordan Issue 98 - February 2015 Understanding what video scopes tell us about our images is essential to creating great looking images; regardless of which video editing software you are using. In this article, I want to explain the basics of video scopes and how to read them. A QUICK BACKGROUNDEach video image is composed of pixels, small...

Submitted by Larry Jordan#

Published 01 March 2015

Which camera is right for you?

by Beth Zarkhosh Issue 98 - February 2015 So January has been and gone and it\'s out with the old and in with the new. This applies to the freshest and upcoming cameras for video making on the market; it\'s now time to get rid of your old equipment. With CES behind us, new innovations have taken many by surprise and with BVE currently going on ther...

Submitted by Beth Zarkhosh

Published 01 March 2015

Post Production gear guide - what new products to watch o...

by Beth Zarkhosh Issue 97 - January 2015 With 2015 now upon us what better way to start by being in the know with all the latest gear for video editing? We all know the editing process can be a stressful one, so having the right equipment and being organised will help you to become more productive this year. So what\'s new for 2015 in the world of...

Submitted by Beth Zarkhosh

Published 01 February 2015

Four must-haves for modern media workflows: Enhancing you...

by Laurent Fanichet Issue 97 - January 2015 It\'s always been about the struggle to manage lots of assets and adapt your MAM to suit in the world of digital media workflows. In the early years, enterprise storage infrastructure couldn\'t keep pace with the demands of SD, so the first non-linear editing systems were turnkey solutions with proprietar...

Submitted by Laurent Fanichet

Published 01 February 2015

Eye to Eye: Video Post-production

Video post-production has long been one of the fastest developing subsets of the broadcast business. It was among the first to lead the shift from hardware into software, bringing huge advantages in terms of affordability and ease of use. I can still remember the high cost, heavy weight and low quality of the early analogue tape to tape video editi...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 January 2015

Expanding Arqiva into HD playout

ATG Broadcast recently completed a major SD to HD upgrade for Arqiva broadcast transmission centre at Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire. The expanded system enables Arqiva to process and transmit four fully-operational 1080i HD channels as well as six new SD channels. It includes the installation and equipping of a server-based ingest suite, playout...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 January 2015

Stars of the show - A visitors view

by Ben Sheriff Issue 96 - December 2014 Yesterday TV-BAY - Kit Plus came to East London\'s Brick Lane showcasing a roadshow packed with great seminars and kit to whet our appetites in advance of BVE in February. It was no great surprise that, for the DPs and camera operators at least the star of the event was the Sony PXW-FS7. Sony\'s latest large...

Submitted by Ben Sherriff

Published 01 January 2015

Emphasising Television in streaming television

by James Gilbert Issue 96 - December 2014 There have been all sorts of doom and gloom stories, over a decade or more, about how television is changing. Budgets are being slashed, workflows are becoming automated, and standard IT hardware is taking over from bespoke broadcast kit. But despite all this, television still looks good. If you watch telev...

Submitted by James Gilbert

Published 01 January 2015

A quick guide to: Considerations for building monitor gal...

by Steve Hathaway Issue 95 - November 2014 There has been a trend in recent times towards using large screen systems in production galleries and monitor walls. This has been enabled by the wide-scale availability of affordable multi-viewer systems but has this trend really been of benefit to broadcasters? As a specialist in picture monitoring, work...

Submitted by Steve Hathaway

Published 01 December 2014

Move and Deliver

Issue 94 - October 2014You may not have heard of the open source video company Kaltura. But you probably will have heard of Harmonic. Together the two companies made an announcement at IBC that is indicative of where multi-screen, multi-platform TV is heading. They have teamed up to develop and market a cloud-based video infrastructure and OTT TV p...

Submitted by Will Strauss#

Published 01 November 2014