KitPlus | Articles

Troubleshooting - Top Tips to Make Files Work

by Bruce Devlin Issue 110 - February 2016 Troubleshooting - Top Tips to Make Files WorkSo, you built yourself the world's most perfect, IT-based file workflow and you have a state-of-the-art media facility? Congratulations, have a beer, but at some point it's going to go wrong!Given that fewer than 50% of support cases in any company that I have wo...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin

Published 16 March 2016

New Upmixing Challenges and Strategies for Audio Post-pro...

by Jon Schorah Issue 109 - January 2016 Following the successful introduction of Halo Upmix, NUGEN Audios new upmixing plugin, Creative Director and Co-Founder Jon Schorah reflects on the changing landscape and increasingly complex demands of the modern audio post-production environment. The audio post-production engineer survives in a demanding an...

Submitted by Jon Schorah

Published 21 January 2016

Broadcast Playout Over IP and in The Cloud

with Don Ash Issue 109 - January 2016 Simon Tillyer: Before we get heavy about IP and the cloud, what is the current state of the broadcast playout business? Don Ash: The transition to server-based systems in recent years has made the entire process of broadcast playout much easier to operate and automate than the tape-based equipment which precede...

Submitted by Don Ash

Published 21 January 2016

The Evolution of Cloud

with Micky Edwards Issue 108 - Decmeber 2015 Television was originally created to be a mass communication platform. Yet, over the last few years, it is becoming increasingly hyperlocal. There are several reasons the television industry is transitioning from a broadcast to narrowcast schematic. One is monetization. According to Borrell Associates, l...

Submitted by Micky Edwards

Published 15 December 2015

Three days to launch a TV station

by Neil Hutchins Issue 104 - August 2015 We go on-air in less than 100 hours is an alarming statement when the studio and control room in question contain no technical equipment whatsoever. But this was the situation that we faced upon arrival at the new Local TV channel in Manchester for the first time as we began to unload the van late on a Thurs...

Submitted by Neil Hutchins#

Published 01 September 2015

Back to the future

by Dick Hobbs Issue 103 - July 2015 I was recently talking to the estimable James Gilbert, who runs the equally estimable graphics and automation specialist Pixel Power. He said something that made me think. We were talking about scalability, and he said that it works in two directions. There is the sort of scalability that we all readily understan...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs.

Published 01 August 2015

An end-to-end solution

by Kevin Shaw Issue 102 - June 2015 BBC Studios and Post Production (BBC S&PP), a commercial subsidiary of the BBC, provides an end-to-end solution for what we refer to as post-post-production. Our services include preservation of media in our Front Porch DIVArchive and an end to end service that includes digitization of film and tape, quality cont...

Submitted by Kevin Shaw

Published 01 July 2015

Why fast production storage is just not enough

by Martin Bennett Issue 102 - June 2015 UHD, 4k, 6k, 8k¦the proliferation of high-resolution formats and files along with the growing number of skillsets that can collaborate on projects push storage bandwidth and capacities beyond their limits. If we just take a look at the potential storage requirements for a single 8K raw digital cinema format t...

Submitted by Martin Bennett

Published 01 July 2015

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

CALM - A crucial act to follow

by Martin Moore Issue 101 - May 2015 Sudden jumps in sound level between television programmes and commercials first came to the notice of legislators after a loud commercial interrupted a family dinner at the home of US House of Representatives member Anna Eshoo. The technical parameters adopted in the draft were based on an existing recommended p...

Submitted by Martin Moore

Published 01 June 2015

From VoD to Linear TV

by Nikos Kyriopopoulos Issue 100 - April 2015 Content owners, broadcasters, and operators worldwide typically provide a sizable library of VoD content and a limited offering of live/linear programming. This unbalanced ratio between VoD and linear TV offerings is historically shaped by two factors:- The cost associated with linear TV production, a b...

Submitted by Nikos Kyriopoulos

Published 01 May 2015

Big rush with little fuss at new Birmingham broadcaster

by Neil Hutchins Issue 99 - March 2015 Big Centre TV is the latest of the new wave of UK Local TV stations, having launched on 28th February. But behind the calm and successful appearance was a frenzied period of activity, as Ofcom had only confirmed their licence just three months earlier. To get from nothing to on-air in such a short timescale wa...

Submitted by Neil Hutchins#

Published 01 April 2015

Loudness normalisation for podcast streaming

by Jon Schorah Issue 99 - March 2015 For media companies steeped in traditional workflows, the exploding demand for over-the-top (OTT) content on many different devices is offering up significant new opportunities as well as challenges. If content owners can re-purpose their assets effectively, they can reach existing and new audiences through chan...

Submitted by Jon Schorah

Published 01 April 2015

Venice live productions tools go to the consumer

by Tim Felstead Issue 98 - February 2015 The objective of most studio production is to cost effectively create live or as live television to which audiences will be drawn. During the process of creation, recording into media servers can either be a separate process used only for immediate replay, or can be part of a media workflow serving multiple...

Submitted by Tim Felstead

Published 01 March 2015

Studio furniture at the cutting edge

by Graham Buchanan Issue 97 - January 2015 Custom Consoles was established in 1996 to meet the market demand for efficient and robust studio furniture at accountant-friendly prices. That may sound trite but we were working in SI roles ourselves and knew from direct experience how difficult it was to commission third-party desks built to the high st...

Submitted by Graham Buchanan

Published 01 February 2015