KitPlus | Articles

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

Does 2D to 3D really work?

It is widely said that 3D has to be done well as, if it’s not, then it actually can hurt the viewer and give 3D a bad name. Certainly there have been big efforts to make good 3D, with Sky going to great lengths to ensure they set a high standard. Unlike the old 3D celluloid films, digital 3D can be a completely stable medium; it does not degrade wi...

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

Meet Steadicam

1) What is Steadicam?Steadicam is a body-worn camera support systems that isolates the movement of the camera from that of the operator and allows the camera to travel with great freedom over almost any terrain without resorting to conventional track and dolly techniques. Invented by Garrett Brown, the first model was produced in 1976 primarily for...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 December 2010

AF101 a first look

IBC saw the first working prototypes of the AF100 being shown to the public. Barry Green (some of you will be familiar with Barry from the US Forum DVXUSER) had the pleasure of working with the pre-production AF101 while at IBC. Incidentally the AF100 & AF101 are the same basic camera for different markets, all of them are NTSC/PAL switchable. At t...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 November 2010

Deja Vu

3D was everywhere at IBC with a choice of new products on offer for all parts of production. This makes 3D far more accessible as well as easier to produce. It was also clear that interested visitors to the show were no longer swayed by the initial ‘wow’ factor and were trying to see the more important things – notably the economic realities. In th...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 November 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

Redefining Mobile, High Definition Recording With Cinedec...

IBC 2010 saw the official European launch of Cinedeck EXTREME v2.0, an ultra-portable cinema grade integrated High Definition monitoring, recording and playback device that has already won numerous awards and accolades since making its first public appearance at this year’s NAB Convention in Las Vegas. Cinedeck EXTREME v2.0 incorporates a number of...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 November 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

Rotolight Interview Kit Review

This month we decide to surprise Jim in his cage and see if we could illuminate him with the new Rotolight Interview Kit. Highly portable and extremely user friendly, Jim was beaming all over – pardon the pun. The Rotolight has already been around for a while with many cheaper copies trying to emulate the brand. This new package is good. It’s a com...

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

Archiving in a Multiplatform Environment

There was a time when broadcasters and media companies worried only about one version of content, destined for one distribution platform. Now, however, the increasing volume, number of versions, and growing complexity of digital media assets has made the management and storage of content a much more challenging undertaking. Media companies today mu...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 October 2010

Digital Archiving in Media Workflows

Why is there a growing need for digital archiving in the broadcast and post-production industry?Across all segments of the media and entertainment industry, the past decade has seen a fundamental transformation, where virtually the entire industry moved from tape or film to digital media. This change required investing in digital equipment and proc...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 October 2010

Shared Storage Comes of Age

Increasingly stored in digital form, together with related metadata, digital media is in the process of transforming both the technology and process of production throughout the broadcast and post production industries. But as every action precipitates a reaction, every advancement precipitates its own particular challenges. The challenges with dig...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 October 2010

Eye to Eye: Storage and archiving

In 1986 or thereabouts, I visited the London headquarters of a stripling company named Lightworks which had developed an innovative and relatively low-cost video editor based around a 1 gigabyte hard-disk drive. The drive was the size of a standard British housebrick and, bought in at £1,000, was considered mightily good value. A typical 1,500 giga...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 October 2010