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Misinterpreting complexity for sophistication

i Professor Niklaus Wirth was one of the pioneers of computing as we know it. He was responsible for the Pascal language, a project he completed in 1970. Wirth became professor of computing studies at ETH-Zrich, and retired in 1999, although he remains active to this day. He grew ever-more despairing of the complexities of computing systems, which...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs - new

Published 01 August 2017

Mr MXF does Vegas

For quarter of a century I have been boarding planes to Las Vegas every April and the thing I look forward to most is the Sunday morning cycle from the Strip up to the top of Red Rock Canyon to look back down upon Vegas. From up there, you get a sense of perspective of how alien the city stuck in the desert really is. This year\'s NAB Show is likel...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin - new

Published 19 May 2017

Does the cloud have substance?

Just at the moment, every customer we talk to wants to move to the cloud. It is not just a techno-buzzword: people are really attracted by it. The idea of getting rid of all hardware and letting someone else worry about keeping machine rooms alive seems like a good plan. And they sometimes feel a bit deflated when we talk quietly and calmly about w...

Submitted by Ciaran Doran

Published 04 April 2017

Mr MXF thinks the future is made of components

The recent SMPTE IMF plugfest that was kindly hosted by Fox in Burbank gave the vendors, users and content owners a chance to discuss the fine details of the IMF standard and to get excited about where it will take the Post Production community. If you haven\'t heard of IMF then you have not been standing within 500ft of me for the past year. IMF i...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin

Published 15 February 2017

Dick finds the truth out there

The Oxford English Dictionary has determined that its word of the year for 2016 was "post-truth". We\'ll skip over the fact that it is, clearly, two words. Post-truth is, according to the world\'s best lexicographers, "an adjective defined as \'relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opi...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs.

Published 15 February 2017

Mr MXF thinks the future is bright

I have had the good fortune to spend some time with students at Southampton Solent, The University of Surrey, Ravensbourne and Godalming College in the last few weeks. Although student numbers are down on the technology courses, enthusiasm is high and the passion for the broadcast and media industry is evident in the eyes of the stars of tomorrow....

Submitted by Bruce Devlin

Published 13 January 2017

Trends in IP based broadcast

The momentum behind moving media operations to IP-based environments is unstoppable and to stay ahead of the competition these days, companies need to be migrating operations away from rigid, single-purpose components and towards software-based common computing resources. The good news is a well-architected IP-based production facility is now able...

Submitted by Glodina Lostanlen

Published 13 January 2017

Rethinking standards in the media world

It\'s actually a more difficult question than you think. When I ask the majority of engineers this question, I will get a technical answer. It will be something like "to be sure we meet the specification\" or "to be sure we don\'t put bad signals on air\" or "so that I don\'t get fired for getting loudness wrong\" The reality of course is that moni...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin

Published 07 December 2016

The importance of a low noise floor

The Noise Floor of a piece of T&M equipment is the inherent noise (or intrinsic jitter) introduced by the equipment itself. The level of inherent noise affects the accuracy and repeatability of jitter measurements that can be made, especially when measuring low levels of jitter. With the permitted 100KHz jitter on a 12G-SDI signal being only 0.3UI,...

Submitted by Alan Wheable

Published 07 December 2016

Taking a hybrid approach to the SDI/IP transistion

Broadcasters are not newcomers to technological transitions. As an industry, we\'ve survived analogue to digital, baseband to file-based workflows, SDTV to HDTV and now 4KUHD resolution, not to mention weathering a barrage of new compression formats. Today, we\'re facing one of the most dramatic transformations we\'ve ever undergone: SDI to IP. Unl...

Submitted by Matthew Coleman

Published 07 December 2016

Dick puts it all together

Many of you will be reading this as you prepare for IBC. Some may even be reading it on the train/plane/ship to Amsterdam. I want to take a couple of minutes of your time to look at a last minute addition to IBC. It concerns IP, but trust me: this is good news so please do not stop reading just yet. For very, very many years we have connected video...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs.

Published 26 September 2016

Filming in 4k in not just about the camera

Filming in 4K is not just about the camera. The whole workflow and supply chain needs to be considered. A BNC cable that you have used for the last few years has happily coped with 1.5G HD-SDI, now we are wanting twice the data rate. Camera Corps asked Polecam to help with its supply of cameras to the Champions of Hockey Games at the Olympic Hockey...

Submitted by Steffan Hewitt

Published 26 September 2016

Realising the ideal

On 26 July 1916 there was a public meeting in New York. It was called by a group led by Charles Francis Jenkins (and more on him in a moment). But the guest speaker was Henry D Hubbard, at the time the secretary of the US National Bureau of Standards. This is some of what he said: "Interchangeability of parts is an important principle of standardis...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs.

Published 24 August 2016

The future of timing and timecode

It is SMPTE\'s 100th anniversary! I hope that all readers have had a chance to view the Centennial Video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN2yYrEFMFQ) and to contemplate that 100 years ago we were in the dawn of the cinema era, where different equipment used different frame rates, different sprocket sizes, different frame sizes and the concept of d...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin

Published 24 August 2016

Test and measurement in a multiformat world

The evolution of television technology since the days of 525-line and 625-line standard definition has left a large legacy of standards which modern broadcast systems now have to recognise and process. In today's video and audio business, creatives and technical staff have to be ready to handle a multiplicity of signal types. In its standard form,...

Submitted by Kevin Salvidge

Published 24 August 2016