KitPlus | Articles

How to Automate HD

HD movies are on average more than three times larger in size than the equivalent SD movie. Naturally therefore, HD material requires more storage and longer to transfer from the archive/storage to the transmission path. Managing these increased file sizes and optimally controlling the bandwidth is one of the main challenges which need to be addres...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 May 2010

Modern Test Techniques for Digital Audio Broadcast System...

The move to digital systems in broadcast audio means that engineers and systems integrators have had to evolve new means of testing equipment. Simon Woollard, Applications Engineer for audio test and measurement manufacturer Prism Sound, discusses some of the issues faced by today’s broadcast engineers. The AimsIn terms of audio performance, the br...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 April 2010

3D home viewing

It seems the whole world is excited about the return of 3D to cinemas. Older sceptics said it wouldn’t last as it used to give them a headache. Sure, the old celluloid-based 3D delivery system had real problems and the production chain was slow and very expensive. This time is different, with rock-steady digital images in cinemas ensuring that the...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 April 2010

Eye to Eye: Acquisition and Production

Back in the days of the Audio Fair which annually graced London's Russell Hotel, my co-hack Frank Jones of Hi-Fi News put his head into the KEF Electronics demonstration room and bellowed the time-honoured question "What's new?"KEF was showing established products that year so its founder, the avuncular Raymond Cooke, responded with his own questio...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 2010

AVCHD and NXCAM

I’ll be honest – up until recently I had not been a big fan of AVCHD. It promised great things but, having hired out consumer AVCHD cameras for the last few years, we knew there were still a few hurdles for it jump over. For corporate customers, to just ‘plug and play’ in terms of simple playback was impossible – some form of software was always re...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 2010

Looking back, and forward to the next decade of media pro...

The year 2000 doesn’t seem that long ago – and what’s for certain is that as you get older ten years is a very short space of time. A decade is a long time in technology though. In 1999 most people didn’t have a mobile phone and weren’t even on the internet at home, painfully slow dial-up was the only option for most. A decade on, the internet is a...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 2010

Location test equipment

What to look for…. SizeRuggedFast switch on timeLight weightMultiple applications from one unitDaylight readable displayLong Battery lifeSound monitoring as well as videoMountings (when you need both hands!)A number of years ago Hamlet gave itself the impossible task of developing the world’s first 3G, HD and SD capable, video and audio measurement...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 February 2010

Robotic cameras on location

Television is such a natural extension of the human senses that I doubt if more than one viewer in a thousand gives much thought to the effort put into modern programme production. Much of the original push for creative freedom came from outside broadcast crews, initially using turret-mounted optics and later zoom lenses to obtain close-ups of dist...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 February 2010

Film Affect

As shooting on film for TV applications is increasingly being replaced with HD, there is a growing tendency for people to wish to apply film tools and methods to origination when using the electronic medium. However, unless aiming for a specific look that cannot be achieved any other way, it can prove more time consuming and costly to work this way...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 January 2010

12 Frequently Asked Questions About On-Camera Lighting

1. Why/when would someone use an on-camera light? The main purpose of an on-camera light is for “fill” light. Simply put, you are just trying to remove any shadows from your talent’s face to give them a nice clean natural look. If you use too much light, however, you will drown out your background and get no depth to the video. Also, in today’s’ ru...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 December 2009

Eye to Eye: Lighting and lighting control

In 1985 I visited the Paris HQ of France Regions 3 with Arthur Garratt, a freelance science broadcaster who worked mainly for BBC World Service. FR3 was one of the first European television networks to make full use of high-efficiency ENG and EFP. We learnt a lot and were able to offer one recommendation in return. Watching a news presentation by t...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 December 2009

New Light in the Forbidden City

IBC 2009’s Production Village was the venue for the launch of a revolutionary new lighting product, the Rotolight ‘Stealth Edition’ RL48 ring-light. Although the show had more than 48,000 visitors and over 1200 exhibitors, Rotolight was listed in the TV-Bay lighting category, featured in the IBC News and the ‘Eye Catcher’ technology report on Amste...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 December 2009

SATIS in a day

Aware that several French distributors had pulled out of this year's SIEL & SATIS, I chunnelled to Paris on day two of the October 20-22 show with minimal expectations. The small size of the Guide de Visite (20 pages A5) added to my misgivings but the event itself proved respectably large, crowded and buzzing. Nearly 280 companies occupied stands i...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 December 2009

A Guide to Testing IPTV: Technologies and Challenges Par...

Testing IPTV NetworksThe Technology LifecycleThe deployment of new technologies tends to follow a similar lifecycle that begins with early research, development and standardisation and ends with full deployment and service management. The lifecycle diagram illustrated in Figure 5 shows a number of different technologies moving through the design an...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 November 2009

Mercedes-Benz Worlds winning formula, Online Creative and...

I set up Online Creative in 1999 after a number of years of linear editing and five years of post working for German non-linear editing manufacturer, FAST, during the pioneering days of digital video. The early 90s were a very exciting time editing with non-linear for the first time, although I haven’t done a linear edit since!Online Creative has g...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 October 2009