KitPlus | Articles

Hacking Hell

There was a really scary story in the news a week or two ago. In the words of Yves Bigot, director-general of TV5 Monde, "we were a couple of hours from having the whole station gone for good". What happened to this highly respected broadcaster was that malicious hackers set out to destroy the network\'s systems. That has to be an alarm call for al...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs.

Published 07 December 2016

IBC - how was it you

IBC 2016 was very much a launching show, with more new products and updates than in many recent IBC\'s or NAB\'s. With so many of these announcements directly in the remit of a cameraman, blink and you\'d miss the next big thing in camera and lenses news. With this in mind, this review focuses on camera and lenses only. One consistent factor among...

Submitted by Duncan Payne

Published 10 November 2016

Yonsei Church Preaches to the Masses

Yonsei Central Baptist Church in Seoul is a thriving church community on a massive scale. Having outgrown several previous buildings, the church purchased a 9.8 acre plot of land in order to build a church big enough to house its congregation, which amounts to hundreds of thousands of members. The church building itself covers 427,000 square feet....

Submitted by KitPlus

Published 25 August 2016

The FAQs on automated quality assurance

The transition from tape-based to file-based video and audio recording allowed a completely new approach to the business of checking that programmes and interstitials conform to broad-cast industry standards prior to transmission. The Vidcheck team designed the world\'s first au-tomated broadcast quality control product. We have been working on fil...

Submitted by Thomas Dove

Published 25 August 2016

Up in the air with Dick

In the last issue of this magazine was a very interesting article by Lee Sheppard of SGL, talking about the pros and cons of archiving in the cloud. While there is a lot of conversation about cloud storage, its pluses and minuses, I have to confess to still being slightly confused about the practicalities and economics of it. So armed only with Goo...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs.

Published 22 July 2016

The modern day media manager

As industry trends move towards all file-based workflows from production to post production, there are several concepts and traditional industry practices that need to be modified and adapted for the transition. This spans throughout the entire production process in order to ensure that all deliverables are being recorded, edited and stored within...

Submitted by Jonathan Aroesty

Published 22 July 2016

Do you have a MAM solution

One of the top questions I get asked at trade shows is, "Do you have a MAM solution?"Well, yes. Of course. It's what we do; but thank you for asking. What you should be asking is, "What differentiates your MAM solution from the rest of the MAM pack?"Now we have something to talk about. For a lot of MAM solutions out there, workflows are designed -...

Submitted by Paul Wilkins

Published 22 July 2016

News production with an IP workflow

Broadcast workflow used to be all about tapes. Shooting on tapes, putting tapes into machines, copying from one tape to another, using very expensive gear and costly workflows, with scarce resources and high skill levels. But as broadcast technology evolved tape was mostly replaced by hard drives, and the revolution in editing made it possible to w...

Submitted by Helge Hoibraaten

Published 22 July 2016

The Pros and Cons of Archiving in the Cloud

Archiving content in the cloud provides a number of key benefits. However, many media companies and content owners are still hesitant to store their assets that way due to content security implications and cost concerns. So what are the pros and cons of storing content in the cloud?There are a number of key drivers including: access to content from...

Submitted by Lee Sheppard

Published 14 June 2016

Meeting the Challenges of Media Assett Management

It's been 20 years since Microsoft founder Bill Gates uttered the words "content is king,\" and never has that statement been more true in media production environments. And yet, ask producers in any high-pressure broadcast operation to name their biggest challenges, and you can bet that managing video assets - finding them, accessing them, and usi...

Submitted by Dave Clack

Published 14 June 2016

Recreating a Masterpiece

by Stuart Harris Issue 112 - April 2016 Tell us a bit about yourself Stuart. At the moment I am the acting head of cinematography here at the National Film and Television School. I have been a cinematographer from around 1980 and I have done commercials, music videos, feature films, sort of everything really. I think a creative career was what I wa...

Submitted by Stuart Harris

Published 25 April 2016

A virtual world but call it cloud if you must

I prefer not to use the word "cloud". It's useful for eight points in Scrabble, but in broadcasting, if we can still call it that, what you're really describing is storing data on someone else's computer or, on an industrial scale, a whole lot of someone else's computers (data centres). Cloud is just a convenient way of saying "shedload of capacity...

Submitted by Jan Weigner

Published 01 April 2016

Focus Technology in 2016 and Beyond

by Lisa J. Whelan Issue 110 - February 2016 With the advance of larger camera sensors, faster lenses and complex lighting systems, the role of the 1st AC (Assistant Camera) is more demanding than ever. Fortunately, the world of focus technology is developing new and innovative ways to step up and meet these demands head-on. Out of FocusHistorically...

Submitted by Lisa J Whelan

Published 16 March 2016

Media Asset Data Models in MAM Systems An Evolutionary V...

by Kevin Savina Issue 109 - January 2016 As I was working on a presentation I gave on the data models MAM systems are built upon, I realized that looking at the evolution of these data models was a nice way of explaining them. It only made sense to share it with a wider audience. By illustrating how media assets are tracked and catalogued within a...

Submitted by Kevin Savina

Published 21 January 2016

Post Production Companies Protection

by Leighton Chenery Issue 109 - January 2016 The UK Post and VFX industry has some of the most skilled and creative talent in the World attracting work from all over the globe including many of the biggest movies from the US. We all know, however, that problems are not a rarity and whilst nobody might be to blame, you may end up having to make a di...

Submitted by Leighton Chenery

Published 21 January 2016