KitPlus | Articles

Changing the art of Chroma Key

ChromaKey technology has been used for decades in TV and film studios to composite images or footage into a shot using green and blue screen backdrops. Although used on multi-million dollar movies, such as AVATAR and used all around the world in News rooms, conventional ‘Fabric’ ChromaKey technology requires Kilowatts of lighting, hours of setup ti...

Submitted by Rod Aaron Gammons

Published 01 June 2013

The Cloud, a big hit at NAB with Bob Pank

NAB 2013 will go down in history as the event where the broadcast industry took to the Cloud in a big way. Perhaps it was the number of smaller companies and start-ups that have been successfully operating cloud services for a year or more that persuaded the big names to join in but, more likely, these moves have been in the pipeline for a while. T...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 June 2013

Learning to love IT with Dick Hobbs

There are three clearly defined levels of activity at NAB. There is the buzz which someone is trying to get going, there is the stuff which people are actually trying to buy, and there is the latest collection of buzzwords and catchphrases which provide endless entertainment for those with a love of language. This year, for instance, we were all to...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 June 2013

Jon Pratchett reviews the Matrox VS4 Capture Card

On many occasions it has been necessary to record ISO footage from the camera's on a multi camera live streaming job, normally just so we have that backup and can do any re-edits if needed. However it relies on either the camera operator having to remember to load the camera with storage media and then of course HIT RECORD!! In the heat of a live e...

Submitted by Jon Pratchett

Published 01 May 2013

Cost effective transport of video over long distances

The transportation of live video and audio feeds over the internet has become a widely accepted technique. This has led to a bewildering number of products and techniques becoming available from simple PC plug in cards to very sophisticated encoder / decoder sets. Of course each of these has its own place in the market, as there can be no one size...

Submitted by John Golding

Published 01 May 2013

Live from the supermarket car park

What’s Cooking? is the new daily daytime TV show beamed from a temporary studio in the car park of a supermarket. As chefs prepare dishes live on air, a roving camera crew relays pictures from the aisles of the shop while Channel 4 viewers interact with the presenters and cooks via social media. Produced by Superhero TV, technical integration and i...

Submitted by Kieron Seth#

Published 01 May 2013

Live production for multi-platform delivery

by Steve Burgess, technical director, Megahertz Broadcast SystemsLive event television, whether it is sport or music and entertainment, has always made serious demands of production technology. At Megahertz Broadcast Systems we have been building outside broadcast trucks for some of the world’s most demanding customers, for more than 25 years, so w...

Submitted by Steve Burgess

Published 01 April 2013

An unexpected debate

At the end of last year I went to a screening of The Hobbit, or rather the first volume of The Hobbit, as An Unexpected Journey is the first part of a trilogy. I say I went to a “screening” not because that is the way that we trendy media types talk, but because it was a private showing to some of the great and good of the industry in the UK, organ...

Submitted by Robert Howard

Published 01 March 2013

Bob Pank looks at Editing and the Cloud

By Bob PankHistorically video editing has been one of those operations shaped by technology. For decades it depended on VTRs to play and record. You had to go to an edit room, usually darkened and with loads of buttons and winking lights, to get your edit done by a video editor. It was not cheap. Then, with video stored on computer discs, editing w...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 February 2013

The joy of field editing

In the world of remote working, cloud storage and instant news, the ability to edit on location at a shoot has become a pre-requisite. Only a few years ago, field editing used to be merely about the quick rough cut, the assembly of proxy files or simply the ingest of media in an edit-friendly format. These days, however, energy efficient, high perf...

Submitted by Kieron Seth#

Published 01 February 2013

Strictly successful

It has been hard not to spend most of my time thinking about the BBC recently. While it may be the very epitome of the public service broadcasting ethos, it is bizarre to watch one BBC programme unleash invective on another BBC programme, lashing people who probably buy each other coffee on a daily basis. How did John Humphreys feel going to work t...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 January 2013

3D for Cinema, ProAV and Events

Over more than a century of motion picture presentations there have been periods when 3D has emerged, and each time interest has faded away. The latest 3D wave goes back to the advent of digital technology for cinemas. Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI) was formed in 2002 and delivered its first DCI Specification in 2005, when Doremi was well ahead w...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 January 2013

3d Screens

Often exhibitions such as IBC and NAB can be summed up as progressive – slightly better products but nothing really new. Sometimes there is a breakthrough such as Ampex’s introduction of the VTR in 1956. The early years of digital production and post tools were rich in totally new things. At the time I worked at Quantel and seeing inventions like P...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 December 2012

Monitoring: Cutting the Wires

Teradek began the wireless monitoring revolution at last year's NAB show. Its Cube wireless encoders are no bigger than a pack of playing cards. They compress a camcorder's video feed into an H.264 signal for transmission to either a WiFi-enabled laptop, iPad or tablet or to a Cube decoder. Straight-away live, remote and affordable monitoring was b...

Submitted by Kieron Seth#

Published 01 December 2012

The semantic web made simple

There is a new term creeping in to discussions in the broadcasting business, and particularly around those involved in asset management and research projects. The term is “semantic web” and, I suspect, there are a lot of people who are neither completely sure they know what it means, nor trust its relevance in our business. I aim to provide some si...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 November 2012