KitPlus | Articles

Tips and Tricks to Giving Sci-Fi a New Look

From Terminator to Blade Runner, Alien, and even E.T., science fiction is a genre that will never fail to capture an audience’s imagination. It’s also a genre that encompasses so much more than just space crafts or time travel: frequently providing filmmakers with a platform from which to not only highlight social and political issues, but also exp...

Submitted by Mathieu Marano

Published 07 June 2018

Moving to an IP Platform Considerations

Audio transport methods have remained virtually unchanged in the broadcast industry for more than half a century. Common approaches to routing audio around large broadcast facilities have closely followed methodology employed in telco central offices, with the use of X-Y crossbar or crosspoint switching. This began to change with the arrival of sol...

Submitted by Stephen Brownsill

Published 07 June 2018

Listening to the needs of audio engineers

Monitoring SDI video content within an installation is and has always been straight forwards. If you have a monitor, and you can see the image correctly, all is well. This is not necessarily the case for metadata and especially not for audio. Assuming a SMPTE 352 payload packet is present on the SDI signal, this metadata determines how the video co...

Submitted by Alan Wheable

Published 07 June 2018

UHD 4k and HDR Picture Quality

And as good as it is, and as easy as it is to do, one of the raps on HDR is that some feel that it’s so bright and sharp that it looks odd, unnatural, almost harsh. It’s similar to when we did our first trials with 4K. The resolution was so high you could easily see, for example, even very minor blemishes. It’s perhaps an irony of new technology th...

Submitted by Tobias Kronenwett

Published 07 June 2018

The Ongoing Evolution of Subtitling Technology

As a subtitling technology developer and manufacturer we’re currently and frequently hearing remarks along the lines of us ‘having it easy’ at the moment. This has typically spun out from the fact that there hasn’t been any really significant and therefore demanding technology shifts in the industry that have affected us for a while. In the past we...

Submitted by Dean Wales

Published 07 June 2018

The Pitfalls of Online File Sharing and Sending Services

Easy-to-use, readily-accessible, and consumer-oriented, online file sharing platforms such as Dropbox and Google Drive are, to end users, a pleasant replacement to older file transfer methods such as FTP. FTP is complex to use and requires IT intervention to make almost any change. The pain associated with FTP, which was developed in the 1970s, is...

Submitted by Mike Nash

Published 07 June 2018

Delivering on the 4k Promise

It’s happened. Consumers are demanding 4K UHD content. They have the TVs, smartphones, tablets and other devices they need, and with much of Netflix and Amazon original content in 4K, as well as sports coverage from BT and Sky, consumers have tasted the future of content quality and are hungry for more. But broadcasters need not worry if their cust...

Submitted by Lorna Garrett

Published 07 June 2018

What is Next for Broadcast

The Broadcast industry is always chasing new technology. Some of that technology is further than it appears to be, and some of it is closer to adoption than it seems. In part, early adopted technology is accelerated because of customer or business demands, and in the case of IP based environments, the driving factors are speed, cost reduction, and...

Submitted by David Schleifer

Published 07 June 2018

State of the Nation

I sometimes think I pay too much to get my hair cut. On the most recent occasion I was trimmed, my hairdresser had just returned from a holiday in Hawaii. Where she thought she was going to die. She thought this because the state’s emergency alert system was triggered, sending messages across all available platforms, for 38 minutes, that a ballisti...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs - new

Published 26 March 2018

Technological advances in the broadcast industry

Since it is Omnitek’s 20th anniversary this year, I thought it would be interesting to look back over the technological advances in the broadcast industry over the last few decades and look at the similarities between then and now. When I started work in the Broadcast television industry in 1975, video was analogue (with only 3 of 4 formats to worr...

Submitted by Alan Wheable

Published 26 March 2018

Six steps for award winning sound design with Jungle Stud...

Few can argue that great sound design is one of the most important elements to any moving picture. Mute most horrors, and the difference in fear factor will be enormous. Visualize Jaws or Star Wars, and John Williams’s iconic score will instantly come to mind. As for me, my own personal passion for music first came as a teenager. I started out as a...

Submitted by chris turner

Published 26 March 2018

How IP-based KVM can improve workflow in broadcast contro...

One of the most significant shifts the broadcast industry has seen over recent years is the adoption of IP technology as a standard infrastructure across the entire broadcast workflow. IP provides a network suitable for routing audio, video and control around a broadcast facility and is providing the answers to many industry challenges. An increasi...

Submitted by John Halksworth

Published 26 March 2018

Out of the box: Sennheiser Ambeo VR microphone

The use of 360 video, especially on platforms like Facebook and YouTube is really starting to take off. Gone are the days when you needed to buy multiple GoPros and rigs in order to get something decent looking. Now players like Insta360 and even GoPro with their fusion 360 camera are providing single camera, high quality solutions, enabling the ma...

Submitted by Jon Pratchett

Published 26 March 2018

Tried and tested: DPA d:vice

KitPlus recently took delivery of an interesting piece of equipment for review. We like our iPhone gadgets here. For us, useful iPhone gadgets started when the Olloclip lens gave us a wide angle adaptor. This was a good start, finally evolving into a proper tool when Ziess produced the Exolens system for the 5,6 & 7 series iPhones. Around the same...

Submitted by KitPlus

Published 26 March 2018

VR and the importance of tracking

I would like to begin this article by clarifying what we at Shotoku mean when we talk about VR in live production. It’s not the production of immersive, 360 content where you need to wear a headset; we are talking about virtual studio (VS) and augmented reality (AR) work, such as placing graphics into a green screen environment or physical set. The...

Submitted by KitPlus

Published 26 March 2018