Articles

Articles, opinion and reviews from the industry. It is free to add your own articles, just login / register and follow the links in your KitHub panel.

Articles by Bob Pank#

A LONG VIEW BACK AND FORWARD

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Peter Savage looks backwards and forwards to assess our industry, taking a uniquely long viewWell, here we are again. It’s the end of the year and with the usual party invitations means Christmas must really be upon us. So, in timely annual fashion, I have an opportunity to look back at 2012 and forward to 2013 for all things broadcast. A booming s...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 January 2013

Meeting standards in 3D

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It has been said that poor quality stereoscopic TV will ‘poison the water’ for everyone. This was because in the past 3D was made to quite poor and uncontrolled production and delivery standards. But since BSkyB’s “Technical Guidelines for Plano Stereoscopic 3D Programme Content” were published over two years ago programme makers have had specific...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 January 2013

3d Screens

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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

Loudness Monitoring: Complacent Wont Get You Compliant

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Stricter regulations across the globe, the worldwide need for standardized audio level loudness processing, the need for logging and graphing mixed with long-term records maintenance for compliance verification, and the convergence of SDI/IP and ASI technologies all make for a challenging time in the broadcast industry. Identical and obligatory com...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 December 2012

The cushion quotient

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I have just been to a conference organised by the Mobile Data Association. I was very grateful to the organisers for the invitation, as it is the sort of thing that appeals to me: some of the top analysts in the industry throwing out statistics and predictions. Of course, at this sort of conference you get a lot more about where we are than where w...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 December 2012

Issues in surround audio and new technologies to address...

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Issues in surround audio and new technologies to address them. Surround audio and the encoding technologies, such as Dolbys AC-3 used to transmit it, have introduced new issues in maintaining audio quality. At a time when skilled audio personnel are getting scarce and budgets are shrinking new technologies hold the key to delivering top quality aud...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 December 2012

Ubiquitous Cloud at IBC

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It was one of those IBCs that was more consolidation than innovation. There wasn’t any one product or technology that stood out as a game changer. There was more evidence of 4K being pushed as a more realistic alternative to 8K and more of the must-have 84-inch 4K TV screens. Well they do look fabulous but I still had to go and see NHK’s 85-inch SH...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 November 2012

Autocue Production Suite at BroadcastShow

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Autocue Production Suite at BroadcastShowThe Autocue Production Suite (APS) is a single, integrated system designed to replace traditional, individual broadcast devices. When combined with our newsroom, prompting and production applications, it offers a cost-effective end-to-end workflow solution. We’ve been working with BroadcastShow over the last...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 November 2012

The social geek

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Today I want to consider this Venn diagram. It has been widely circulated on the internet: it appears to have been created by the Californian producer and publisher Scott Beale in 2009. It is a laudable attempt to differentiate between nerds, geeks, dweebs and dorks. You may feel that, given all the other pressures on our busy lives, time spent det...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 November 2012

HOW AND WHEN TO DIVERSIFY YOUR BUSINESS

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In the first of two articles on diversification, Peter Savage offers advice on building your business by diversifying within your existing business and marketI had an interesting experience last week, and one which conveniently leads on to the subject of business diversification which is my topic for this month. Some of you might have seen that I h...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 November 2012

Zoom lenses and minicams

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Finding a quality tracking zoom lens for the minicams made for the likes of Toshiba/Iconix/Hitachi/Sony has been an uphill battle. The cameras have been made primarily for the medical imaging market for microscopes and endoscopes but adopted by the broadcast industry as a high end minicam. However lenses were always a problem. Fujinon made the TF r...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 November 2012

The semantic web made simple

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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

Understanding and Managing the Piracy Continuum

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Content owners, content distributors and security vendors have traditionally characterized digital “pirates” as a single malicious group with ill intentions. This, however, is seriously short-sighted because it is an overgeneralization that not only overshadows true consumer behavior, but results in misguided piracy mitigation tactics and missed re...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 November 2012

Streaming Part 2

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I thought it was about time that I gave you all a little update on some of the kit I have been using and testing of the past few months. So here are a couple of updates for you starting with:Matrox MC100This little beauty has been in my procession for about a year now. If you don't know it’s a little box that allows you to do things such as HD-SDI...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 November 2012

Wibbly Wobbly Waveforms

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The very first analytical electronic instrument, developed in the late 1890s, was the oscilloscope. This used a cathode ray tube (CRT) to paint a graph of voltage on the Y axis versus time on the X axis. Once television became a practical reality in the 1930s, the same instrument was applied to the video output from the camera and became the very u...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 November 2012