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Articles by Bruce Devlin

Consumer of the shelf technology is coming


I had the privilege last week of sitting in a strategy session of the Digital Production Partnership where we were concerned with predicting the future. As Niels Bohr once famously said, "Predictions are really hard - especially when predicting the future". One of the attendees made a comment about camera technology and I instantly thought about th...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin
Published 15 March 2017

Mr MXF thinks the future is made of components


The recent SMPTE IMF plugfest that was kindly hosted by Fox in Burbank gave the vendors, users and content owners a chance to discuss the fine details of the IMF standard and to get excited about where it will take the Post Production community. If you haven\'t heard of IMF then you have not been standing within 500ft of me for the past year. IMF i...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin
Published 15 February 2017

Mr MXF thinks the future is bright


I have had the good fortune to spend some time with students at Southampton Solent, The University of Surrey, Ravensbourne and Godalming College in the last few weeks. Although student numbers are down on the technology courses, enthusiasm is high and the passion for the broadcast and media industry is evident in the eyes of the stars of tomorrow....

Submitted by Bruce Devlin
Published 13 January 2017

Rethinking standards in the media world


It\'s actually a more difficult question than you think. When I ask the majority of engineers this question, I will get a technical answer. It will be something like "to be sure we meet the specification\" or "to be sure we don\'t put bad signals on air\" or "so that I don\'t get fired for getting loudness wrong\" The reality of course is that moni...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin
Published 07 December 2016

Heading towards brightness regulations


I like IBC in the same way that I find NAB grating. Maybe I have been living in the UK for too long, but the bright morning Amsterdam sun breaking through clouds and reflecting off the canal while fit young things on bicycles pedal to college; snapchatting with their friends and avoiding collisions with practised ease has a certain charm. You just...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin
Published 10 November 2016

Live streams versus srowing files


So, what is the difference between a stream and a file? It may seem like a dumb and obvious question, but it's crucial in the design of many file based workflows and the applications that drive them. Let's start with the basic and obvious answer. "You can random access a file but you sequentially process a stream". This used to be important back in...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin
Published 26 September 2016

The future of timing and timecode


It is SMPTE\'s 100th anniversary! I hope that all readers have had a chance to view the Centennial Video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN2yYrEFMFQ) and to contemplate that 100 years ago we were in the dawn of the cinema era, where different equipment used different frame rates, different sprocket sizes, different frame sizes and the concept of d...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin
Published 24 August 2016

OTT - is it over the top or business as usual


OTT is a term that is casually bandied about as though everyone knows what it is, but is there really a single definition? Hopefully this little guide will have you speaking the jargon like a native!OTT stands for Over The Top. If you're into linguistics, then the first question that comes to mind is "What are A & B in the sentence: A is going over...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin
Published 22 July 2016

Content Security in the CLoud


Security is a difficult topic. There is no such thing a generic security. You always secure yourself against specific threats and hope the solution is generic enough to cover other similar classes of threat. For example - placing an expensive lock on the front door of your house prevents the specific threat of gaining access by using the door handl...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin
Published 14 June 2016

Class: Multi - Channel Audio


by Bruce Devlin Issue 113 - May 2016 If you\'re given a media file and it has 16 channels of audio then life can quickly become the opposite of boring, especially if it has to go to air quickly and the supplier is new. Put simply there are many ways in which the different channels can be laid out in the file, but there isn\'t a single overall stand...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin
Published 13 May 2016

Fact from Fiction - IP transport


by Bruce Devlin Issue 112 - April 2016 Wandering around the endless corridors of NAB in 2016, you\'ll hear much more talk of IP transport than in previous years. If you\'re lucky then you\'ll see a few GUIs that might show Software Defined Network (SDN) routings or channel allocations. You might see a GUI that shows the flows of essence, grains, pa...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin
Published 25 April 2016

Object Audio - whats all the noise about


We all know that getting the audio right makes the pictures better. Anyone who has seen a movie created for Object Audio like Dolby Atmos will know that there is something special about it. To figure out what that is, let's rewind a little and see why we might need it. Remember the good old days of mono audio on TV? Mono audio gives a single channe...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin
Published 01 April 2016

Troubleshooting - Top Tips to Make Files Work


by Bruce Devlin Issue 110 - February 2016 Troubleshooting - Top Tips to Make Files WorkSo, you built yourself the world's most perfect, IT-based file workflow and you have a state-of-the-art media facility? Congratulations, have a beer, but at some point it's going to go wrong!Given that fewer than 50% of support cases in any company that I have wo...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin
Published 16 March 2016

UHD HDR HFR WCG Made for each other, or too much too soo...


by Bruce Devlin Issue 108 - December 2015 The majority of LCD screens rolling out of the huge factories are now 4K-ready. They have a lot of pixels, and were not going to be chopping them up with a hacksaw to make small screens in a hurry. Even cheap mobile phones have more pixels than the big TV set that hangs on the wall of the front room in my h...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin
Published 15 December 2015

Why you might regret automating QC workflows


by Bruce Devlin Issue 107 - November 2015 In todays electronic media environment, broadcasters and content owners live and die according to the quality and versatility of their media assets. Not only do consumers expect the best quality viewing experience, but they also expect that viewing experience to be possible on the widest range of devices, a...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin
Published 01 December 2015