Understand how to choose the optimal remote production strategy for your workflow. Latency, circuit data capacity, and quality of service all influence the best strategy decisions when figuring out where to install cameras, production switchers, microphones and sound consoles.
Many people and cultures celebrate special New Year dates. Organizations designate fiscal years. Broadcasters traditionally mark their new technology year mid-April, at annual NAB Shows. Old habits die hard.
There are many types of codecs, all used for specific purposes to reduce file sizes and make them easier to distribute down a limited bandwidth pipe. Lossy compression and Lossless compression are the two most common categories of data compression used to reduce the size of data without significant loss of information.
As company mergers, acquisitions and extensive rights management agreements have become part of the new media landscape, it has created large multi-national conglomerates that span the globe. This in turn has revealed the need for IT networking technology and complex software orchestration that tie all of the disparate locations together and increase productivity across the company.
TV stations are great places to work, and talented technical people like the stability. The longer they work at a station, the more difficult they are to replace when they retire.
After years of trial and error designed to reduce operating cost and (more recently) keep crews safely distanced, remote production has found its niche in live production and will remain the de facto method for producing events over a distributed network infrastructure. However, a big hurdle left to overcome for successful deployment of such networked workflows is latency. In live production, video latency refers to the amount of time it takes for a single frame of video to transfer from the camera to a processing location (on premise or in the cloud) and back to the display—wherever that display might be.
As one of the last industry events to be held in person last year, the HPA Tech Retreat is going virtual for this year’s gathering of an elite group of broadcasters, production, and post-production professionals. The Hollywood Professional Association (HPA) holds this event every year and it has become one of the most anticipated networking and technology showcase events of the entire calendar.
_460_345.png "Stephen Whiting, director for Newsy, running the show from his home using Viz Mosart newsroom automation software.")
With the pandemic’s alarming numbers now decreasing, news anchors have carefully begun reporting from the studio again, albeit in separate parts of the building and socially distanced. However, the IP-enabled technology and remote workflows developed by equipment vendors across the industry during the worst of it have endured and will for some time. These new tools allow reporters, producers and technicians to work from home by streamlining the process of producing a newscast.
The #1 rule of live broadcasting is that things tend to fail at the worst possible time. The greater the ratings, the more likely something highly unlikely but mission-critical will fail, broadcast RF and wireless communication systems included. Count on it.