Without intercom, a live broadcast production would soon degenerate into chaos. A whole industry has been built on the protocols intercom users have adopted and everybody involved in the production must be able to hear the director’s instructions, clearly and concisely.
There is a school of thought that suggests increasing the brightness through the contrast control on a television will give a higher dynamic range. However, this doesn’t necessarily increase the contrast ratio. Quantization noise is the enemy of dynamic range and increasing brightness in a system with a low bit depth makes quantizing banding obvious. When banding occurs, the brightness must be turned down to remove it or, the bit depth should be increased.
HDR is taking the broadcasting world by storm. The combination of a greater dynamic range and wider color gamut is delivering images that truly bring the immersive experience to home viewers. Vibrant colors and detailed specular highlights build a kind of realism into broadcast productions that our predecessors could only ever have dreamed of.
We’ve heard the hype, and I admit I’ve contributed my fair share. The iPhone is able to capture impressively sharp, high-resolution images that stand up to critical examination even when magnified and viewed on a 20-meter cinema screen. The iPhone’s onboard software compensates for the most egregious image defects, applying on-the-fly color correction, noise reduction, and broad optical compensation that eliminates chromatic aberrations, barrel distortion, and a host of other things, from what is, after all, an exceedingly modest lens.
A group of international technology vendors and broadcasters is working on developing and implementing Artificial Intelligence (AI) standards to improve video coding. Calling itself MPAI (Moving Picture, Audio and Data Coding by Artificial Intelligence) they believe that machine learning can improve efficiency of the existing Enhanced Video Coding standard by about 25 percent.
Video, audio and metadata monitoring in the IP domain requires different parameter checking than is typically available from the mainstream monitoring tools found in IT. The contents of the data payload are less predictable and packet distribution more tightly defined leading to the need to use specialist media stream centric monitoring tools.
Speculative fiction is something that’s often hovered on the borders of drama, fantasy and sci-fi, and one of the huge benefits of the streaming media revolution is that much more of the genre has found a way in front of both a camera and a large audience.
The year 2020 was a big milestone for the broadcast industry. All major events were cancelled, but media operations still needed to produce shows and events even during the crisis. More than ever, broadcasters turned to the remote production and IP production; in fact, according to Omdia, 37% of media enterprises are now set to embrace remote production on IP.