Most live remote outside broadcasts are thoroughly planned by producers and directors who are often too busy to consider potential equipment problems. Technology is an engineering responsibility. Engineers must be ready for any circumstances that threaten to take the show off-script or off-air, from dead wireless mic batteries to unexpected foul weather. In live TV, anything can happen and probably will, usually at the worst possible time.
Time base correction is an enabling technology that crops up everywhere; not just in broadcasting.
The last twenty years has seen a lot of film and TV hardware turn into software that runs on workstations and servers. With Apple’s move away from Intel, though, and several other recent attempts to popularize alternative designs, anyone looking at new equipment finds a field in flux.
As broadcast facilities and other organizations that use media to educate and inform continue to carefully make the move to video over IP, they currently face two main options, with a range of others in the wings. They may opt for a full SMPTE ST 2110 design that leverages uncompressed pristine quality video for higher profile productions or lightly compressed NDI networking, which brings with it less costs and easy access to an expanding ecosystem of compliant products and systems.
Due to the flexibility and virtually unlimited access of the Internet Protocol, manufacturers of broadcast and production equipment have for years provided customers with the remote ability, via an HTML 5 browser interface, to monitor and control hardware devices via a smart phone, tablet or laptop. Vendors have now begun to take that access one step further and have developed dedicated applications for mobile phones—which have been optimized for the reduced scale of a phone screen—that put this control in the palm of your hand.
“You need to be very predictable with the broadcast at all times. When I started doing this you had to be really careful with 5.1; there was no standardization,” he says. Indeed, for a long time, as broadcasters began to switch to HDTV across the U.S., it was not unusual for audio channels to be mixed up during transmission, or for audio processors to be incorrectly set or configured.
Progress inevitably comes with compromise. We can’t complain about the technology that’s brought us from hundred-kilo tube cameras to the 4K cellphones of today, but anyone who remembers the fuzzy old days of the 1990s might also remember a few things that we miss in 2021. Let’s examine a few.
At one time, it was traditional to complain about the things that science had promised us but failed to deliver. Now we actually have a jet pack that’s practical, or at least that lasts more than thirty seconds, we’re free to turn our attention to some other things that seem perpetually just around the corner.
