Timing accuracy has been a fundamental component of broadcast infrastructures for as long as we’ve transmitted television pictures and sound. The time invariant nature of frame sampling still requires us to provide timing references with sub microsecond accuracy.
Dialogue is king in television. Let’s face it, you don’t watch an episode of your favorite police procedural or reality show just to listen to the sound design or the incidental music. But whether the content is scripted or unscripted, delivering intelligible dialogue can be a real challenge for the show’s mixer.
For the past year an international group of technology companies, funded by the European Union (EU), has been looking into the use of 5G technology to streamline live and studio production in the hopes of distributing more content to (and from) viewers faster and more efficiently. Due to the restrictions imposed because of the coronavirus, most of the work thus far has been completed remotely.
The film and TV business is a prominent producer of things that were once very expensive, but which have become much more affordable as developments overtook them. That’s never clearer than when browsing everyone’s favorite auction website, which has recently seen Spirit telecines, once seven figures, selling for less than the price of a good used car. For photochemistry enthusiasts, that’s exciting, though cooler heads might suspect a catch.
When televised sports events began to return after the initial coronavirus lockdown in 2020, U.S. broadcasters faced a dilemma. With no spectators in attendance, what do you do about the lack of crowd noise? This is the fascinating story of how a team of award-winning creative audio engineers set about manually re-creating the right atmosphere.
The need for synchronization rears its head in so many different endeavors that it has to be accepted as one of the great enabling technologies.
Still photo lenses find their way into film and TV work via many different routes and for many different reasons. It’s happened so much that the prices on some popular options have risen precipitously in recent years. Are there still good deals to be had?
Though mostly a publicity stunt, Major League Baseball’s Field of Dreams Game live telecast on August 12th proved to be a hit for everyone involved—including the Fox Sports team and production company Game Creek Video—tasked with putting it on.
