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Filmmaking is not usually a weekend pursuit, but a sufficiently clever script can make a wide-ranging story happen in a very contained space.
The Tokyo 2020 Olympics is giving Japan the perfect stage for showing off the quality of 8K broadcasting, even if the Games are a year late and muted in their impact by the lack of crowds and controversy over staging them at all at a time of a Covid-19 surge in the country. It is the chance for the country and especially its national broadcaster NHK, which has long championed the cause, to convince other countries that they should consider adopting this high resolution 4320 x7680 format despite its huge toll on bandwidth and storage.
For most of its history, film and TV work has, by any sane measure, been incredibly complicated. Photochemical film was a nightmare of precision engineering and process control. Digital alternatives, intended to make things cheaper and simpler, involve some of our highest-performance electronics.
The conversion of monochrome TV to color was quite a trick, but it came at a cost.
This has been a year in which we all—reporters, producers and station engineers—had to learn the basics of good lighting, particularly the three-point setup pioneered by famed lighting inventor Ross Lowell for in-home studios. However, lighting fixtures and kits in general got lighter and easier to use, even for large studio and ENG applications as well.
When composing and lighting scenes, DOP’s usually seek to maximize texture and perspective. The rationale is simple: We live in a world that is unmistakably three-dimensional, so DOPs seeking to faithfully represent the natural world exploit a range of ways to promote the three-dimensional illusion.
Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS) the host broadcaster for the Games was founded twenty years ago and has arguably gone through its hardest and most intense period of digital transformation for Tokyo 2020.
Aside from being the first Summer Olympics to be delayed a year due to a pandemic—shifting technical plans and causing strict work-arounds to comply with health restrictions—this year’s live coverage by NBCUniversal (NBCU) is noteworthy for its move to all-IP operations within the International Broadcast Center (IBC) onsite in Tokyo and for its use of the network’s extensive and disparately located resources to make the Games a success.
