Flexible Access is our way of responding to customer needs we see in the market. At a high level, it is about putting our customer experience first and foremost. In these uncertain times, our customers need to produce more stories, better.
Every decade has had a buzzword. Watch a 1950s educational movie and realize how dated the term “atomic” sounds now, and not only because the downsides of nuclear power have since become so painfully apparent. Since then, we’ve been sold technology marked “transistor,” “digital,” and now “AI,” although sometimes it’s not quite clear how key those things are to the success of a technology.
The peculiarities of the motion of planet Earth are responsible for much more than seasons and the midnight sun and it took a while before it was all figured out.
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.
