The subjects of timing, synchronizing and broadcasting are inseparable and in this new series John Watkinson will look at the fundamentals of timing, areas in which fundamental progress was made, how we got where we are and where we might be going.
There aren’t many positions in the film industry which have the prerequisite of spending an hour sunken in the waters off San Diego in a classic diving suit with a blacked-out helmet. To be fair, it wasn’t so much the film industry that made Pete Romano do that; it was the U. S. Navy, who were interested in finding out if prospective dive school candidates could handle confinement.
PTP - as a precise network timing technology has been available for nearly two decades. It is already widely used in Telecommunication networks, Finance and Trading platforms, substation automation networks and many more industries. Every industry has its own demands such as target accuracy on the end nodes, or whether it should be used locally or via wide area connections. Furthermore, there is often the question of whether existing network components should be re-used or if they will be replaced.
Television is still a niche industry, but nonetheless, one of the most powerful story telling mediums in existence. Whether reporting news events, delivering educational seminars, or product reviews, television still outperforms all other mediums in terms of its ability to communicate to mass audiences.
Spending a few weeks in southern Italy is a popular idea. For cinematographer Angus Hudson, BSC, an opportunity to soak up the Puglian sun would come in the form of The Life Ahead (in Italian, La vita davanti a sé), a film directed by Edoardo Ponti and starring Sophia Loren in her first role since 2010.
With the pandemic’s alarming numbers now decreasing, news anchors have carefully begun reporting from the studio again, albeit in separate parts of the building and socially distanced. However, the IP-enabled technology and remote workflows developed by equipment vendors across the industry during the worst of it have endured and will for some time. These new tools allow reporters, producers and technicians to work from home by streamlining the process of producing a newscast.
Floating-point notation and gamma are both techniques that trade precision for dynamic range. However they differ fundamentally. Gamma is a non-linear function whereas floating point remains linear. Any mathematical manipulations carried out on floating-point encoded data will be correct whereas manipulations of gamma-encoded luma cannot be. Gamma was intended to linearize a cathode ray tube whereas floating point encoding was designed from the outset for mathematical manipulation.
Possibly one of the last features to wrap before the global pandemic effectively shut down production was Fatman, a dark action comedy directed by Eshom and Ian Nelms and starring Mel Gibson as the kind of Santa Claus who would probably exist in 2020 if one existed at all.