IP and COTS infrastructure designs are giving us the opportunity to think about broadcast systems in an entirely different manner. Although broadcast engineers have been designing studio facilities to be flexible from the earliest days of television, the addition of IP and COTS takes this to a new level allowing us to continually reallocate infrastructure components to make the best use of expensive resource.
We live in fascinating times: increasingly, we live in the era of cloud-based broadcast operations.
Moving to IP is allowing broadcasters to explore new working practices and mindsets. Esports has grown from IT disciplines and is moving to broadcast and has the potential to show new methods of working.
Previously a basic record/play system using a hard drive was considered. This relied on a table linking time codes in the recording with physical addresses so that the drive would access audio data blocks in the right sequence slightly ahead of when they were needed. In that way a time base corrector could present the samples in an unbroken sequence at the correct sampling rate to a DAC. The mechanical timescale of a legacy medium such as tape or film has been replaced by a logical timescale.
Building optimized systems that scale to meet peak demand delivers broadcast facilities that are orders of magnitude more efficient than their static predecessors. In part 2 of this series, we investigate how this can be achieved.
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.
IP is delivering unprecedented flexibility and scalability for broadcasters. But there is a price to pay for these benefits, namely, the complexity of the system increases significantly as we add more video and audio over IP.
