Core to any successful television production is the effective application of clear and precise communications. Camera operators, sound assistants, playout, slow-mo operators, and floor managers all need to hear direction from the production teams. Without comms, the production would soon degenerate into a chaotic cacophony of incoherent images and sounds.
In this second instalment of our extended article looking into the practical applications of SDI and IP we look at how SDI is naturally plug-and-play and works with well-defined formats whereas IP is dynamic and more versatile but requires greater thought in making it work reliably.
TV engineers are always busy behind the scenes, monitoring and maintaining technical quality to make the station and those in front of the cameras sound and look their best, and thinking of ways to make it better.
If there’s one thing the production community has learned during the pandemic, it’s that ensuring the safety of the crew on site or in the studio should always be first and foremost in people’s minds. The second takeaway is that sending less people on site and implementing more remote support is the new normal that the industry is, somewhat begrudgingly, coming to terms with.
Over the past year, as broadcasters and production companies have expended great effort to reconfigure their workflows and develop new ways of working amid strict safety protocols, so too have the manufacturers of the technology and systems they rely on.
SDI has been and continues to be a mature and stable standard for the distribution of video, audio and metadata in broadcast facilities. From its inception in 1989 to the modern quad-link 12G-SDI available today, it has stood the test of time and even with the advent of IP and Ethernet, it shows no sign of waning.
Several things are widely held to be true about HDR. Subjectively, it looks nice; most people instinctively like it. Also, it’s often described as being about higher brightness, and while that’s rather missing the point, it’s still very common to specify displays solely on the basis of their peak light output. More power is good, right?
The era of dominance by video codecs from the MPEG stable is ending as rivals, especially the Alliance for Open Media (AOMedia) comprising big internet technology companies such as Google, jostle for position.
