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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.
TV stations are great places to work, and talented technical people like the stability. The longer they work at a station, the more difficult they are to replace when they retire.
After years of trial and error designed to reduce operating cost and (more recently) keep crews safely distanced, remote production has found its niche in live production and will remain the de facto method for producing events over a distributed network infrastructure. However, a big hurdle left to overcome for successful deployment of such networked workflows is latency. In live production, video latency refers to the amount of time it takes for a single frame of video to transfer from the camera to a processing location (on premise or in the cloud) and back to the display—wherever that display might be.
As one of the last industry events to be held in person last year, the HPA Tech Retreat is going virtual for this year’s gathering of an elite group of broadcasters, production, and post-production professionals. The Hollywood Professional Association (HPA) holds this event every year and it has become one of the most anticipated networking and technology showcase events of the entire calendar.
_460_345.png "Stephen Whiting, director for Newsy, running the show from his home using Viz Mosart newsroom automation software.")
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.
A number of new production facilities are now being designed and built around the ST 2110 standard for video over IP, but the cost has been prohibitive for many others. The engineers at Diversified Systems Inc. (DSI), a veteran systems integrator, were challenged by this when it came to a recent project to add cameras to the recording studios of New York City’s renown Power Station.
Our first Essential Insights is a set of three video episodes in which we discuss transitioning to IP with industry experts. We explore the fundamental challenges during the planning stage. The decisions that need to be made, and the long-term thinking needed to maintain flexibility, scalability and resilience.
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.
