The requirement for a wide dynamic range to be provided economically is usually met by what is loosely called gamma, which is a non-linear transfer function having numerous drawbacks. However, there is an alternative form of what might loosely be called gamma, which is floating point.
In modern consumer electronics history, every new year begins with an early January Consumer Electronics Show, followed by the April NAB Show, both in Las Vegas. Significant new home and broadcast video and audio technologies are often rolled out at both shows, targeted for near-opposite markets wanting to enjoy or produce lots of TV. With no physical exhibits since CES 2020, manufacturers are struggling to impress virtual visitors and reporters with better and larger images with what they can see on their local computer screens.
Timing accuracy has been a fundamental component of broadcast infrastructures for as long as we’ve transmitted television pictures and sound. The time invariant nature of frame sampling still requires us to provide timing references with sub microsecond accuracy.
Lockdowns have accelerated some societal or technological trends that were already happening, such as remote production and home working in general.
For content providers (studios, content owners, content aggregators, or other content licensors) and their licensees (affiliates) operating in a multiplatform world - and pirates looking to obtain illegal access to the most popular content - it’s an unrelenting game of cat and mouse. While the internet has provided a cost-effective and easy way to deliver content to consumers, it also opens up new vulnerabilities that content pirates are eager to expose.
Allowing one actor to play two roles in the same scene has been possible, at some level, at least since 1961’s The Parent Trap, in which one of Hayley Mills’ arms disappears visibly behind a soft-edged split screen. To put it mildly, techniques have improved, but keeping the necessary technology out of the way of a director whose tastes run to very freeform moviemaking is a challenge in itself.
It’d be easy to think that when Bryce Bayer’s name appeared on the Kodak patent for single-sensor color cameras in 1976, it was a new idea. Sufficiently new to be patentable, perhaps, but actually the idea of covering a sensor with a pattern of primary-colored filters goes back to the earliest days of color photography.
It’s interesting to compare the quality that can be obtained using digital audio with legacy media such as the vinyl disk and magnetic tape.