_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.
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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.
On October 27, 2020 The Federal Communications Commission issued an order to expand its captioning mandate for broadcasters to include audio description requirements for 40 designated market areas (DMAs) over the next four years. The move came after the Twenty-First Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act of 2010 (CVAA) directed stations in the top 60 DMAs to provide what it calls “described programming.”
IP networks are delivering outstanding success for broadcasters, both in terms of scalable functionality and flexibility. And the recent NMOS suite of specifications is improving integration and control, with IS-06 and IS-07 accelerating the process.
The effect of OTT-based delivery is wide-reaching, stretching all the way back to the original content production domain and creating new technical requirements and opportunities.
