The concept of working from home was trending long before public health issues caused most of us to contribute remotely, but the past year has seen an acceleration no one could have predicted. What those in the media industry quickly learned is that it’s not that easy to take your work home with you.
There is a school of thought that suggests increasing the brightness through the contrast control on a television will give a higher dynamic range. However, this doesn’t necessarily increase the contrast ratio. Quantization noise is the enemy of dynamic range and increasing brightness in a system with a low bit depth makes quantizing banding obvious. When banding occurs, the brightness must be turned down to remove it or, the bit depth should be increased.
Never trust the adhesive holding tape to the hub of a 40 year-old ¾-inch videocassette.
HDR is taking the broadcasting world by storm. The combination of a greater dynamic range and wider color gamut is delivering images that truly bring the immersive experience to home viewers. Vibrant colors and detailed specular highlights build a kind of realism into broadcast productions that our predecessors could only ever have dreamed of.
We’ve heard the hype, and I admit I’ve contributed my fair share. The iPhone is able to capture impressively sharp, high-resolution images that stand up to critical examination even when magnified and viewed on a 20-meter cinema screen. The iPhone’s onboard software compensates for the most egregious image defects, applying on-the-fly color correction, noise reduction, and broad optical compensation that eliminates chromatic aberrations, barrel distortion, and a host of other things, from what is, after all, an exceedingly modest lens.
A group of international technology vendors and broadcasters is working on developing and implementing Artificial Intelligence (AI) standards to improve video coding. Calling itself MPAI (Moving Picture, Audio and Data Coding by Artificial Intelligence) they believe that machine learning can improve efficiency of the existing Enhanced Video Coding standard by about 25 percent.
NAB and SCTE are planning a joint forum that will connect the NAB Show in Las Vegas with the latter’s SCTE·ISBE Cable-Tec Expo in Atlanta on October 12, 2021.
Complex workflows often involve diverse teams of partners and collaborators exchanging files in the fastest time possible. FTP no longer delivers the speed and operational simplification needed so we must now turn to acceleration technology geared towards media file transfer to meet the demands of modern media workflows.
