On the morning of March 9th, Bill Macbeth, Chief Engineer at local Fox affiliate KBSI hit the switch on the station’s Rohde & Schwarz THU9evo liquid-cooled UHF transmitter and, in a video posted on social media, uttered the words: “Transmitter is on, we are making power.” Just like that, they were broadcasting a new NextGen TV (ATSC 3.0) signal over the air to its audience in Southeastern Missouri, Western Kentucky, and Southern Illinois.
While LED monitors are increasingly showing up in news studios large and small, in many cases replacing the green screen studios of old, make no mistake that virtual sets are advancing and, in tandem with augmented reality graphics, are changing the way stories are told on air.
Whether we think of it as virtual production, or just a particularly sophisticated variation on the back projection techniques that have been used for years, direct-view LED video displays have gained a hugely positive reputation in film and television effects work.
After two years of virtual gathering, broadcasters convening in person for this year’s NAB Show in Las Vegas will see a lot of new faces due to management and staff changes at the various vendors. One notable “new” figure will be Dr. Andrew Cross, formerly with NewTek, Vizrt and now the new CEO of Grass Valley (GV).
Philo T. Farnsworth’s reported first words upon seeing the first TV image, which happened to be transmitted wirelessly, were “There you are, electronic television!” Some 95 years later, TV broadcasters and viewers rely more on wireless electronics than ever.
A consortium of the five largest motion picture studios in the U.S. is developing the next generation of production and post workflows, using the cloud at its core, to save time and money and allow the best and brightest production teams to be located anywhere in the world yet collaborate and share files as if they were in the same room. Indeed, by the end of 2030, entertainment productions will be produced in very different ways, rearranging or inverting today’s workflow steps dramatically.
While many stations (and viewers) have grown accustomed to green screen weather walls and rear-projection cubes as part of their sets, LED walls are beginning to show up in greater numbers at production studios around the world. Those old virtual sets are slowly being replaced with new displays on the wall and floor as news organizations realize their immense creative potential.
Mobile World Congress has come back as a full hybrid event with a substantial physical presence in 2022 after its absence in 2020 and skeletal form in 2021, with around 55,000 attendees in Barcelona, coupled with an even larger number of online delegates.
