The Year That Changed TV December 29^th 2020 - 09:00 AM

This time last year, had anyone predicted or suggested what is now normal in live TV news, sports and entertainment, such as fake fans, laugh track-style crowd noise and regular live news reporting and interviews from reporter’s homes, they would have been laughed out of the industry. Who would h…

Creative Analysis: Part 14 - Cinematographer Sebastian Thaler On 7500 December 28^th 2020 - 09:00 AM

According to International Civil Aviation Organization rules, if an airliner transmits a certain four-digit transponder code, the world should assume that it is being hijacked. The 2019 film 7500, directed by Patrick Vollrath, takes that code as its title and stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Aylin Tezel and Carlo Kitzlinger as the crew of…

KVM-Over-IP Comes Of Age December 24^th 2020 - 09:00 AM

With many production personnel working from home these days, gaining access to computers and systems back at the studio can be tricky, both logistically and due to obtaining the right security authorization. In many cases, a network- or software-based solution is not adequate because the available bandwidth might run out,…

2020 In Review: Industry Bruised But Not Beaten December 23^rd 2020 - 09:00 AM

There’s no way to sugarcoat it: The pandemic has had a highly disruptive effect on video production and distribution in 2020 and many agree it will be felt for several years. The inability for people to gather safely has made it impossible for full-scale video production to go ahead as i…

No More Flying Blind In The Cloud December 22^nd 2020 - 09:00 AM

Migrating live and file-based video services to the cloud holds the promise of huge flexibility in deployment architectures, geographical backhaul possibilities, virtually limitless peak provisioning, pay per use pricing, access to machine learning and other advanced intellectual property on-demand, and much more. This migration is still in its infancy and…

Is Gamma Still Needed?: Part 7 - HLG And PQ December 21^st 2020 - 09:00 AM

The legacy gamma adopted in 709 and 240M has recently been supplanted by two more approaches to applying non-linearity to luminance, namely the Hybrid Log Gamma (HLG) system developed by the BBC and NHK and the Perceptive Quantizer (PQ) developed by Dolby.

Computer Security: Part 2 - Understanding Why Computers Work The Way They Do December 16^th 2020 - 09:00 AM

To see how to make computers secure, we have to go way back to see how they work.

Digital Audio: Part 6 - Noise Shaping December 15^th 2020 - 09:00 AM

Noise shaping performs an important role in digital audio because it allows hardware to be made at lower cost without sacrificing performance, and in some cases allowing a performance improvement.

Creative Analysis: Part 13 - Cinematographer Stuart Brereton On Baking Christmas December 14^th 2020 - 09:00 AM

In the mid 1990s, the north of England was a hotbed of film production, with well-known features such as Brassed Off and The Full Monty all produced within a few years and a few miles of each other. The Northern Media School, then part of Sheffield Hallam University, was literally…

Sinclair’s Qligent Vision Integration December 11^th 2020 - 09:00 AM

Standardized QoS/QoE monitoring systems ensure that Sinclair operators can seamlessly aggregate, analyze and troubleshoot all broadcast performance data groupwide. It also builds a solid foundation for future automation.