Andy Serkis has become the face - and body - of performance capture. The technology has allowed the creation of more convincing and realistic looking fantasy creatures, notably Serkis’ own standout roles as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit trilogies and Caesar in the most recent Planet of the Apes films.
Jackinabox is a unique Flyaway Gallery/ PPU designed by John Surdevan and Sam Gardner, a multicamera director and a computer vision software engineer. After working together for years and looking at how things could be improved, they began to customise their own suite of live production kit that harmonises industry standard systems with their own hardware and software. John Surdevan explains to The Broadcast Bridge how they have blended Blackmagic Design gear with the Raspberry Pi Compute Module to create a multi-touch vision mixer to help them and other production teams work more creatively, faster, smarter and more economically.
Successfully deploying 100% SW 100% COTS with uncompressed IP signals.
Familiarity breeds contempt and to a certain extent that is what has happened among broadcasters when it comes to serial digital interface (SDI) technology. Since SDI was first standardised by the SMPTE in 1989, broadcasters have forgotten the trials and tribulations they went through to get those initial systems working. Over the past 30 years, products have been developed that have resulted in an almost plug-and-play approach to building SDI-based broadcast infrastructure.
Now that we have resolved the professional media over managed networks aka JT-NM aka SMPTE ST2110 + NMOS challenge – What about all the field production, i.e. News, UGC, etc. that is beginning to use the wild and unruly Open Internet to send it back to the home office? Sending files back has different options, there are more than a few cloud options and accelerator solutions plus VPN and extended network.
Broadcasters are continuing to adopt and take advantage of IT working practices as they transition to file-based workflows. However, some seemingly effective solutions are outdated, have not kept pace with advances in computing power, and are unable to efficiently transfer large media files. FTP, for example, is tried and trusted but its 1970s design philosophy has proven inadequate for large media file transfer.
