KitPlus | Articles

Video Tape recorders cannnot die.

In its simplest form, Tape Archiving requires:- 1) Playback decks 2) Tape Cleaning Facilities 3) Tape Baking Incubator/Oven 4) Ingest Platforms 5) Storage This article concentrates on what is often described as the weakest link, namely 1) above i.e. the Playback Decks and what could be another weak link, namely 2) i.e. Tape Cleaning Facilities. I h...

Submitted by KitPlus

Published 02 November 2017

Back in the day

by Larry Jordan Issue 100 - April 2015 Congratulations, TV-Bay, on your tenth anniversary; as well as the 100th issue of TV-Bay/KitPlus magazine. Very cool!Ten years ago seems like forever. Some of us were editing with Final Cut Pro 5. LiveType was still with us. Others were using Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 (CS3 was still two years in the future). Stil...

Submitted by Larry Jordan#

Published 01 May 2015

Dick Hobbs remembers the BBC Television Centre

I am writing this column the day after the last news programme was transmitted from BBC Television Centre, and by the time you read it the place will be more or less moribund. Which is sad. My first experience of Television Centre was – frighteningly – 40 years ago when I went to a recording of Andr Previn’s Music Night in TC1. It was a Rachmaninov...

Submitted by Bogdan Frusina

Published 01 May 2013

To cloud, or not to cloud

Almost ever since it began, there have been two parameters that have played a big part in shaping broadcast television – bandwidth and storage. Admittedly, storage was not an issue at the start because there was no way to do it, but Ampex changed that in 1956. Bandwidth dictates many aspects of infrastructure and broadcast picture quality, the amou...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 January 2013

3d Screens

Often exhibitions such as IBC and NAB can be summed up as progressive – slightly better products but nothing really new. Sometimes there is a breakthrough such as Ampex’s introduction of the VTR in 1956. The early years of digital production and post tools were rich in totally new things. At the time I worked at Quantel and seeing inventions like P...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 December 2012

A new era in slow-motion?

Those readers who watch sports programmes on a regular basis may have noticed that many productions now have high speed cameras providing so called “ultra-motion” replays as a part of slow motion sequences. These cameras have been in use for many years in such areas as crash testing and sports training, but until recently the quality of the image h...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 April 2012

How the mysteries of Library and Archive have changed in...

As I walked into the ATV Bridge Street studios in Birmingham in November 1974 I could not have known what a revolutionary time I would experience in my career as a “Library Guy”. Since 2” tape became the recording medium for television in the late fifties nothing much had changed in its cataloguing, storage and usage. A few stickers on the tape, a...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 October 2011

Tape is dead. Long live Tape

An area that has been a vital part of television – defining much of ‘how’ and ‘what’ things are done – is recording. At first film was the medium, then in 1956, Ampex invented the video tape recorder with the prime aim of providing delayed programmes across the USA. Soon video tape editing, and other applications rapidly expanded and the 2-inch qua...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 October 2010

Frame Rates and HD

Much has changed since the 25 Hz and 30 Hz frame rates for television were defined over 60 years ago. In Part 1, last month we noted how the USA (followed by others) adopted the 1000/1001 frequency offset to produce the 29.97 Hz rate and the resulting drop-frame timecode. Of course at that time, 1953, they could not imagine the consequences of thei...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 2010

A brief history of television graphics

Thirty years ago, television captions were routinely created by sticking white Letraset characters onto black card. Credit rolls were possible using special devices which used long strips of black material onto which the Letraset was stuck, and which were literally rolled, either by an electric motor but sometimes even by hand. There were, of cours...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 October 2008