KitPlus | Articles

State of the Nation - The chances of anything coming from...

Among the autumn dramas the old-fashioned broadcasters have offered us this year was a new adaptation of the HG Wells classic The War of the Worlds. Writer Peter Harness stayed pretty faithful to the book, retaining its setting of leafy Surrey and focusing on the human stories. But any mention of The War of the Worlds inevitably brings up the CBS R...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs - new

Published 27 January 2020

State of the Nation - January 2019

I’m writing these thoughts on the morning of 20 December. From my desk in Tunbridge Wells I am normally gently aware of air traffic at five thousand feet, lining up to land at Gatwick Airport. Today it is silent: since 9.00 last night some idiot has been flying drones across the runway. An airport is a finely tuned machine, with all the interconnec...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs - new

Published 24 January 2019

State of the Nation

I am writing this in the middle of a record-breaking heatwave in southern England. Yet it is time to be thinking about the mists and mellow fruitfulness of autumn, or at least the predictably damp and chilly Amsterdam when IBC hits town. What will be the hot talking points of IBC this year? I am not in a position to talk about what the big vendors...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs - new

Published 18 July 2018

What is the future of media creation, salaries and conten...

by Thomas Urbye Issue 97 - January 2015 Often this very question is debated by experts in our industry, but many have their own agenda, whether that be advertising creation, media buying, low budget film-making, publicly funded television, subscription based services and beyond. But what is the real future for our viewing habits, those of us workin...

Submitted by Thomas Urbye

Published 01 February 2015

REVIEW: Portaprompt 365 Personal

by Sam Dierckx Issue 95 - November 2014 InSync are an online video strategy and video production company. Our roots are in the production of Television programmes, but we left that boat early because of the opportunities that presented themselves online and of course because TV budgets here in Belgium have become smaller and smaller due to online c...

Submitted by Sam Dierckx

Published 01 December 2014

Capture and Produce

Issue 93 - September 2014 Amongst all the new cameras, support and other production kit being touted prior to IBC, it was a less tangible announcement that really captured the imagination: Atomos’ announcement that it wants to standardize its Start/Stop Trigger connectivity for HDMI by making it available to other manufacturers. Locking SDI interfa...

Submitted by Will Strauss#

Published 01 October 2014

High speed camera system technology

by Steve CotterillIssue 81 - September 2013 High speed camera systems are now readily available, but all systems are not equal. Say you want to enhance your live TV coverage of a sporting event with slow motion. For some time now, the only alternative to standard 25fps based replays would have been replays from supermotion 75fps cameras manufacture...

Submitted by Steve Cotterill

Published 01 October 2013

Graduation of the Ravensbourne 3!

Issue 80 - August 2013 ALEX FINEThe last year of university, and the last year of my life, have been the hardest Ive ever experienced¦so far. This year has boiled my blood, and my peers, and Im glad to say Im now out of that particular blood feud. I was fortunate enough to be struck with some good grace in the last few weeks of the degree. The docu...

Submitted by KitPlus

Published 01 September 2013

Eye-to-eye: 2011 highlights

“Broadcasters must climb up the ladder into high definition or they’ll get their ankles chewed by the computer industry”. Memorable quote from a manufacturer of video standards converters nearly 30 years ago when NHK was trying to establish its original 1125-line (1080-active) 5:3 aspect-ratio ‘Hi-Vision’. Well it happened. 2011 was the year ‘high-...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 January 2012

Storage and archiving

Anyone looking closely at a helical scan video tape mechanism, particularly the miniature variety, might be forgiven for wondering how such an elaborate technology ever came to be invented. The first experimental video tape recorders were essentially audio recorders running at very high speed to achieve the bandwidth needed for television signals....

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 October 2011

Ask the experts - Monitoring

What are the latest innovations in monitoring?For both film and broadcast work, in addition to the fact that the picture must be true, without motion artifacts or aliasing, for a lot of applications you can also add that the picture must be processed in real time - less than one frame or one picture in progressive mode – so the main innovations are...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 March 2011

Aston ON

In August 2009 leading Spanish real-time graphics manufacturer, Brainstorm Multimedia acquired the Aston 7 character generator from the Softel Group. With over 30 years on the market, Aston is one of the most established brands in the business and has been the gold standard in character generation in the United Kingdom for many years – to the exten...

Submitted by Bob Pank#

Published 01 June 2010

London to Capetown, by bike Part 3

Brazzaville was still five hundred kilometers away and the road was still a little on the rough side but not as sandy. What it lacked in sand however, it made up for in water. The road had developed the particularly unattractive habit of having huge water-filled mud-holes at any place where it was impossible to pass on either side. So there was no...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 December 2008

London to Capetown, by bike part 1

South Africans are known for being to the point, so when I was told that I had done the whole thing ‘Arse Backwards’ I wasn’t unduly upset, but I did feel a need to justify the way I had approached this project. I had just arrived in Cape Town and was rather pleased with myself, having just completed a year long journey through some of Africa’s mos...

Submitted by Dennis Lennie

Published 01 October 2008