KitPlus | Articles

The Importance of Audio Production Systems

Large-scale entertainment programming presents a unique set of challenges for broadcasters. Often extremely high-profile keystones of a broadcaster’s schedule and increasingly billed as live ‘event television’, as well as delivering the very best audio quality they demand a huge degree of flexibility and agility in terms of their production. With m...

Submitted by Tom Knowles

Published 26 March 2020

NAB 2019 Highlights

The NAB Show in Las Vegas never loses its capacity to surprise. With NHK already transmitting in 8K and the Tokyo Olympics just a year away, this might have been the year that 8K equipment prices descended from the stratosphere to just plain expensive. The main trends at NAB 2019 were an increasing focus on HD-HDR, Media-over-IP and 4K. 8K was pret...

Submitted by Paul MacKenzie

Published 04 June 2019

An Epiphany Moment

I had been negotiating the sale of my company and had reached the really hard end of the bargain. We were close to agreeing the final sum after a lot of too-much-give-and-not-enough-take negotiation. The solicitors were calling me, keen for a deal. It had come down to one sticking point and, in my hard ball “I am the Wolf of Wall Street” guise, I w...

Submitted by Peter Savage 2

Published 09 November 2018

Streaming and the need for continued innovation

In a fast-changing world, audio producers need to adapt quickly in order to keep up. Media consumption is changing - fast. Almost without anyone noticing, we have passed the tipping point. Only a few years ago we were discussing streaming as an emerging technology; yet now, according to a recent Deloitte survey, streaming has overtaken live TV as t...

Submitted by Jon Schorah - new

Published 04 April 2017

The Transistion in Audio Monitoring

As signal chains have become increasingly complex, the challenges involved in managing and monitoring these paths have multiplied exponentially. Over the past few decades, we\'ve migrated from handling a single channel of content using composite video and analog audio pairs, to elaborate multi-channel facilities routing HD video with embedded audio...

Submitted by Shane Toven

Published 15 March 2017

Mr MXF thinks the future is made of components

The recent SMPTE IMF plugfest that was kindly hosted by Fox in Burbank gave the vendors, users and content owners a chance to discuss the fine details of the IMF standard and to get excited about where it will take the Post Production community. If you haven\'t heard of IMF then you have not been standing within 500ft of me for the past year. IMF i...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin

Published 15 February 2017

Smart audio - the way foward for live broadcast productio...

Today\'s broadcast facilities are facing ever-increasing demands on their resources as they strive to keep up with consumers who expect more content on more devices, both where and when they want it. Amongst all the various elements broadcasters have to handle (including video, graphics, data, captions and subtitles), the importance of audio should...

Submitted by Anthony Wilkins

Published 07 December 2016

Ask the experts - Transitioning to IP

1) What has been the broadcast industry's feeling about the move to an all IP workflow?Transitioning from conventional signal transport to an all-IP environment in broadcast or content production operations seems to be a matter of "when\" rather than "if,\" as it brings a great number of advantages with it. IP is touted as offering numerous benefit...

Submitted by Craig Newbury

Published 22 July 2016

Class: Multi - Channel Audio

by Bruce Devlin Issue 113 - May 2016 If you\'re given a media file and it has 16 channels of audio then life can quickly become the opposite of boring, especially if it has to go to air quickly and the supplier is new. Put simply there are many ways in which the different channels can be laid out in the file, but there isn\'t a single overall stand...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin

Published 13 May 2016

VR and 3D Audio - Ask The Experts

by Pieter Schillebeeckx Issue 113 - May 2016 What\'s the difference between 2D & 3D audio? There are two parts to this question when it comes to audio for VR. The key difference is that 2D is a single horizontal slice,so when we\'re thinking 5.1 or traditional surround sound in a cinema that would be looked at as 2D,whereas 3D adds height informati...

Submitted by Pieter Schillebeeckx

Published 13 May 2016

Object Audio - whats all the noise about

We all know that getting the audio right makes the pictures better. Anyone who has seen a movie created for Object Audio like Dolby Atmos will know that there is something special about it. To figure out what that is, let's rewind a little and see why we might need it. Remember the good old days of mono audio on TV? Mono audio gives a single channe...

Submitted by Bruce Devlin

Published 01 April 2016

New Upmixing Challenges and Strategies for Audio Post-pro...

by Jon Schorah Issue 109 - January 2016 Following the successful introduction of Halo Upmix, NUGEN Audios new upmixing plugin, Creative Director and Co-Founder Jon Schorah reflects on the changing landscape and increasingly complex demands of the modern audio post-production environment. The audio post-production engineer survives in a demanding an...

Submitted by Jon Schorah

Published 21 January 2016

Monitoring Q & A

Issue 107 - November 2015 What elements of modern console technology has made a large impact on your craft?Rob Wolifson: Historically, shows were set up differently, you had more time to prepare. For example, if a show was on at noon in one studio, the breakfast show would be done in a different studio, so transitioning from one show to the next wa...

Submitted by KitPlus

Published 01 December 2015

Authoring and Monitoring for the emerging 3D immersive Br...

by Anthony Wilkins Issue 107 - November 2015 The world of broadcast audio is on the verge of a major revolution. Numerous 3D Immersive formats are under development and will find their way into the mainstream of broadcast production and distribution in the near future. Unlike the world of relatively constrained channel based coding as we are accust...

Submitted by Anthony Wilkins

Published 01 December 2015

Bring up the bodies

by Dick Hobbs Issue 98 - February 2015 If you have even once turned on BBC television in the last couple of months, you could not fail to learn that the big blockbuster drama this winter is Wolf Hall, a television adaptation of Hilary Mantel\'s two-thirds complete trilogy about the Tudors, and Thomas Cromwell in particular. I subscribe to what seem...

Submitted by Dick Hobbs.

Published 01 March 2015