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IP and COTS infrastructure designs are giving us the opportunity to think about broadcast systems in an entirely different manner. Although broadcast engineers have been designing studio facilities to be flexible from the earliest days of television, the addition of IP and COTS takes this to a new level allowing us to continually reallocate infrastructure components to make the best use of expensive resource.
Whenever I’m asked about my opinion on the transition to IP, I always state that the impact can’t be appreciated until its history is understood. This brings into context the need for broadcasters to educate and surround themselves with those who have in depth knowledge and understanding of the subject.
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Planning the cinematography of a production which is quite literally about darkness is a challenge. Shooting a documentary with a skeleton crew in a place where power cuts are every day is an even bigger challenge. Director of photography Miguel Angel Viñas faced all that and more on The Road Bad and the Place Dark, a documentary shot in Sierra Leone for medical charity Médecins du Monde.
Cloud computing is helping a myriad of professional organizations expand their reach and implement new types of IP workflows that were not possible previously. It has also allowed media companies to work virtually anywhere.
The image of a director crouching to line up a shot with an optical viewfinder is one that’s been pushed aside somewhat by the less romantic modern image of a director squinting at an LCD monitor. The monitors have a lot to recommend them – in an ideal world, they can show color, exposure, and contrast in a way that’s close to how the final production will appear, for some value of “close.” It’s enough to make us forget that the cameras of decades past – film cameras – didn’t even need batteries to make a picture that has lots of extra look-around room, miles of resolution, no rolling shutter, a completely accurate depiction of lens flare and depth of field. And, of course, no issues handling all the dynamic range and color of the real world.
While cloud computing and storage have reimagined how remote workflows are implemented, they can also play a huge role in business continuity and even disaster recovery. As many major productions have already proven, the key to continued success is extending traditional on-premise workflows into the cloud.
In mid-May of this year, as countries such as Germany, England, and Spain considered easing COVID-19 restrictions to allow professional sports to resume, various professional sports leagues began discussions with broadcasters and production companies on the best way to televise games without fans in the seats. They’re called “ghost games” and finding the right recipe for presenting an engaging viewer experience was paramount.
As the media landscape continues to streamline the way it delivers content, cloud-native technology, that is, container-based virtualized environments that replicate traditional workflows on premise, is playing a big role. However, some broadcasters moving their assets and processing power to the cloud are performing a simple “forklift,” which is often not sufficient to address the types of complex signal processing and infrastructure flexibility required.
