Steeven Petitteville’s background in cinematography begins with the sort of story that many people would like to be able to tell. Petitteville didn’t finish studying at the ESRA film school in Paris, having become too busy working in the camera department to do so. After ten years as a camera assistant, he arrived in Los Angeles to shoot a commercial. Seven years later, he’s still there.
Felix Krückels is a certified audio engineer who graduated from the Detmold University of Music and has been involved in immersive audio since 2012. He was there when NHK launched its Super Hi-Vision project with the help of Lawo.
There are a number of reasons why people like old lenses, and they’re all very valid. Cameras and lenses so good they’re invisible are a recent development. Most of the best films ever made, by default, predate today’s spotless pictures, and artists have always been a rebellious bunch in any case. This, though, is an article about why it’s not always a good idea to rebel, at least without knowing exactly what we’re getting ourselves into.
More broadcasters are seeing the benefits of moving their operations to the cloud, especially as we are becoming more reliant on remote working. But the transition isn’t necessarily a linear move and hybrid working practices help us balance the unique requirements of large media files and the flexibility cloud systems offer.
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.
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.