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.
With the emergence of the cloud into the media production and delivery space, the broadcast and media industry must embrace an entirely new approach to acquiring and deploying technology. Large capital expenditures (CapEx) are increasingly being replaced by operating expense (OpEx) budgets that are more flexible and aligned with the operational requirements of broadcast facilities.
It seems almost superfluous today to specify that audio is digital because most audio capture, production and distribution today is done numerically. This was not always the case and at one time audio was primarily done without the help of numbers and the term digital audio was introduced to distinguish the new technology from what went before.
Here we look at some of the origins of gamma in imaging and move on to introduce the peculiar characteristics of the cathode ray tube.
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For anyone who’s seen the first series to bear the title, the name Penny Dreadful will conjure up images of occult happenings in a shadowy, late-Victorian world. After twenty-seven episodes across three highly successful seasons, Showtime aired the last episode of Penny Dreadful in June 2016. By November 2018, the network had ordered a successor: Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, which premiered in April 2020 and looks very different to its gothic predecessor.
