The USB Promoter Group has announced that the USB4 standard for personal computing has been finalized and will be published later this year. The benefits include faster transfer speeds, better management of video and compatibility with Thunderbolt 3 devices.
In an era when electronic media outlets are multiplying like rabbits, many organizations find themselves getting newfound attention on radio and television. Whether it be a seminar, announcement or speech by a public figure, it’s easy to be caught off guard when a gaggle of journalists and TV cameramen show up at your door.
Live sports productions are the natural home for HDR. The increase in luminance latitude combined with extended color space delivers an immersive experience never before witnessed by the home viewer. But backwards compatibility must still be maintained for legacy SDR audiences.
Sound Devices has upgraded its MixPre line of portable audio mixer/recorders and Zoom will soon deliver its F6 mixer/recorder. Both have a revolutionary new feature: so much headroom that it no longer matters where the gain level is set during recording. Both explosive high and quiet volume signals can be recorded at full audio quality without touching a control.
A major development has happened in the broadcast industry with the adoption of software running on COTS servers for processing uncompressed real-time video. Up to recently, this had not even appeared on the radar, but new technology evolution and innovation has now made software COTS for broadcasters a reality.
Like many critical professional equipment categories, live production switchers (“vision mixers” to many overseas) have undergone a transformation based largely around the implementation of software-defined features and multi-layered capabilities that allow the operator to do more. When EVS introduced its Dyvi switcher in 2017, it boasted a software-defined architecture - basically a software approach to utilizing GPU performance to manipulate and modify video streams - that offered users a brand-new approach to live production while promising to take them far beyond the limits of conventional hardware switcher design.
Broadcasters continue to see the benefits of IP and many are integrating piecemeal to build hybrid SDI-IP systems. At a first glance, monitoring of hybrid systems may seem to be just an extension of existing practices. However, the complex interaction of SDI and IP signal levels, buffers, and timing conspire to provide interesting challenges rarely seen in broadcasting.
In this series of three articles, we investigate the underlying aspects of computer server design for high value security and 24-hour operation. In the first article we look at advanced server security, in the second article we understand how servers are controlled, and in the third article we gain a deeper understanding of virtualization and the benefits for secure operation.
