Hitomi Syncs With MMC Studios
Hitomi Broadcast has supplied a full set of its synchronisation tools to MMC Studios in Cologne. The Hitomi kit is a critical part of the delivery of some of Germany’s most popular live television programmes.
MMC Studios is the leading television and film studio provider in Germany. Its studios are responsible for some of Europe’s most popular programmes, including live shows like Let’s Dance (the German version of Dancing with the Stars/Strictly Come Dancing), The Masked Singer and The X Factor. The studios are fully equipped for 4k HDR Ultra HD production.
“On a show like Let’s Dance, we produce in HDR Ultra HD, and deliver that and a SDR HD version to CBC, RTL’s broadcast centre,” said Andreas Albert, head of technical operations at MMC Studios. “The show can have as many as 20 or 30 HD/4k and colour space conversions in production, as well as the final output, and with different latencies in different converters, we have to work hard to keep everything in synchronisation.”
The solution is to use Hitomi MatchBox to align every stage of the process. MatchBox Glass, the iPhone app version of the signal generator, is used on every camera into the switcher. A MatchBox Generator provides test signals for video processing chains, and the MatchBox Analyser provides absolute precision in measurement of lip sync, phase coherence and channel identification. Both the generator and analyser are 4k ready with 12G-SDI connectivity.
The unique Hitomi test sequence tests every element of the circuit, and the Analyser calculates the difference between what it knows should be there and what it actually receives. For MMC, this means that every delay in every part of the production chain is precisely calibrated and can be calculated. When the signals leave the building on a live broadcast, they are precisely in sync.
You might also like...
Standards: Part 22 - Inside AIFF Files
Compared with other popular standards in use, AIFF is ancient. The core functionality was stabilized over 30 years ago and remains unchanged.
IP Security For Broadcasters: Part 1 - Psychology Of Security
As engineers and technologists, it’s easy to become bogged down in the technical solutions that maintain high levels of computer security, but the first port of call in designing any secure system should be to consider the user and t…
Demands On Production With HDR & WCG
The adoption of HDR requires adjustments in workflow that place different requirements on both people and technology, especially when multiple formats are required simultaneously.
If It Ain’t Broke Still Fix It: Part 2 - Security
The old broadcasting adage: ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ is no longer relevant and potentially highly dangerous, especially when we consider the security implications of not updating software and operating systems.
Standards: Part 21 - The MPEG, AES & Other Containers
Here we discuss how raw essence data needs to be serialized so it can be stored in media container files. We also describe the various media container file formats and their evolution.