10 TVBEurope IT Broadcast Workfl ow Preview IT Broadcast
Shout it out loud The question of Loudness metering is still confusing to some people. What is Loudness anyway? And why exactly are we moving from peak-based measurement to Loudness? And for that matter, what is peak-based measurement? It’s important, says Patel, to understand why we needed to make the change in the fi rst place. “Using a Loudness-based delivery standard gives you a better potential for creative audio. By using the average audio level of a programme, it gives you the opportunity to balance the dynamic range and use the dynamic range of the spectrum, whereas the old peak-based measurement really didn’t relate to the range of audio we could use.
“The peak measurement was originally designed for certain limitations we had in our transmission standards. The reason we did peak-based measurement was so the sound didn’t interfere with the colour quality of the television signal in transmission. I’m old enough to remember that. But now we have digital transmission and a variety of ways of transmitting content. If you use the average level in a programme, as Loudness monitoring does, you can use the nice dynamic range that digital audio gives us, and it’s a better user experience. “A good way to think of the shift is like the transition to decimalisation,” says Patel. “It made life easy for us, but people like me still think in feet and inches. It’s a signifi cant change for someone who has to do it for a living, but it’s not a change that’s diffi cult to overcome.”
Getting more for less Visual effects companies were early adopters of fi le-based workfl ows, often leading the charge in the manipulation of large fi les across multiple
Workfl ow will take place on 8 July at London’s BAFTA
www.tvbeurope.com July 2014
locations, and working collaboratively with them across multiple teams.
Simon Robinson, chief scientist and co-founder of visual effects software developer The Foundry will take part in a VFX discussion panel at the IT Broadcast Workfl ow conference. The Foundry was a pioneer in software
still just letting go of a tape legacy is shocking.
“From the perspective of a company developing software for visual effects, I’m always astonished by the tape-based workfl ows still out there,” says The Foundry’s Robinson, “We don’t engineer software with tape in the back of our minds any more.”
cloud infrastructure are still quite signifi cant. The start-ups we’ve seen around cloud-based rendering of CG, for example, aren’t as successful as we might have thought they would be.
“For a lot of our customers, big and small, it’s still not obvious that there is yet a better solution than just managing their own
“From the perspective of a company developing software for visual eff ects, I’m always astonished by the tape-based workfl ows still out there. We don’t engineer software with tape in the back of our minds any more” Simon Robinson, The Foundry
development for compositing and effects. Its compositor, NUKE, originally developed by Digital Domain, has become the company’s fl agship software and is used throughout the industry. The Foundry and the companies it serves are only too familiar with fi le-based workfl ows and the notion that some parts of the industry are
With ubiquitous connectivity and huge processing power at everyone’s fi ngertips, how does Robinson see workfl ows changing in the next few years? “It’s hard to know quite when it reaches the tipping point where the processing power becomes a game-changer, because the technical hurdles to move the required amount of data and workfl ow around
hardware resources and software pipelines on site. Connectivity is a big thing already though. Once the medium is purely digital from capture to delivery, it matters a lot less where in the world the content creators are and where the customers are.”
But despite more robust
workfl ow, better connectivity, remote production, and tremendous scalability, the
endless push for greater and greater effi ciency is still the key driver.
“The big challenge is getting more for less,” says Robinson, “Maybe it always has been. Effi ciency gains over time mean that customers expect higher quality and faster turnaround for less money. The consumers of media are becoming more and more discerning about visual quality, because they are acclimatised to a feature-fi lm world where anything can be made real (real to today’s standards; I bet in ten years time we’ll be looking back and seeing the cracks). And because the cost of setting up a small team is relatively low, in hardware and software costs, there’s a lot of competition bubbling up, and it could be anywhere in the world.”
Tickets for IT Broadcast
Workfl ow are available at the Broadcast Workfl ow website.
www.broadcastworkfl
ow.com.
www.adstream.com
www.bbc.co.uk/northernireland www.broadcastworkfl
ow.com http://emotion-systems.com/ www.ericsson.com www.thefoundry.co.uk
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