Last night was the b-roll.net NAB Bash 2008. Broadcast Engineering includes the blog feeds on our BE-Roll industry blog aggregator from several of the photogs who were in attendance at the event. First I met Stewart Pittman, the Lenslinger himself. He introduced me to Kevin Johnson, founder of the b-roll.net community. Later, as Kevin stood at the front of the room raffling off prizes from the event sponsors, I met up with Stewart again and he introduced me to Chris Weaver, who writes the TV Photog Blog, and Rick Portier, who writes the Turdpolisher blog. Leslinger’s Viewfinder BLUES and Chris’ TV Photog Blog are both featured on the BE-Roll. Rick’s very entertaining Turdpolisher is not currently included on the BE-Roll because of the colorful language Rick sometimes uses. But if you are not offended by four-letter words, it’s a blog I recommend checking out. more
At a press conference yesterday Vizrt put on display a collaboration with Perceptive Pixel. Perceptive Pixel has an advance multi-touch graphics display system. Vizrt has integrated the system into its Viz Engine.
Users of the integrated system can control graphics through multi-touch gestures. Listen to Phil Kurz’s interview of Jeff Han, Perspective Pixel’s founder, about the interactive display.
Last year, Sonnet Technologies exhibited at the NAB Show for the first time, and the company won a Pick Hit award for its Fusion storage system. Today, the company’s CEO, Robert Farnsworth, showed me Sonnet’s latest announcement — the Fusion F2, a portable two-drive RAID SATA storage system. It provides 640GB of storage in a small package; it’s not much larger than two stacked CD cases. The system is designed for on-location video capture or remote use when grid power is unavailable. Its two 320GB/5400 rpm 2.5-inch drives are mounted side-by-side in a rugged aluminum enclosure, ensuring secure storage and durability.
This morning, I got the chance to view a live demo of two of the three technologies being considered by the ATSC as a mobile digital TV standard — A-VSB and MPH. The Open Mobile Video Coalition (OMVC) has set up a van in the Central Hall outfitted to recieve two live channel feeds — one UHF and the other VHF — to demonstrate how each system performs.
For the demo, I squeezed myself into the backseat of the van, where a monitoring wall was set up behind the driver and passenger seats. The two main video displays depicted a live, MPH-enabled feed from a local UHF channel and another live, A-VSB-enabled feed from a local VHF channel. According to Victor Tawil, senior vice president of technology for MSTV (which is performing the trials of all the potential ATSC technologies on behalf of the OMVC), the two systems are periodically swapped between each channel, so that the UHF channel might be getting an A-VSB feed and the VHF channel the MPH one. This keeps things as objective as possible, and is also the protocol for the actual field trials of the systems. more
Broadcast Engineering is shooting video from the NAB Show floor and uploading it to our Web site this week. Let me tell you a little about what I saw yesterday.
I started my morning bright and early at the Open Mobile Video Coalition’s breakfast. NBC News’ Dan Abrams moderated a panel, which discussed the future of mobile video. In NAB president David Rehr’s own words, live television could be on 345 million devices in just a couple years, and “that would be awesome!” The audience had plenty of questions, including, “should the FCC mandate that all devices have a mobile receiver?” The OMVC thinks there won’t be a need for that because consumer demand will make it so manufacturers have to include it. A mobile standard still needs to be established, so there is work to be done, but based on the amount of people attending the breakfast and the questions, it’s evident that there is interest in mobile video. more
Sinclair Broadcast Group, if all goes as planned, will launch high definition local newscasts within the next three to four weeks in Baltimore and Columbus, OH, and sometime this summer follow suit in Ashville, NC, and Pensacola, FL.
Following the Open Mobile Video Coalition breakfast at NAB2008 April 14, I spoke with Sinclair VP engineering and operations, Del Parks, who revealed the station group will use the rollout at stations in its four biggest markets to evaluate its approach to HD news operations and make any mid-course corrections, if needed, before continuing the high-def local news rollout in its other nine news markets. more
Communications Specialties Inc. (CSI) is in booth SL8025, which happens to be just across the aisle from the Penton booth (Broadcast Engineering’s parent company) in the South Lower Hall. In the CSI booth, Derek Miranda walked me through a live setup of the company’s new Pure Digital Fiberlink 3150 Series, which allows users to transmit HD/SD-SDI over one single mode or multimode fiber.
The company also offers the Pure Digital Fiberlink in 7500 Series and 7502 Series versions. They use no compression or sync stripping.
JVC’s new GYHD200UB ProHD Professional HD camcorder provides selectable live transport stream output capability of either 1080 60i and 50i signals or 720 24p, 25p, 30p, 50p and 60p through the IEEE 1394 connection. The selected IEEE 1394 output signal can also be recorded into the ProHD DR-HD100 Hard Disk Recorder as either .m2t or .mov QuickTime files.
Offering full-frame 1280 x 720 progressive imaging and 720p recording as well as a 14bit A/D converter the GY-HD200UB provides great images. The selectable 60p and 60i acquisition capability of the GY-HD200UB makes the camera ideal for HD news and sports. Filmmakers and HD dramatic productions will appreciate the native progressive image capture and the “overcranked” recording for superb slow motion images during 24p final output.
JVC says the GY-HD200UB is immediately available with a suggested list price of $5,995, which includes a 16:1 Fujinon lens and Anton-Bauer battery system. A camcorder head only version, the GY-HD200CHUB is available for $5,695.
I visited the RF Technologies booth yesterday afternoon, and learned the company is releasing a new low RFR SFNstar broadband slot antenna. It has up to 7 channels (42 MHz) of bandwidth at 700 MHz, and is designed for use with upper and lower 700 MHz mobile TV networks, as well as mobile video and DTV transmissions. Probably what a broadcaster would find most handy about the antenna is that its bandwidth is wide enough to handle multiple 700 MHZ transmissions. Also, because of its low RFR performance, it is possible to place it on rooftops and short towers and not run afoul of radiation safety thresholds.
A typical 10-bay broadband SFNstar antenna with a 50 kW ERP and mounted with a center of radiation of 22 feet above ground or rooftop will produce less than 50% of the maximum general public RFR limits. This gives broadcasters looking to deploy an SFN network as part of a mobile TV network much more flexibility in terms of where they can mount the antennas.
RF Technologies is offering the Broadband SFNstar antennas with input power ratings from 7.5 to 50 kW, allowing several DTV or mobile TV transmissions from a single antenna. The antenna also uses circular polarization technology, so no matter what direction an end user turns his or her mobile device receiver, the coverage remains the same.
There is no reason the television industry cannot have a working mobile television standard by the end of 2008, Sterling Davis, vice president of engineering at Cox Broadcasting and member of the Open Mobile Broadcasting Coalition, said on the opening day of NAB2008.
Davis offered a report to a gathering of more than 400 broadcasters April 14 on progress the coalition has made testing competitive systems offered by Harris, Rhode & Schwarz and Thomson as part of its Independent Demonstration of Viability (IDOV) project aimed at birthing an ATSC-approved mobile TV standard by the end of the year.
According to Davis, field trials of the systems began in March and will continue in April in San Francisco and Las Vegas. During NAB2008, the Sinclair Broadcast and Telemundo stations in Las Vegas, are transmitting mobile TV as part of their digital stream. more
The editors and writers of Broadcast Engineering post live from the NAB Show in Las Vegas as the news happens. Check back throughout the day for the latest in industry news, reports from press conferences and product introductions.
