A blog post of mine for the National Film and Television School:  https://www.nfts.co.uk/news/steam-powered-why-arts-key-engaging-students-engineering-technology National Film and Television School Head of Technology, John Maxwell Hobbs considers why the UK is facing a skills gap in broadcast engineering and how an increased focus on the arts could be the key: “There’s a lot of focus on what’s called the “STEM” approach to education these days. STEM stands for Science, Tech

An interview I did for the National Film and Television School https://www.nfts.co.uk/news/why-industry-needs-more-broadcast-engineers Top technologist and former BBC Scotland Head of Technology John Maxwell Hobbs has been appointed to lead the National Film and Television School Production Technology MA. The Masters has been introduced to tackle a shortage of broadcast engineers and fill a looming skills gap in the industry. We asked John about the reasons for the skills g

I'm really excited to be giving one of the keynotes for this year's conference of the International Associates of Broadcast Manufacturers on the 4th of December in London. I'm talking about how traditional broadcasters can adapt to a radically changing world. http://www.theiabm.org/events/iabm-2015-annual-conference/schedule.html

Lights Out by Chris Leslie My friend, the documentary photographer and filmmaker, Chris Leslie has been working on and off for three years on a film project called "Lights Out," about the closing of the Bluevale/Whitevale public housing complex in Glasgow and I'll be providing the soundtrack. From Wikipedia: "Faced with crippling housing shortages in the immediate post-war period, the city undertook the building of multi-storey housing in tower blocks in the 1960s and early

I'll be chairing one of the featured panels at IBC this year called, "Waiting for the Sergeant Pepper Moment," looking at the potential technology has to change the way we make television. You can read about the panel at the IBC website. In 1967, The Beatles released their album "Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band," a watershed in modern music and the first time a mainstream band created music expressly for vinyl, as opposed to its being a mere recording of a traditi

I've written an article for the BBC Academy looking at the dramatic changes we're experience in broadcast technology. Check it out here: BBC Academy - Technology - Out with the old, in with the new.

In my last post, I only half-jokingly asked, "What do you do when you've won the revolution?" The answer to that is, "get working." A revolution overturns the old order. Most revolutions fail because they've only focussed on the negative, with the only goal being the elimination of that negative. Once that's accomplished, for most people, it's "thank you, goodnight." A successful revolution requires a positive aim - plans to create something, build something. That's wher

This autumn, BBC Scotland, passed the fifth anniversary of the opening of our new  facility at Pacific Quay in Glasgow. When we opened our doors, we were the most advanced broadcasting facility in Europe, and arguably the world.  We had a full HD infrastructure, production was mostly file-based, and with the exception of live video, all our media was transported via IP. Since then, a number of comparable facilities have opened, Sky's Harlequin 1, DR's DR Village, Media Ci

One of the greatest challenges in any event broadcast is coverage. Apart from the standard budgetary and staffing constraints, productions have to deal with available camera positions that are often less than ideal, as well as having to second guess coverage needed for more dynamic events such as festivals, non-traditional sports, and wide-ranging events such as motor racing. There has been a great deal of research into free-viewpoint video. In essence, this allows the place

On Friday, I had the privilege of watching the opening ceremony of the Olympics in the BBC's Pacific Quay Studio B over the first ever live transmission of an event using Super Hi Vision, the high resolution broadcast technology created by NHK, the national broadcaster of Japan. Super Hi Vision is the first entry in a class called Ultra High Definition Television, which has a resolution of 7680 × 4320, which is 16 times the resolution of HDTV. Along with that is a 22.2 chann

There's a lot of focus on "big data" these days after the recent Facebook IPO. The term is becoming as ubiquitous at "the cloud." There's a great line in Michael Wolff's article, "The Facebook Fallacy," at the MIT Technical Review. "The company knows so much about so many people that its executives are sure that the knowledge must have value." That sums it up in a nutshell - "We have so much of this stuff, it MUST be valuable. We just don't know what that value is yet." This

In the 121 years since the invention of the motion picture camera, the worlds of production and post production have operated as two connected, but completely discrete units. The production side, an optical/chemical/mechanical process, essentially unchanged from the Victorian era until the widespread adoption of the portable video camera (until recently, almost all feature films still used Victorian technology, now only most of them do.) The portable video camera, although r

There is intense focus at the moment on the potential of IP delivery of media. A slew of acronyms like VOD, OTT, and IPTV are being joined by terms such as, “second screen,” “orchestrated media,” “lean back,” and “lean forward,” viewing with more to come. To date, the majority of effort in this area has managed to recreate the experience of watching television, but with a much less friendly user interface. VOD and catch up TV have eliminated the walk to the video store and t

Current situation Non-linear editing, fast computers, and high-speed data networks have gone a long way in changing our approach to post-production and is now making significant inroads into distribution; but as of yet, the production process has changed very little. In the second decade of the 21 st century, we are still saddled with an 19 th century, Victorian era workflow. Clanking, whirring cameras constructed with motors, flywheels, belts and levers; arcing HMI lamps ou