Mark Schubin ranks among the best of the best television engineers today. He brings more than 40 years experience to every production along with a wealth of television history and lore. A consultant now to many large communications companies both here and abroad he took time out from his busy schedule to talk to us about the production of an opera produced in 720p with the Panasonic production truck, the same one used for many of the ABC produced Monday Night Football games. Mark talks about some of the characteristics of HDTV which differ from the older standard.
There is both a correction and an elucidation for “HDR: The Great, the Okay, and the Yikes!” Correction: About 35:30 in, the term “ground glass” is used for what test viewers looked at during projector-illuminated tests. Actually, it was an LCD screen being rear-illuminated by the projector. Elucidation: At about 26:24 in, the chart says […] More
Yesterday, at the 2016 NAB Show in Las Vegas, the National Association of Broadcasters’ big annual event, I visited “The ATSC 3.0 Consumer Experience” at the southernmost end of the corridor outside the upper level of the South Hall. It’s shown above in an artist’s rendering. It was actually bigger and more crowded, so crowded, […] More
Like every other NAB show, the upcoming 2016 one will likely have lots of innovations. One to which I’m looking forward is the new “autocolor” button on SoftPanels LED lights. Each can measure the ambient lighting and adjust its output to match, whether it’s an incandescent table lamp or daylight streaming in a window. I’m […] More
Ralph Baruch died on Thursday, March 3, 2016, at age 92. A giant of our industry, after escaping the Nazis in Europe, he was a movie-theater usher, an engineer at Empire Broadcasting, and an ad seller for Channel 5 in New York before joining CBS in 1954, heading the newly spun-off Viacom in 1971, […] More
This one has it all, from toxic candles to quantum entanglement, the story of how opera created the modern media world, with full references. Here’s a free link to the paper, published in the March 2016 issue of the Proceedings of the IEEE: The Fandom of the Opera Opera-house-based baseball-playing robots? A 200-ton music synthesizer? “No […] More
Opera has a long history of bootleg recording. The “Golden Age of Opera” label, begun in the 1950s, used unauthorized off-air recordings from Metropolitan Opera (Met) radio broadcasts. Before that, Wagner-Nichols promoted recorders and recordings of those broadcasts. And Classic Editions issued an opera recording supposedly made in Italy that was, in fact, an […] More
Like many other innovations, high-dynamic-range (HDR) imaging can bring benefits but will require work to implement. And then there’s the bottom line. HDR’s biggest benefit is that it offers the greatest perceptual image improvement per bit. Different researchers have independently verified the improvement, and it theoretically requires no increase in bit rate whatsoever. In […] More
Opera was alive and well in New York City, again, in 2015. I have tried to compile all of the opera performances there in that year. I’ve probably missed some. As I’m not a musicologist, and some scholars don’t consider even Bizet’s “Carmen” or Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” to be operas, I used these […] More
In the aftermath of the shootings in San Bernardino, the leading Presidential candidate of a major U.S. political party called yesterday for barring members of a particular religion from entering the country. The statement is ignorant, and I feel compelled to explain why. It is ignorant because the ban would violate the U.S. constitution, which […] More
Once upon a time, in a land far away, I helped solve some problems involving the acquisition, processing, recording, and distribution of audio and video signals. The company I was assisting was heavily involved in dubbing the voices of American television programming in a different language. For many decades, I have also been involved […] More
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