Networked production – not quite utopia?

A lot of focus on Day 2 was the transition IT based / Networked Media sessions.

The trend (of course) for production centers is to networks, where everyone in the production centre is interconnected.   But is this quite the utopia it sounds?  There will, we learned, still be headaches for the engineers who have to plan and install them.

The phrase "of the shelf" products for Networked Media needs qualifications. You cannot achieve the performance we need by combining different systems and switch supports. When considering the data transfer capacity of the studio links, you need to factor in the issues of buffering and synchronisation.  Also compression systems are not ‘reversible’, so expect generation issues.  In other words there may be no such thing as ‘off the shelf IT equipment’ for us.   

For those, like your blogger, who still love 3DTV, there was a small exhibit with an autostereoscopic display at the exhibition.  Oh, how the mighty have fallen?  The demonstrator told me that six views are created from two original views and displayed on adjacent strips on the display.  The result is reasonable if not perfect.  The stereoscopic phenomena where, when you move your head, the objects in the scene appear to shift laterally, is still there outside a modest viewing position.   But, hey, we should be thankful for small steps forward?