You might not have noticed, but… I guess I’m not much of a gamblin’ man.

Oh, sure, I’ll push the limits of food safety as much as the next man, daring to down a slice or two of room temperature, morning-after anchovy pizza. That’s a bet I’m willin’ to take. But when it comes to my precious camera data, not so much.

You know the scene as well as I do… the one where the famous cowboy actor points his gun and says, “Do you feel lucky, punk? Well, do you?” Umm… no. I don’t. I never feel that lucky. And that’s why I bend over backwards to preserve file integrity when offloading my P2, SxS and AVCHD footage.

You’ve probably heard this saying, too: “It ain’t really footage until it exists in three places”—that means copying. Almost from the moment you shoot it, you’d best be copying that data to keep it safe. Only one problem, amigo: Copying camera files can be the exact opposite of “safe.”

MOVE YOUR BITS, BABY
So here’s a personal question: How do you move your bits? In bit buckets? How do you prevent data from getting dirty?

Here’s my guess. Dollars to donuts, you’re doin’ the same thing you do when you move your holiday snapshots and cat videos— you’re doin’ the lossy drag. Drag-’n-droppin’ those files from one folder to another in no way guarantees that all the data winds up arriving, uncorrupted, at its destination. That’s why it’s called “lossy.” Doesn’t happen all the time, or even all that often, but when it does, you’ve lost a valuable scene from that expensive shoot day, and there’s no getting it back.

How about now, punk? Still feel lucky? Looks to me like you rolled the dice and crapped out. Bummer.

For the gold standard in data wrangling, we would normally look to those master Hollywood datakeepers, the DI Guys. They’ve got millions in play, what with high-priced talent, exotic locations and gigundo crews. So they must really know how to protect footage. And they do. They hurl giant buckets of money at world-class capture and backup systems. They sit in air-conditioned trailers and sip cool beverages, supervising file transfers while the actors act and the shooters shoot—their data perfectly safe.

If that’s not quite your job description, fear not. Keeping your data intact is within the reach of even the most poverty-stricken freelancer.

Here’s the two-part formula. The first part is easy, once you’re in the know. Get the right software. I know of two relatively inexpensive apps that will save your bacon over and over… Imagine Products’ ShotPut Pro, and Red Giant’s new Offload. (Bet there are others, too.) They’ve got all sorts of convenient creature features like automatic numbering and multiple drive destinations, but the core technology is the same unglamorous, time-tested technique used since the first mainframes. They use checksums to perform verified file transfers, moving bite-sized chunks of data and making sure each chunk arrived safely. By comparison, your lossy file drag is the equivalent of lobbing empty beer cans over the fence into your neighbor Lloyd’s backyard. (Not that I would know about such things.)

The second part is the hardest, by a mile: ritual and discipline. Protect those camera files immediately, in the exact same way, absolutely every time you shoot… no excuses! Use uniform numbers, names, Hello Kitty stickers or whatever it takes to keep them organized; and do it right away, before the wrap party, and maybe even before the batteries go back on the charger. This is the OCD portion of your otherwise messy life, and you must obey.

FILE INTEGRITY FEELS GOOD
I’ll warn you that once you’ve found this path to data righteousness, you might start to ask yourself ever-harder, more philosophical questions. What about Quick- Time and DNxHD files from Ki Pros and PIX240s? Shouldn’t every file always get moved this way? Is it ever okay to simply drag and drop? Fine questions, all, and I hope you spend many hours discussing them over a delizioso bottle of a fine Italian Primitivo; but here’s the punchline—you archived a verified, known-perfect copy of your camera data before erasing and reformatting the storage media for the next job. Talk about starting from a position of strength.

There’s an unglamorous reward for doing things that are hard and boring, a kind of non-trophy way of celebrating things that never happened: Someday, you look back and realize that you’ve never lost a file. And as a result, probably never lost a job or a client.

And that, my fine punk, is the real definition of “lucky.”

Mario Orazio is the pseudonym of a well-known television engineer who wishes to remain anonymous. E-mail him atmorazio@nbmedia.com.

You might not have noticed, but… you might be tracking the wrong trends.

Every time I see that baby with the top hat standing alongside the old dude with the hourglass, I cringe. Their iconic presence means we’re gonna insert a hard stop in the smooth continuum of time, and try to carve out a single, 12-month portion, like slicing a small square of lasagna outta the center of the pan. And we’re gonna study and analyze that little portion like it’s not part of something bigger. It’s not natural, but we do it anyway.

Want the skinny on 2014? Try this: “It’s not like it used to be.” Time was, a year-end compendium in this fine publication would deal exclusively with engineering topics… recently revised federal standards for carrier deviation, or the year’s newest low-noise processing circuits.

No more. Today, you need to know more about bureaucracy than about bandwidth; more about trends than transistors. Because that’s where the real communications revolutions begin—not on workbenches splashed with solder, but in the backrooms where regulatory deals are made, and in the back pockets of gadget-toting hipsters.

Our livelihoods, in support of the technologies of mass communication, are determined at opposite poles—by the seemingly powerful at the top who make policy by making deals, and by the unempowered masses at the bottom who exercise a more genuine power by choosing what they watch, when they watch it and the devices and distribution channels they use to access it. And we serve both of those groups.

ANALYZE THIS
So… what happened this year? Nothing, and everything.

Yes, technology marched forward, as it always seems to, but that’s not news. And charting that progress is a little like tracing the slime trail of a garden slug.

The real news is in the megatrends, not the microchips. 4K TV… isn’t that advancing technology? If UHDTV is news, it’s not because bright folks created killer technology, though; it’s because consumers wanted to spend more to see it. (Which they haven’t, yet.) Or because regulators and corporate moguls have found ways to create the fatter channels needed to push those extra pixels. (Which they haven’t, either.)

Maybe next year for that one.

Looking for news you can use? Turn to my beloved nemesis, a.k.a. “The Commish,” for clues about your long-term career prospects.

Channel repacking and spectrum auctions… I know you’ve heard about those. I keep readin’ how they threaten our way of life, our very existence! Nonsense, says me. Those are trivial concerns, logistical exercises about channelization and bandwidth and whatnot.

Look at the watershed moments that created the FCC to control radio frequency allocation, and the dickering that gave us the mess we called NTSC. Our predecessors lived through it, kept their jobs, and kept delivering ever-changing modes of mass communications to the biggest audiences in the world. Granted, more has changed in the last seven years than in the first 70 of the FCC’s existence; but if we stop sweatin’ the details, and start thinkin’ big, we’ll keep doin’ what we do.

THE REAL HOT NEWS
Wanna talk about an FCC issue, ripped from the headlines, that you oughtta track? Try net neutrality—that’s a bit of rulemaking that has more potential impact than any tech-spec regulation they can promulgate.

Content delivery via RF, which has always been a huge focus for us TV and radio guys, isn’t the big deal it once was, and I think you know that. Admit it. You’re pushin’ content out 10 different ways, almost all of them involve bits, and only a few involve fillin’ the ether with RF.

Remembering that those two top-and-bottom megaforces, dealmakers and content consumers are really drivin’ the bus… who cares how it’s delivered? You’re still producing and delivering content… the distribution channels, quite frankly, are none of your business, and anyways, nobody asked you.

We’ve always had level-playing-field channels of distribution, monitored and regulated by The Commish in imperfect ways, but resistant to monopolization by special interests. That’s what net neutrality seems to be about—keeping common-carrier distribution impartial—and that guarantees our future better than the alternatives.

BE NOT INFLAMED
One final trend note: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings drew 2014 headlines with this wonderfully inflammatory quote: “The age of broadcast TV will probably last until 2030.” Great line… wish I’d said it. Is he wrong? Who knows. Wires gave way to RF; now giving way to wires again; but they still want RF delivery, even if it’s on different channels and devices. Bad news for us? I don’t think so. Once again, our fate is in the hands of those at the top and those at the bottom; but, hey… they both need us to make it all work.

And that’s a trend I’m willin’ to buy into any day.

Mario Orazio is the pseudonym of a well-known television engineer who wishes to remain anonymous. E-mail him atmorazio@nbmedia.com.

You might not have noticed, but… these days, things are lookin’ down. Literally.

Quick story: So, one fine day I’m sittin’ around the studio, polishin’ the capacitors and waitin’ for the daily drama to begin, when an express package is flung in my general direction. Inside—footage I’ve been told to expect, although I can’t say I was expectin’ to see it arrive on those round, shiny plastic discs we used to use. No matter… I’m up to the challenge.

Sent from Tatabánya, Hungary, these files were every bit as foreign to me as their point of origin. But strangely encoded, offbeat file formats turn an ordinary offload into a Christmas present; after all that work unwrapping it, you’re even more convinced that it’s an extra-special treat.

I quickly scrub through the files… high-def renders of a clean, pixel-perfect industrial complex and the carefully textured fields of green that surround it. Oh, those clever eastern Europeans—an animator’s tour de force, complete with little human figures inside a giant glass lobby. Only… wait… what’s that?

When I watch long enough, and the animation finishes circling the building, I notice something funny, small, off in the corner of the frame. Now, animators don’t usually model and shade geometry only to stick it off-camera; makes no sense. I go back and investigate.

It appears to be a small, Euro minivan with its side door open. There are two human figures standing nearby, eyes skyward.

And one of them is holding a remote control box… for a drone. I’ve been duped by aerial footage so smooth and clean that I mistook it for CGI. Sheesh.

SKY’S THE LIMIT
Of course I was confused. Short of the Goodyear blimp, and plus or minus a spare $20K, what are the odds of shooting aerial footage in the Hungarian countryside for a little project like this? Had to be 3D, in my mind.

As viewers, we’re in love with aerial footage. Aerial gives life to our nighttime dreams of floating above the earth, all-seeing, awash in the beauty of the cities, farmland and mountains below. About 20 minutes after photography itself was invented, Frenchman Gaspar Felix Tournachon hopped into a hot air balloon and started snapping—no mean feat, considering he had to bring a darkroom aloft and process his collodion plates on the spot. Our photographer-forebears have used kites, rockets and even carrier pigeons to capture the aerial images that set human imaginations aflame, and despite your self-pronounced sophistication, you’re no different, baby. You love it, too.

In my own defense, it’s no great shame to be fooled by a perfect blend of technologies, aeronautical and optical. ’Ole Mario is part of a rapidly aging well-experienced generation of camera platform liberators, after all. On our watch, giant TV cameras got small, and left their pedestals and tripods in favor of shoulders. And smaller cameras worked with traditional film gear, like jib arms, dollies and cranes. The brilliant inventor, filmmaker and performer Garrett Brown was one of us. Every year at the NAB Show, I watch him demonstrate crazy new innovations on his ever-expanding family of Steadicam products—he invented that, ya know. Molto bene.

But our “tiny” NTSC cameras weighed 35 pounds; a 4K-capable GoPro weighs less than 5 ounces. That’s a game-changer. That means that an eight-rotor remote-controlled helicopter can propel a camera into the heavens without breakin’ a sweat. Add all our other relatively newfound technologies… GPS, Wi-Fi, low-power RF… and ya gotta call it a “platform”—a self-contained ecosystem for making gorgeous pictures.

GO FOR THE GIMBAL
But wait… there’s more! The “smooth” part of my Hungarian footage is credited to another legacy aerospace technology... the gimbal. A self-leveling, stabilized mount takes away the shakes, the jaunty angles and the sudden jerks. (Decades of operating experience haven’t helped me… maybe I need my own gimbal.)

The availability of small, low-cost gimbals has made drone photography viable, and has led to innovative earthbound stabilizers, too, such as Freefly Systems’ handheld MoVI platform for small cameras. Funny how great ideas sometimes fall right out of the sky.

It ain’t simple, and that’s for sure. Not simple to outfit a rig; not simple to fly. And add two big question marks— privacy concerns and the federal government—and you realize that even the legality ain’t simple. Nobody wants drones peeking into their windows and over fences; and FAA rulemakers have said, at least for now, that remote-controlled hobby aircraft are OK, but if the same ’copter is flown for cash, you’re an outlaw. Nice.

I want one. Significant cost aside, I really, really want one. Would my drone kill or maim someone with me at the helm? I think not. But would it plunge directly into the briny deep, or wind up a musciada under an 18-wheeler? I smell financial ruin, and it’s worse than last week’s smelts. I can’t help thinkin’ about Tournachon and his balloon… and then about that intrepid lawn chair balloonist over Los Angeles a few years ago. Hmmm… garbage bags filled with helium… why not? Gasbag with a camera. If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard that…

Mario Orazio is the pseudonym of a well-known television engineer who wishes to remain anonymous. Email him atmorazio@nbmedia.com.

You might not have noticed, but… reliability don’t come cheap.

But fact is, if you’re looking to protect against the unplanned, leaving nothin’ to chance, you’d better be prepared to spend a bundle. When you’re in the business of pleasing your viewers, it’s the cost of doin’ business… it’s the viewer’s minimum expectation.

Seems to me, though, that I’ve been hearin’ about a boatload o’ un-reliability lately. Signal failures rarely make the headlines… so it’s got me thinkin’. Which is dangerous.

DEAD AIR, NO WAY
In the old live-broadcast world, used to be that the worst imaginable crime would be an on-air failure… missing picture, sound or carrier on a broadcast television channel was considered sacrilege, and many a brother technician was banished to the transmitter shack after ruining the denouement of some network potboiler.

To that end, we’d go to Great Lengths to prevent that kind of disaster. And Great Lengths, as anyone knows, can only be reached via Great Sums of Money. Duplicate sync generators fed an automatic switchover device; expensive alarm systems detected darkness, silence and absence of RF. Dual $75,000 VTRs rolled identical copies of network shows, standing ready just in case Halley’s Comet made a U-turn in space and returned to obliterate the on-air playback deck.

When NBC made the bold decision to ship individual camera feeds from the 1996 Atlanta Olympics back to a switcher in 30 Rock, they threw truckloads of money at redundant signal paths—a self-healing SONET ring— transmission complexity never before seen, nor previously paid for.

And even today, when live broadcasts originate outside the studio, “bulletproof” is the buzzword. Remember the Super Bowl blackout? Network execs sure do. Awards shows, golf tournaments, the final rounds of “America’s Got Talent”… each event duplicates the available land power with a substation’s worth o’ amperage from massive generators. Because an on-air power failure has that N’awlins juju: Big n’ Easy.

The take-home: Wanna sleep at night? Just buy doubles. Fully redundant… everything. And it’s worth every penny; who says money can’t buy happiness?

VIRTUALLY INSECURE
But what about reliability in the age of IPTV? Seems easy as pie… hey, they’re just bits! The guys down in IT have it licked, or so they tell me; it’s supposed to be so much easier when you’re just doing the data thing.

If that’s true, though, somebody got some ‘splainin to do. Because the land of digitally delivered TV—that next great wave that’s s’posed to wash us out to sea—has seen a pile o’ fail lately. The recent Metropolitan Opera live-to- movie-theaters broadcast of “Werther ” got really, really quiet for the last seven minutes of the performance, I hear. (Spoiler alert: He croaks, and little kids sing Christmas carols. The end.) Now that musta been a pretty sight… enraged opera buffs stormin’ the popcorn stand at the local multiplex, burning their librettos.

HBO’s Interweb outlet, HBO Go, blew a fuse when too many fans watched the finale of “True Detective.” Just look at those words: “too many fans.” Is there such a thing? Apparently so. Extra viewers never crashed a TV transmitter, as far as Nellie the Neuron can remember.

And don’t even start on the woes of Netflix and its patented “Thin-and-Spotty” network transmission. Apparently, the ‘Flix is so popular (can you spell “juggernaut”?) that every evening, a full one third of North American internet traffic consists of packetized episodes of “Orange Is the New Black” and “House of Cards.”

But the odds of watching un-buffered Netflix HD are slim, and there’s a full-out Tong war underway between the Flixxies and their on-demand competitors, who just happen to be the ISP’s who own your broadband service. And like any good thug or highwayman, Kabletown wants to wet its beak in the Netflix birdbath. Where’s the fault… is it in the firmware in the routers, or the wetware in the cable exec’s noggins? Hard to say… and even harder to fix. Using my Reliable Mario method (“throw money at it”) won’t work; whaddya do, duplicate the entire internet?

One thing’s for sure: the natives are restless, and won’t be puttin’ up with this for very long. Starting today, simple reliability is profoundly complicated; it’s technology, it’s politics, it’s power and avarice. In the old world, we knew how to do reliable; but the genie’s out of the bottle, and to retain viewers, we gotta rebuild reliable from the ground up. Get busy.

You might not have noticed, but… our ever-simplified world is crazy-complicated.

Now, I’m not talkin’ philosophy or physics, but the rarefied air of silicon and solder. And salesmen.

Imagine my disappointment one fine evening as I hit the big-box electronics store out on the highway for a simple purchase, and leave in a lather.

So I’m shoppin’ for accessories for that sweet little helmet-cam I just bought to record all my pie-eating triumphs at the annual Festa San’ Guido. (Pizza pie, of course.) At the top of my accessory list: storage.

With features such as burst mode and resolutions up to 4K, these new puppies are ravenous. That 4 MB Compact Flash card that came with my last digital still camera might not cut the mustard, methinks.

So I’m shoppin’ SD, and I vaguely remember those whizbang Class 6 postage stamp-sized memory cards I once saw… bet they hold a whole gigabyte these days, I says to myself. So… where’s the sales help?

OK, so you know the punch line. Everybody but me knew the punch line. The options are confounding… full-sized SD cards went out with the dinosaurs, and I can’t even pick up the new Class 10 MicroSD cards without a tweezers. For reals. Storage sizes range beyond 32 GB up into the 64s and 128s; and then there’s speed. Writing speed is the thing… natch; reading is nice, but when the 4:2:2 is flyin’ out of the spigot, write speed talks.

Seriously? A horsefly-sized card that stores 128 GB, and writes at 6 MBps. Wowzers. But based on my extensive research that one night, you really can’t tell the players without a scorecard; next time, I’m startin’ a set of crib notes on the back of my hand.

DOWN MEMORY LANE
Fact is, flash memory storage is the de facto standard of our times. And I can’t decide whether I love the idea of using garden-variety SD-family cards for my precious footage, or I fear it beyond all reason. There’s something so appealing about the utter simplicity—that itsy-bitsy package, at popular prices, and available at the local big-box or on the Interwebs. But we’ve also been trained to expect that serious, mil-spec quality needs a bulletproof package, with an extra-serious price sticker to match. How can simplicity breed such complexity?

For perspective, it doesn’t hurt to recount the history of our earliest, highest-profile flash storage icons. Panasonic’s P2 memory cards made it to market before Sony’s SxS cards, but being first brought its own problems: the flash memory of the day was slow… slower than the speeds required for HD streams, at the very least. The ingenious solution took a page from Rube Goldberg’s playbook: If mechanical hard drive arrays needed multiple, interleaved drives and a RAID controller, why not do the same for P2?

Inside those first-generation cards, if you popped off the metal trim plates, you’d find an embedded RAID chip and four socketed SD storage cards… the world’s flattest multi-volume array.

Of course, it wasn’t long before flash chips picked up steam and achieved usable speeds for video, and a host of form factors, capacities and price points were thrust upon us—further complicating the simple task of storage. And even then, the lure of cheap consumer solutions was too strong to resist; rather than pay full price for a high-reliability SxS card, shooters turned to SxS adapter frames that accepted good ol’ SD cards. Reliability is often overrated, ya’ know.

VISIT FROM A PEDDLER
The other day, the camera salesman came a-callin’ at our place, looking for all the world like a vagabond peddler with his collection of odd-sized trunks, and showin’ us a big broadcast camera, a little faux-cinema jobbie, and a couple o’ more in between. He talked fast, which I don’t necessarily like, but among the crumbs that Nellie the Neuron was able to snatch out of the ether was storage… he kept talking about storage, and over the course of an hour, he was able to cite at least six different ways these cameras would record pictures, ranging from high-speed, purpose-built, cinema-grade memory, all the way down to those consumer cards.

Most were proprietary; some required beau coups in-camera compression; and none of them were free, or even close. Which is my ultimate criteria, of course.

But across the range of cameras, sizes, bit rates and resolutions, one aspect was constant: flash memory, whether built-in or add-on, was the storage of choice. An external recorder with a flash-based SSD; branded memory modules selectable by capacity and writing speed, all the way up to 4K RAW; and even those garden-variety, tweezer-delivered SD cards.

Until the next big thing comes along, looks like we’re writin’ to flash, whether cheap, pricey or in-between. As for the flash memory crib notes, looks like they’re headed off the back of my hand, up one arm, and down the other.

Mario Orazio is the pseudonym of a well-known television engineer who wishes to remain anonymous. E-mail him atmorazio@nbmedia.com.

You might not have noticed, but… there ain’t much of any TV-related doin’s at the FCC these days. So why are we keepin’ them around?

Man, if I had a nickel for every time I’ve sworn a foul oath and wished for the demise of “the Commish,” I’d be up to my navel in nickels. Seems that there has always been a string of bad news headed our way out of Washington, whether on the rule-making front, enforcement or just general annoyance. But as old Uncle Umberto used to say, “Be careful what you wish for.”

Guess I must have wished for the FCC to take a series of crazy wrong turns and drive off into the swamp, because I don’t even think I can see their taillights any more. Not relevant, I say.

OUT OF CHAOS
You know the story of how it sprung up, lo, those many decades ago. In 1934, the world was under bombardment by a steady stream of new, whiz-bang technologies (sound familiar?). Telegraphy had given way to telephony and long distance, and rotary dialing booted Mabel the operator off the switchboard. Radio grew from curiosity to killer, and there were rumors of pictures sent through the ether.

President Franklin Roosevelt waived his magic fairy wand… at least that’s how I heard it… and the Communications Act of 1934 brought the FCC into being. No good to have a narrowly focused Federal Radio Commission; we needed a single, super-duper-mega-agency to control all our most far-out technologies at once! (Another familiar theme.)

Let’s put a rosy spin on things: The FCC was, arguably, the midwife who stood by for the births of all our modern broadcast entertainment technologies. Good job, FCC. And thanks. But ol’ Mario hasn’t noticed anything substantial going on since, well… since about the time “The Beverly Hillbillies” won their time slot.

The evolution of our beloved medium has had less to do with directives handed down from on high, and more with the organic nature of emerging technologies and market forces. I ain’t advocating anarchy, of course, but we don’t need the high-profile decisionmaking drama of a governmental commission; a plain ole’ department would do just fine, thanks.

BYE, BYE, BABY
Now, we didn’t just wake up one fine day and notice that the Commish had become irrelevant overnight. It was more like that famous frog in the pot of boiling water, its environment changing slowly over time, until: stick a fork in it, baby, ’cause it’s done. Kaput.

So, seriously, what has the FCC done for you lately?

Enforcement—your public file and your transmitter logs? That’s a functional task, not a commission-worthy, decisionmaking initiative.

Warring cellphone carriers buying, selling and trading tiny slivers of bandwidth? Please. Market forces at work… dog-eat- dog, survival of the fittest. No commission required.

And spectrum auctions… mama mia! Don’t get me started! Short of filling the general treasury with purloined booty, what has that accomplished? And if we pretend, just for a minute, that such a commission was broadcaster-friendly [peals of laughter heard offstage], all the spectrum-derived cash in Foggy Bottom wouldn’t prevent market forces— the viewing public— from choosing where to watch their TV… over the air, on a piece of RG-59 or on the Internet. The commission can’t save us, and they wouldn’t if they could.

Not convinced the FCC is passé? Then here’s the ultimate test: How many commissioners can you count? Uno, dos, tres… hey, wait—that can’t be right! And an acting chairperson? Exactly how unimportant do you have to be around Washington to muddle onward without a permanent leader, and with a 60-percent head count? In business, they do it this way: If the management team quits, but the organization still keeps on keepin’ on like nothing happened, guess what? We’re not hiring a new management team… you guys are doin’ great on your own. What’s the opposite of indispensible?

There are things we’d all miss… the government- issue hovel where you took your license test; those late-night visits from the Field Engineering team, checking your ERP; and the reams and reams of forms required to… well, to do just about anything.

But nostalgia don’t feed the kitty-cat, and if we’re serious about remaining relevant to new audiences and new generations of viewers, we need to break the shackles that bind us. And that’s you, old friend.

Mario Orazio is the pseudonym of a well-known television engineer who wishes to remain anonymous. E-mail him atmorazio@nbmedia.com.

Bob Caniglia from Blackmagic Design accepts the MARIO Award for the company’s Pocket Cinema Camera.

You might not have noticed, but… disruptors aren’t just for Klingons any more.

How ‘bout that language of ours? Just when ya think ya got it down pat, somethin’ changes. Looks like it’s back to school for ol’ Mario, for more “EFL” (English as a First Language).

I ain’t a swearin’ man, but I’d swear (figuratively, that is) that Mama used to look at me and say, “Ah, Mario, my little disruption.” And all through school, when report cards rolled round, there was that word again: “DISRUPTIVE” in big red capital letters. And I knew perfectly well what that meant.

(L-R) First Cut Pro’s Moyo Oyelola, Scott M. Akers, Waytao Shing, and Sri Sonti accept the MARIO Award given for the company’s First Cut Pro edit workflow collaboration. At least I thought I did—until I started seein’ it tossed around like last Sunday’s fettuccine. Seems like these days that the Bright Young Geniuses who think great thoughts about innovation, technology and such, have taken to calling new ideas “disruptive.” I used to say “clever”… what did I know? The trick is, that to earn that moniker, you really need to disrupt the status quo—shake ‘em up, fly in the face of tradition! And the more I heard, the more I liked it. “Disruptive”… that’s my new thing.

N-A-B, Plus “D.”

What better place to go huntin’ disruption than that little free-for-all in the desert—the one they call the NAB Show. Two million square feet of convention center, 93,000 of my closest friends, and—for my part—a list of 10 mighty disruptive new products. I stayed up all night alphabetizing them… so let’s go:

Blackmagic Design: Pocket Cinema Camera—Every few months, our Aussie friends at Blackmagic seem to disrupt things big time. Last time around, they disrupted the world of expensive cinema cameras by skipping the expensive part. Result: thousands of shooters making beautiful pictures who never thought they could afford that sort of thing. This year, Blackmagic delivered a bigger, yet smaller, surprise—a Super 16-format, interchangeable lens camera that’s about the size of your phone. Pictures are pretty, and the form factor is killer… talk about “goes anywhere.” And it may not be Super 35, but that Super 16 sensor is bigger than the chip in any TV camera I’ve ever owned, including high def.

(L-R) Freefly System’s Shane Colton, David Bloomfield, Hugh Bell,Tabb Firchau and Nick Holins accept the MARIO Award presented for the MoVI M10 camera stabilizer/gimbal.First Cut Pro: First Cut Pro Edit Workflow Collaboration—All right now, kiddies… quick quiz: What group of professionals are the worst interpersonal communicators in the world? Yes, you guessed it—professional communicators! We’re a pitiful bunch, and we need to be disrupted. And that’s where First Cut Pro comes in. It’s an entirely Web-based service that connects editors, producers and end-clients in an environment that’s seamlessly designed for making notes and comments, and delivering results. Sweet interface, crazy amounts of information, instantly available, and talks to your edit software. Plus, it’s got a flex-priced, choose-your-level monthly pricing model – my favorite.

(l-r) Sony’s Wayne Zuchowski, Deon A. LeCointe and Alex Rossi accept the MARIO Award for the company’s Anycast Touch production switcher.Freefly Systems: MoVI M10 Camera stabilizer/gimbal—If you’re really a shooter, then you know about this already, cause the MoVI M10 was burnin’ up the viral video airwaves for weeks before we all got to Vegas. If you already make swiveling camera mounts (a gimbal)—like Freefly does, for remote control copters—then all you do is add stabilization, and voila, you’ve got a small, lightweight handheld rig that delivers like a motion-controlled jib. The MoVI M10 makes you shoot differently – faster, better – and that’s disruptive.

Kessler Crane: Pocket Jib Traveler—They do it smaller, lighter, smoother, better… that’s the Kessler story. If you were a machinist, and into making your own camera mounts, sliders and so on, you’d be Kessler—making things work well, weigh less and pack smaller. So when they call something the Pocket Jib Traveler, you know it’s gonna be rigged for travelin’—one skinny little 27-inch bag that gives your small camera 72-inches of jib action. Integral counterweight, and did I mention inexpensive? The D-word, for sure.

William Maynard (L) and Damien Egan accept the MARIO Award for Solid State Logic’s ADR (Automatic Dialogue Replacement).Radiant Images: Novo Digital Cinema Camera—Now this is just too ideal to be true. You love the GoPro Hero3, right? Great little camera, but man, if only it had some pro features. Radiant Images was listening—they took a Hero3 and hot-rodded it for pro shooters. The Novo Digital Cinema Camera defeats the Hero3’s idiot-proof automatics and gives you full exposure control. It also swaps out the fixed bubble lens for a C-mount and adds the creature features that make life sweet: a thinner body, aluminum case, more mounting points, and a power system that talks to all the rest of your gear. Hats off to GoPro for letting ‘em do it; but kudos to Radiant Images for going pro, big-time.

Tiffen’s Lisa Grunert (L) and Steve Tiffen accept the MARIO Award recognizing the company’s Listec PromPTZ compact prompter.Sony: Anycast Touch Production Switcher—Small businesses…startups… those are the kind of guys we expect disruption from. Imagine ol’ Mario’s surprise, when I see one of 2013 NAB Show’s freshest, most unconventional products issuing forth from the hallowed halls of Sony! No question about it—it’s a switcher for a modern era, with built-in streaming functionality, flexible inputs, even PTZ control. And you know how your fingers fly over the touchscreens in your life—what could be more efficient than tapping your way through a couple of menus to reconfigure digital effects, then back to the program/preset bus, then off to the titler. This ain’t grandpa’s triple re-entry mega-switcher; it’s a re-imagined version that works for today’s go-anywhere culture. Disrupt us some more, Cousin Sony.

Eric Kessler accepts the MARIO Award for Kessler’s Pocket Jib Crane.SSL: ScreenSound ADR—Cobbling together an unrelated set of software tools is a lot of work, especially when they don’t play well together. That’s why it’s always good to latch onto an integrated set of applications when you see one, and I saw one at the show. Automatic Dialogue Replacement (ADR) has come to mean an awful lot more tasks than just… well, replacing dialogue and SSL’s ScreenSound ADR package does ‘em all. My personal favorite is SpotShot, which not only logs the takes, but actually preps the scripts, assigns the parts to different talent, and generates on-screen notes and copy before handing over session control to the SpotFire module. If it sounds like you’ll put about 12 people out of work, just remember—it’s really only you who’ll be working less.

P&S Technik’s Anna Pifel accepts the MARIO Award for the Radiant Images Novo digital cinema camera from TV Technology’s James O’Neal.Tiffen: Listec PromPTZ Compact Prompter—A one-man-band isn’t usually my favorite way to work. Why? Too much to think about, too much to do, and who builds any equipment for the solo practitioner? Well, Tiffen’s Listec prompter group does, and it’s such an obvious solution it makes me grin. If you recognize the letters “P-T-Z” (no, it’s not “praise the zebra”), you’ll guess that this system is optimized for remote pan-tilt-zoom cameras – the kind used with studio-in-a-box packages—as well as other compact setups. Need to prompt that statehouse reporter in her broom closet studio? This is the rig. It folds down pretty small in between uses, or you can screw it to the wall.

Vidpresso’s cofounders Randall Bennett (L) and Justin Caldwell accept the MARIO Award for the Vidpresso Social Media for Broadcasters product.Vidpresso: Vidpresso Social Media for Broadcasters—You know you need it; you know they want it. Your audience can’t live without a constant stream of social media bombarding them—how else would they know what they’re supposed to think? So if you’re smart, you’ll roll social media into your newscasts, your morning talk, sports—anywhere they’re throwin’ around opinions. But how? Ask Vidpresso; they know. They’ve got a Web-based, subscription model system that gets you on the air quickly and cheaply. And the interface is so simple that even senior staffers can harvest posts and Tweets with the speed and aplomb of a 16-year-old. It’s a disruptive method of disrupting your broadcasts… a “double-D.”

(L-R) Radu Corlan, Rick Robinson and Phil Jantzen accept the MARIO Award for the Vision Research Phantom Flex 4K high speed cine camera.Vision Research: Phantom Flex 4K High Speed Cine Camera—Raise your hand if you remember when high-speed cameras were a novelty (back when the only reason to use ‘em was to see things explode in slow motion, and back when the quality was miserable). But hey, not bad for a novelty shot, I guess. If you remember those things, forget ‘em, because Vision Research, king of all things high speed, has a no-excuses, top-of-the-line cinema camera that makes drop-dead gorgeous pictures in glorious 4K. You may think you’ll never need high-speed 4K; but if and when that possibility arises, just remember the Phantom Flex and you’ll look like a genius.

From somewhere out there in the sticks… Mario was chatting with a dog-walking buddy one day recently, when said buddy advanced the opinion that nobody watches broadcast television, or apparently cable television, anymore.

Said buddy watches series programming on DVD, and that is apparently the extent of said buddy’s television viewing, at least to hear him tell it. And he seems to think he is typical. Well, Mario ain’t so sure.

Is said buddy typical? Don’t bet on it. Has everyone abandoned broadcast TV and cable for online viewing? Don’t bet on it.

From some recent news items we learn that although the investment community thinks broadcast TV is going away, there is still growth occurring in the industry, based on advertising revenues. Local broadcast television is the historic cornerstone of television viewing in these United States.

What does local broadcast television still have that no other video medium has? Local content, of course. Mario knew you knew that.

LOCAL, BIG EVENTS
Local broadcast television also brings its viewers some other highly valued content, thanks to the affiliated broadcast networks. Mario refers to “big event” programming, such as the Olympics.

As we are aware, in addition to broadcast and cable, much 2012 Olympics coverage was available online.

According to a report by the Pew Research Center titled “Eight-in-Ten Following Olympics on TV or Digitally,” for the period of Aug. 2–5, 2012, 73 percent of respondents reported watching some Olympics coverage on television; while 17 percent reported watching some Olympics coverage online or digitally, and 12 percent reported following some Olympics coverage on social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter. Television, broadcast or cable, still looks pretty dominant to Mario.

Not surprisingly, the younger the respondent, the more likely online and social media were to figure into the equation. About 31 percent of those aged 18–29 have followed Olympics coverage on social networking sites, as opposed to 11 percent of those between 30–49, 6 percent of those 50–64, and just 2 percent of those 65 and older.

Still, television rules, even among younger viewers. And, online and social networking appear to be supplements to television viewing, as 79 percent of those following the Olympics online or on social networks said they were also watching coverage on television.

Nor is Olympic coverage the only bigevent programming. Far from it. Let Mario call the reader’s attention to such extremely popular events as the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards? Or the plethora of college and professional football games, baseball games, and all the other live sports available on television? Very little of this kind of programming is available online. Why? Well, for one thing, it’s expensive to produce. For another, online does not provide the big audiences required to amortize the costs.

What’s happening in online advertising anyway? Online advertising forecasting firm EMarketer recently lowered its outlook for online ad-spending growth from 17.7 percent to 16.6 percent. Still a healthy growth forecast, to be sure, but a little bit revised downward.

Looks like the business outlook for many, if not most, media outlets is growing, if only by single digits, but we still, of course, have the analog dollars/digital pennies phenomenon, which might be restated as the television dollars/online pennies phenomenon.

So as Mario said previously, don’t count television, even old-fashioned broadcast television, out just yet.

You might not have noticed, but… your production gear ain’t what it used to be. And I’m talkin’ last week, before that firmware download.

I keep havin’ this bizarre dream… sometimes after I’ve scarfed down a pepperoni parfait just before hittin’ the hay, but not always. I’m in the studio, or on location, or in the truck, and I’ve gotta install a new piece of production equipment—only I can’t exactly figure out what it does.

It’s got a bunch of familiar connectors, but that ain’t sayin’ much; six BNCs and a couple o’ HDMI jacks… could be anything with either inputs or outputs, audio or video, or all of the above. Within a few dreamtime minutes, I’m near tears; I know that the whole show hangs on me getting this equipment configured and on-line—but for the life of me, I can’t figure out what it’s supposed to be.

PIN THE JOB ON FIRMWARE
Now, my copy of “Your Dreams Explained” doesn’t say too much about video engineering, but it does suggest that my night terrors are rooted in daytime stresses. And I think I’ve doped it out: Buy a piece of production gear, and there’s no guarantee that, in six months or so, its list of features and functions will be the same. Funny, it doesn’t do what they promised it would do. It does incredibly more!

That, my friends, is the newfound power of firmware updates— not just fixes, but features!

Now, no diatribe from ol’ Mario is complete without a visit from Nellie the Neuron and a stroll down memory lane. In this case, though, the memory runs more like a nightmare. Because back in the day, when a change in functionality was ordered, a Field Service Engineer with an attaché case full o’ tools arrived with a clear plastic tube full of skinny blue wires. Consulting his service bulletin… basically, the Code of Hammurabi in a three-ring binder… he’d wire-wrap jumpers from one end of a circuit board to the other—pin 6 of U27 jumps to pin 1 of U12; pull up pin 5, ground pin 10.

In no time, you’ve got a fuzzy blue tapestry instead of a PCB. And that, dear readers, was a firmware change… pretty doggone firm, I’d say.

But until recently, firmware changes— whether wire-wrap, EEPROM swaps or flashed upgrades—were intended, with almost no exceptions, to solve problems, fix bugs and generally patch things up… in other words, to simply catch you up to the state that was promised at the time of purchase.

SHAPE-SHIFTERS ARRIVE
Fact is, more and more of today’s whizbang production devices qualify as “firmware chameleons,” shape-shifters with an essence that’s amorphous. And the result is no nightmare. It’s a cost-saving, feature-packed miracle of modern times. Firmware chameleons are becoming more and more common, and so is the gigantic smile plastered across my mug when I discover yet another bonus functionality.

Thinkin’ about some of the more notorious chameleon nests, a couple of companies come to mind. Blackmagic Design genius-in-chief Grant Petty just seems to keep adding features and upgrading functions willy-nilly. Blackmagic’s ATEM switchers, in particular, seem to add features and workflow improvements about every 90 days; and the BMD HyperDeck SSD recorders have added codecs that weren’t supported at launch, essentially changing the units’ market positioning entirely.

Lately, ol’ Cousin Sony has become a first-class chameleon breeder. Everything from switchers to monitors have benefited from firmware-delivered shifts. But the most dramatic changes have come to Sony’s Super 35mm family of cameras, where hardware outputs, recording modes and even fundamental sensor resolution (in the FS-700) now exceed original specifications, or soon will.

There are more… plenty more. And they’re all companies that planned ahead, guessing someday there might be room for improvement.

However, here’s the real thing about the firmware chameleons: Sure, it’s a geekfest of the first order… tech for tech’s sake. But more than that, it’s a love fest, evidence of some truly innovative companies who are lovin’ their customers big-time.

The best of the chameleons aren’t charging to unlock each new feature; instead, they’re building customer loyalty— and brand loyalty—by giving it away and by giving their products incredibly more value. And, if you think nobody notices, just check these firms’ Facebook pages and Twitter feeds and user groups… they’re breeding faithful fans by the metric busload.

Like mama used to say: “Take care of your friends, and they’ll take care of you.” And, as far as I know, she’s never even downloaded a firmware update… how ’bout that.

Mario Orazio is the pseudonym of a well-known television engineer who wishes to remain anonymous. E-mail him atmorazio@nbmedia.com.

You might not have noticed, but there is a ginormous amount ofpressure being applied to broadcasters to auction off their spectrum and consolidate their signals on fewer RF channels. Now, Mario enjoys watching MPEG artifacts as much as the next viewer, but if these guys have their way, all the television stations in a given market will try to squeeze onto a single 6 MHz channel, and everyone will have to watch on a Dick Tracy wrist TV with a display 30 pixels wide, ’cuz with that kind of bandwidth limitation, even a smartphone-sized screen, will produce images that look like a pig’s breakfast.

Former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps recently said on C-SPAN that he thinks there is an abundance of spectrum that ain’t being used: “There is alot of spectrum out there, and I don’t think anybody in the United States has very much of a clue exactly how much spectrum is lying fallow.”

In April, Verizon announced it planned to sell portions of spectrum it owns in a number of major markets; spectrum it purchased at FCC auction in 2008 and has been warehousing since. Said sale is contingent on Verizon’s getting approval to buy spectrum from four cable companies.Whatever. Certainly appears to Mario that Verizon has been sitting on unused spectrum for four years.

INNOVATE AWAY
Further, no lesser figure than Martin Cooper, formerly of Motorola and named as the inventor of the cellphone, doesn’t think there’s a spectrum crisis, least ways not one that we can’t innovate our way out of.

In an interview with The New York Times, Cooper said, “Somehow in the last 100 years, every time there is a problem of getting more spectrum, there is a technology that comes along that solves that problem.” He cited technological developments such as improved antennas and techniques to offload mobile traffic to Wi-Fi networks, which, he says, could multiply the number of devices carriers can serve by a factor of at least 10. He specifically recommends the use of smart antennas on cell towers, which, rather than radiating in all directions, would direct RF energy at the phones in use.

Mr. Cooper further said, “Every two-and-a-half years, every spectrum crisis has gotten solved, and that’s going to keep happening. We already know today what the solutions are for the next 50 years.”

David P. Reed, one of the original architects of the Internet and a former MIT computer engineering professor, argues that saying a nation could run out of spectrumis like saying it could run out of a color, as spectrum is not finite.

Reed states there are technologies for transmitting and receiving signals that do not interfere with each other, and that the real reason cell carriers want to control spectrum is to keep it out of the hands of others and thereby protect their businesses.

And he ain’t the only one. The NAB has called for a “fulsome inventory” (methinks “complete inventory” would better convey the message, in light of the many definitions of “fulsome,” none of which really applies), to determine once and for all whether there is really a spectrum shortage,or if spectrum is being hoarded to limit competition.

The NAB has specifically stated that, based on public comments made by company executives in published reports, some companies are “hoarding” spectrum.

SHARING SPECTRUM
In late May, a report from a presidential advisory committee was completed, and publicly presented to the President’s Councilof Advisors on Science and Technology, aka PCAST, and will be presented to POTUS himself in June. The authors of said report include, among others, Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google; and Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer of Microsoft.

These authors believe that computerized, agile radio systems can share spectrum on a vastly more efficient basis, which “would make it possible to move from an era of scarcity to one of abundance.”

The report concludes that radio spectrum could be used as much as 40,000 times more efficiently than it is currently used, and it recommends an approach that could increase capacity 1,000-fold. This efficiency would be achieved by agile techniques that rapidly switch the frequencies on which a device transmits and receives based on a set of rules.

Well, this is an important issue to us broadcaster types, and there is enough smoke here to warrant checking for fire. Keep an eye on this one, dear readers.

The FCC’s zeal to promote channel-sharing pretty much runs in direct oppositionto what it said back in 1997, when it rejected arguments for TV channels less than 6 MHz wide, saying that the use of a full 6 MHz channel is “necessary to provide viewers and consumers the full benefits of digital television made possible by the DTV Standard, including high-definition television, standard-definition television and other digital services. The DTV Standard was premised on the use of 6MHz channels. To specify a different channel size… would not promote [the FCC’s] goals in adopting the DTV Standard.”

Fifteen years later, the FCC has sure changed its tune. And by the way, there has not been one single broadcaster on the FCC since James Quello retired back in 1998. Coincidence?

Mario Orazio is the pseudonym of a well-known television engineer who wishes to remain anonymous. E-mail him atmorazio@nbmedia.com.

You might not have noticed, but… while we've been getting fatter and slower, video recorders have been getting faster and smaller.

Within a span of about two years, we've been bombarded with a steady stream of digital recording devices, one smaller than the next, and with bigger and better capacities and specs by the month. But this wave of innovation didn't fall from the heavens; it actually evolved, in a manner of speakin', bit-by-bit. (Ain't that just precious.)

BITS IN YOUR BUCKET

There was no one historic day upon which pictures no longer were applied to videotape, not so far as Nellie the Neuron can remember. But it seemed like a pretty sudden transition—one day, a stack of digibetas and DV's, and the next, a pocket full of P2.

Bandwidth and bit-depth drove the economics of the first memory devices, from mediocre-quality outboard FireWire disc recorders to MPEG-2 transport streams squeezed onto SD cards. Higher compression rates meant higher capacities and longer record times; but the tradeoffs—noisy, soft images that were murder to edit—were hard to swallow. Even higher-quality media like SxS and P2 cards offered lower-bitrate, higher-compression options for the faint of heart.

Seems like it's been a decade-long race to the bottom… progressively smaller and smaller files, containing less and less of the original picture data. But, seriously, folks… how skinny can one file get? The results are kinda like sending a police sketch artist to record the Indy 500: you get the general idea, but somehow, the small details… and the excitement… are lost.

STORAGE MOVES OUT

Blackmagic Design Hyperdeck Shuttle

Now, everybody who's anybody knows that these days, you just can't be seen recording to your camera's onboard recorder. All the trendy kids on the block have a solid-state recorder mounted on their rigs… on a rail system, a battery bracket or even just with some Velcro. Kinda nutty to see the video output cabled up to a third-party device… but why not? For the most part, you can dial-in as much or as little compression as suits your taste. They're reliable; big capacities, usually; and you can often slap that thing right onto the edit system, and be choppin' away before the onboard cards are even halfway offloaded. And did I mention cheap? Not a trendy fellow myself, I nonetheless find it hard not to approve, big-time.

BRINGING HOME THE BACON (-BITS)

As my production pals know, I like my data like I like my cannoli… big and fat and incredibly pure. It's got to be as close to uncompressed as the laws of physics will allow. (And I've often been on the wrong side of that law.)

Now, in all fairness, some of the "electronic cinematography" crowd have begun to use heavy-duty, rack-mountable recorder systems, with monitoring systems and disk arrays and whatnot. But for those of us who actually leave the studio to make a living, 50 pounds and a long extension cord won't cut it; portable is everything, baby. And pushing big pictures into little boxes—well, that's real magic in my book. I'm a fan of the biggest and the fattest… the recorders that dare to gobble up picture data like it's a plate of yesterday's lasagna.

Sony SR-R4 SRMASTER

Got a light appetite? Feed your 1080p30 stream to Blackmagic Design's inexpensive HyperDeck recorders. Boy genius Grant Petty designed these babies to record no-compromise, uncompressed QuickTime files, with an input that runs at up to 3Gbps. Slap in a solid-state drive (SSD), and devour every bit.

Thinking of a more meaty signal? With Dual-Link inputs and uncompressed DPX recording, Convergent Design's Gemini launched last year as a big-bit-depth (4:4:4) SSD box, with planned firmware upgrades for two-channel stereo/3D as well as 2K cinema recording. Bon appétit!

But if belly-bustin' big-data is on your menu, get ready to mangia. Sony's SR-R1 and SR-R4 SRMASTER recorders swallow 3Gbps/Dual-Link, 4:4:4 bit depths, and stereo/3D; and the R4 records raw camera data in 4K, too. Does it all on flash memory cards installed in the box, selectable for writing speeds up to 5.5Gbps and capacities to 1TB. Mount one on your rig, and go crazy.

BIG RESULTS

It's taken half a century, but we've managed to flip a skinny-stream/fat-recorder scenario upside-down, with big ol' signals captured on tiny silicon wonders. That means that King Content, that merry old soul who pays our phoney-baloney salaries, arrives at his destination in all his splendid, high-resolution glory—

only to be compressed down small enough to stream to a 4-inch smartphone screen.

Go figure.

Mario Orazio is the pseudonym of a well-known television engineer who wishes to remain anonymous. E-mail him at morazio@nbmedia.com.

Somewhere out there… You might have noticed that some folks are questioning the relevance of the Consumer Electronics Show, aka CES.

The rap is that innovation is no longer happening in the teevees and stereos that members of the Consumer Electronics Association, aka "See-Ya," are flogging.

This has, according to these critics, has resulted in the growth of "MOSS," which, politely put, stands for "more of the same stuff."

When the first Consumer Electronics Show was mounted in 1967, in New York, See-Ya was called the Electronics Industries Association, or EIA. Its members, many of whom are no longer with us, manufactured the aforementioned teevees and stereos that, in 1967 and for some time thereafter, were where innovation in consumer electronics was happening.

Old-timers, or middle-timers, will remember that there usta be two—count 'em two—CES shows a year. This began in 1978, with the Winter Consumer Electronics show being held in January in Las Vegas, and the Summer Consumer Electronics Show held in June in Chicago.

This lasted until 1994, after which the Summer show, waning in popularity, began travelling to various cities around the United States. In 1998, See-Ya began the current practice of having only the January show in Las Vegas. Fourteen years later, there are those wondering if CES will stay viable much longer.

NOTHING MAJOR

In spite of the fact that CES is gargantuan, the largest trade show in the Americas, with 2012 attendance at 153,000 and exhibitors numbering 3,100, no major product announcements or introductions were made at the latest show, as was recent custom.

Here are just a few of the consumer electronics devices that weren't introduced at CES recently: Apple iPhone, Apple iPad, Microsoft Kinect, Amazon Kindle Fire.

CES has become so enormous that these kinds of announcements can get swallowed up in the general background roar. So companies that are introducing major innovations to the electronics gadget field prefer to make their own announcements, independently of CES.

HP stopped exhibiting at CES in 2009, and Microsoft has announced 2012 was its last year at the show. And that ain't all.

GOING SEPARATE WAYS

In 2012, the Adult Entertainment Expo (AEE), which has traditionally overlapped the CES, was held later in the month. As a New York Times story headline put it, "Silicon and Silicone Split, as C.E.S. and Adult Entertainment Expo Part Ways." I am not making this up.

The Adult Entertainment Expo had originally been part of CES, which wasn't all that surprising, considering the contribution that pornography made to the demand for VCRs in their early days. So the porn companies began exhibiting at CES, but were frequently consigned to a basement or even a tent, which motivated them to form the AEE as a separate event, which coincided with the CES. Now, they have forsaken CES to go off on their own.

Adding to all this, the electronics retailers who depend on CES to see new products and to place orders are losing ground to the Apples and Amazons of the world who sell direct to consumers, and much of those sales happen online.

In the 1980s, not many broadcasters regularly attended CES, but this changed when HDTV and innovations in advanced display technology and home theater started happening in the late 1990s. Now, although advanced display technology is still advancing—for example with OLED displays—the HDTV market is pretty well approaching saturation.

And believe Mario when he tells ya that nobody cares about 3DTV. Broadcasters, still reeling from economic downturn and general industry changes are attending CES less frequently again. And, of course, nobody needs CES to tell them about the latest tablets and smartphones, do they?

Mario has seen predictions that CES will be history after 2015. Although See-Ya will try its dadburndest to see that this doesn't happen, Mario thinks it is possible that it will.

Mario Orazio is the pseudonym of a well-known television engineer who wishes to remain anonymous. E-mail him at morazio@nbmedia.com.

You might not have noticed, but… it's tough to be abandoned. Jilted. Passed over.

You're right… it's sad. I was sought after, wooed, and, with the encouragement of those around me, I gave in, and let the passion carry me away. It was a beautiful romance—so many wonderful moments—but now it's all over. I'm left with nothing, tossed aside like last week's braciole.

I'm talkin' about Final Cut Pro.

And I wasn't the only disappointed lover; a lot of you were left at the altar when the latest version, Final Cut Pro X, broke the mold, as well as the entire commercial workflow, for Final Cut editors everywhere. I'm not wastin' a Mario Moment on the reasons why it's unusable; I direct your attention, dear reader, to dozens of reviews, hundreds of blog posts, and thousands of hysterical, wailing commenters for that rundown. But it's done. Gone. Kaput.

FLEDGLING ROMANCE

I remember it all like it was only yesterday… (Cue the harp music.)

We'd heard that a certain impudent, brash young head of a computer company (that was before we called him "visionary") had presented himself to the kingpins of the production industry, and had asked them… no, make that "told them"… that he was gonna be their new daddy. That he'd build powerful computers and applications that would take over their industry and revolutionize it. They smiled and said polite things… complimented the turtleneck. And we all looked up from our Avid, Media100 and Pinnacle edit systems, had a big chuckle and looked up the word "hubris" in the dictionary.

But he was a single-minded chap, and in the end, he did what he said he would. He hired developers, bought software companies like NothingReal and locked his staff into their iCubicles until they made the magic happen. And magic it was… last year around this time, Final Cut Studio was, arguably, the dominant suite of production tools for creatives great and small.

Smells like a big success… so why were we abandoned?

THE FIRST BREAKUP

To understand the Big Breakup of 2011 even better, let's join Nellie the Neuron and hop back in the time machine for one more excursion:

The year is 1998, and you're nestled in your little prehistoric Nonlinear Editing Cave. Look around… What sort of equipment do you see? Your Apple PowerMac 9600 is the heart of your edit system, and it's just right for the job. With six PCI slots, you've been able to add a second monitor, a couple of Avid or Media100 video boards and a dual-channel SCSI interface—all the basics.

Before the romance ended... a snapshot of happier times... But trouble's brewin': The new G3 Mac models have only three slots! The Apple oracle has decreed that consumers trump professionals, and that no consumer ought to need more than three slots. And they'd buy thousands more computers than these audio and video guys, the oracle reasoned.

And thus began the big exodus. Industry professionals migrated to Windows-based applications and Intel hardware in droves, or clenched their teeth and sought expensive workarounds. (Yours truly still owns a "PCI expansion chassis" for all that extra slot stuff.) Delivered by a trusted friend, the message had a bitter sting. Apple will sell us all down the river in a heartbeat, in pursuit of the biggest market of the moment.

PROMISES ABANDONED

But, as Grandma Filomena Orazio always used to say, "Time heals all wounds." So when Apple made nice to the production industry, and then delivered the goods in grand style, we forgave and forgot, and came back to the lovin' arms of you-know-who.

Fast-forward to mid-2011. Apple's still chasing the consumer market, only this time, it's not desktops they're hawking, but gadgets—iPods, iPhones, iPads—and the sales units aren't thousands, they're tens of millions. What none of us really foresaw, though, was that the lure of pleasing the millions would snatch our beloved Final Cut away from us.

Because that's what did it. Our (relatively) tiny band of professionals was thrown under the bus to better serve consumers. Thought the pundits were crackin' wise when they called it "iMovie Pro?" Not on your life—Final Cut X is iMovie's bigger, brawnier brother, its ultimate upgrade full of intuitive idiot-proofing features for the mass market, removing all the guesswork, all those pesky choices from the drudgery of video editing.

Only that drudgery—those choices—that's what we do for a living. That's how we feed our families, and pay the rent and conduct our lives. Your hotrodded consumer product is pretty cool, old friend, but we just can't use it. And now we need to reacquaint ourselves with other old friends from Avid and Adobe and get back to work, because that's what we do.

How does that old saying go? Fool me once… but wait, this is actually the second big heartbreak with this lover. Shame on me, I guess.

Mario Orazio is the pseudonym of a well-known television engineer who wishes to remain anonymous. Email him at morazio@nbmedia.com.

You might not have noticed, but the cost of real estate is coming down.

I'm not talkin' about the beating you took on your McMansion's resale value; or, in the case of us engineers, how your beloved hovel, Casa Interlace, is now worth about the same as a cardboard refrigerator box. I'm talkin' another kind of real estate… pixels.

Time was that the surface area of a Plumbicon camera tube told you what kind of picture quality to expect.

But, as cameras shrank to shoulder-sized, so the imagers inside shrank, too. Preamps, matrices and post-processing lessened the nasty effects, but cameras didn't actually improve with the march of time; they seemed stuck with all the astounding quality of a 1975 big-tube model. Sure, the cams were pretty ratty in low light, but, hey… whaddya want for $50K? Magic?

The "digital revolution" might have revolted in your neighborhood, but in mine, a marginal-quality 2/3-inch camera tube became a marginal-quality half-inch CCD chip… now there's progress. One camera company even changed its corporate tagline: "Where 'good enough' is our very best." And when HD arrived, it was assumed that only the smallest physical chip possible would placate the camera marketplace.

And that, my children, is the Reader's Digest version of what got us into our current pixellated pickle: the rise of the DSLR.

WORKAROUNDS AND EXCUSES

Now, don't get me started on the overall stupidity of the DSLR workflow… there aren't enough hours in the day. Unusable form factor, skinny storage, split-system audio recording, jellocam distortion. And a hot image sensor chip that shuts the camera down every 10 minutes or so.

Sony's PMW-F3 (left) and Panasonics's new AG-AF100 cameras are among the first digital cameras in the companies' product lines to sport new big-sensor imagers.
But I never said the DSLR dudes were wrong.

Fact was, the big, fat sensor in a DSLR—capable of way beyond 1920x1080 HDTV—had enough geography to shoot in astoundingly low-light conditions. And that meant ultra-short depth of field, candlelit love scenes, cops-and-robbers night shots… all the shortcomings our cinematic brothers and sisters used to laugh so heartily about when we showed 'em our high-def cameras.

In retrospect, here was the ultimate dopey question: If the DSLR nuts were willing to jump through hoops to cobble together audio, camera support and storage workarounds, all for the sake of a bigger chip, why couldn't somebody just make a big-sensor video camera?

Simultaneously, light bulbs appeared over camera marketers' heads all over the globe. Well, maybe not all over; maybe just Japan… and maybe just two companies… whatever.

SENSORS EMBIGGENED

Turns out, both companies actually knew how to make a big sensor; they both sold DSLRs with pretty honkin' big chips. One of 'em—let's call it "Company P"—looked at its customer-focused mandate, and decided to be responsive—to jump right in and answer the call. Like lightning, their standard micro-four-thirds DSLR chip was cemented into a TV camera body, with multitrack audio, AVCHD recording and interchangeable lenses. Voila.

The other company—"Company S"—did nothing. Some critics weren't surprised.

At least it seemed like they didn't do anything. In reality, though, the elves in the research labs worked night and day calculatin' and blowin' chips. And spyin'. In the development process, they ran right up to the cinema guys' houses and peeked in the windows. And what did they see?

Big surprise… the "big boys" weren't playin' 'round with micro-four-thirds and old SLR lenses; their film cameras used pretty much what they'd always used—a 35mm gate and cinema prime lenses.

Back in the salt mines, the elves pounded out a big 35mm imager with a unique array of sensors, designed to overcome that lag that made horizontal motion so wobbly. They gave it a mount with electrical connections for all lenses, great and small.

And then… they screwed it into every camera they could, from the megabucks Electronic Cinematography systems right down through the rest of the line, including the little $6K indiecam.

The net result: two mainstream, trusted camera-makers with a host of choices between them. Big sensors abound, and you're the winner.

Now, you know ol' Mario can't afford to play favorites, and just because one of the "big two" seems to be out front, well, that doesn't mean there isn't another shoe waiting to be dropped somewhere. Prepare for the next volley in this battle… competing chips, cameras and systems that do more and cost less.

But permit me to strike a quasi-political pose for a moment, and opine this: The falling price of (pixel) real estate—thanks to ingenuity and competition—means real democracy for the rest of us, because now anyone can own a really great camera. Time to brush up on talent, because you can't blame the equipment any more.

You might not have noticed, fellow broadcasters, that "they" are really after our spectrum. Why, just recently Gary Shapiro, venerated leader of the CEA, (or as I like to call 'em, see-ya) and former booster-in-chief of TV set sales, opened the Consumer Electronics Show with a complaint that broadcasters are "squatting" on RF spectrum, impeding our wireless broadband futures. Squatting! Oh my ears and whiskers, as Horace Rumpole might say. Squatting! Let's have a brief review of the "ownership" of the aforementioned television broadcast spectrum, why don't we?

The Communications Act of 1934, the Congressional Act that established the regulation of the U.S. airwaves, enshrined the concept that in the USA, the airwaves belong to the people, and established the Federal Communications Commission to regulate said airwaves. Section 307(a) of that Act declares: "The Commission, if public convenience, interest, or necessity will be served thereby, subject to the limitations of this Act, shall grant to any applicant therefore a station license provided for by this Act."

So, this bargain was struck between the broadcaster and the people who owned the spectrum: we the people will let you use this broadcast channel to ply your trade, subject to the regulations of the FCC, and you, in turn, will use it to serve the public convenience, interest, or necessity by providing entertainment, news, alerts and warnings, and other programming that serves the greater good. All that worked well for a long time, until the demands for RF spectrum began multiplying.

TIMES CHANGE

The UHF television spectrum in the U.S., initially incorporating channels 14 to 82, was largely unused, save by a few entities such as an educational television channel in Houston, Texas, until congress mandated the incorporation of UHF tuners into all TV sets sold, sometime in the 1970s. As time passed, various needs arose, in public service communications and other quarters, and portions of the UHF television spectrum started being allocated to services other than TV. By then, the UHF TV broadcast spectrum stopped at channel 68.

Somebody got the bright idea in the 1980s that high-definition television would be a good thing to do. After a lot of to-ing and fro-ing, and research, and testing, and politicking, we reached the point where we decided that we would launch digital television broadcasting, aka DTV. DTV would be, as its name implies, digital, and it would incorporate, in addition to HDTV, the ability to broadcast SDTV, and just plain data. As someone in my past career used to say, "it's not just television broadcasting, it's a digital pipeline into the home."

GOING DIGITAL

In order to make the transition from analog to digital TV, as there was still a considerable supply of unoccupied UHF spectrum around, the FCC lent every broadcast TV station a second channel, and said, "Build a DTV station on it, and someday, you will be required to shut your analog station off, and give up one of the two channels you will temporarily occupy." That happened. We saw it, and it was good. HDTV was, and is, being broadcast, along with, in many cases, multiple subchannels, expanding the services offered by a broadcast station. Plans began to be made for a mobile broadcasting service.

Every U.S. television station spent the money and resources to put a digital signal on the air, then shut off their analog signal, freeing a lot of spectrum in the bargain. Five minutes later, there was a different message: "You broadcast guys are not putting the spectrum to its optimum use. Give it up, so we can use it for wireless data transmission, and we might pay you something for it." Now, we are told we are "squatting".

Gordon Smith, the president of the NAB, got it about right in his response to Mr. Shapiro's comments. He said that there probably isn't enough spectrum in the universe to accommodate this dream of transmitting everything to everyone individually.

And take a look at what these spectrum-enviers have in mind. The chief technology officer of Verizon said that sending all that video-on-demand stuff out over the cell network will probably clog it up royally. So, the answer is to transmit it, one-to-one, via separate RF signals. Sure looks to yours truly like this is a way to wrest RF spectrum from free over-the-air broadcasters and sell it to paid video services.

SPECTRUM USE

And Julius Genachowski, chairman of the FCC, is singing the same tune, saying that broadcasters are not putting the spectrum they occupy to its highest use. Earth to Julius… Get a clue! The FCC was created to serve the public convenience, interest, and necessity! Have you heard, J., that TV antenna sales are at an all-time high in the U.S.? Looks a lot like the public wants to watch free broadcast TV, otherwise why are they buying all those TV antennas? Doesn't that make broadcast television, ipso facto, the "highest use" of the spectrum it is occupying?

We don't yet know, of course, what will come of mobile DTV broadcasting. But many, if not most, DTV stations are filling up their respective 6 MHz blocks with subchannels. There is, for example, a DTV station in the Los Angeles area that carries no HDTV signal, but does carry 7 or 8 SD subchannels. Sandwich mobile into this, and TV broadcasters and the public are getting more and more out of a 6 MHz piece of spectrum.

We have already seen broadcasters get the short end of the stick as far as the spectrum allocations go. The original plan was to put all DTV stations on channels 14-62. They ended up on channels 2-52. That most certainly happened because broadband spectrum lusters realized that low VHF channels stink for digital transmission. Now, broadband spectrum lusters want the whole enchilada. In their perfect world, they would get all that spectrum to use for VOD, and they wouldn't have the broadcasters to compete with any more. But this couldn't happen, could it?

You might not have noticed, but … nobody's really watching. And by nobody, I mean you.

Even though it's your job, I think a lot of you aren't looking. At a scope, a waveform monitor, a phase meter, vector or even the ol' VU. I'll bet dollars to donuts you aren't watching.

Why? Because you don't really have to.

Sure, if you're one o' them FCC-licensed geniuses, well, you're signing your name to a legal document, so I guess maybe you're watching. Once in a while.

But as for the rest of us, just down in the trenches makin' pictures, uhh … no. Not so much. No one seems to care, and pictures still seem to come out the other end of the wire, regardless.

Fact is, every step of the way, from the moment a tiny speck of light or whispered sigh leaves its point of origin, we've got an automatic circuit watching, measuring, adjusting, watching some more. I call these the "watchers." Like the saying goes, the watchers watch so you don't have to.

But who's watching the watchers?

REASONS TO BE FEARFUL

There was a time when every engineer--heck, every TV production professional--knew how to read and interpret a waveform monitor. It wasn't easy; the idea that a green trace on a CRT could reveal secrets about vertical, horizontal, light, dark, color and timing… whew. Talk about abstract. But with a little practice, it became second nature; and no matter what stories we told everybody else, it wasn't rocket science.

So why, then, have we stopped watching? A bunch o' reasons, seems to me.

Let's start with "the automatics" … auto gain, auto iris, auto white balance, auto loudness. Those are my favorites when it come to blame. Now, these circuits aren't your grandaddy's old Automatic Level Control designs--voltage gets big, gain goes down. This is digital, buddy boy, and we all know that computers don't get things wrong. Sliding gamma scales, tapered slew rates … hard-coded in a chip, computed in real time. It's not gonna be wrong – why should I watch it? And even if I wanteda to change it, I bet those naughty automatic circuits wouldn't let me.

Reason number two: It's closer to rocket science than it used to be. In fact, I'd suspect the Mission Control folks would freak out if they saw what we're expected to monitor. It's not as simple as that ol' analog waveform; the colorimetry and high-def pulses are way beyond that. In the digital domain, we're looking at high-bandwidth transmission streams, compressed, muxed and demuxed … what is that, really? And don't even start with 8-VSB … the RF side of things taxes my wetware to the max.

WATCHING IS WORK

Finally, the third big reason … big as the elephant in the living room … laziness. Sloth. A "cardinal sin," as I recall. If I can't see anything wrong, and I'm not afraid of getting fired, why bother? What's in it for me?

Looks to me like only three of my engineering brethren are ever gonna need to pretend they're watching: the shader on a multicamera shoot; the post-production colorist; and ol' Hank up the mountain at the transmitter site. The rest of us need to conserve our energy--hey, it takes time to read a fine magazine like this one here. And those donuts aren't going to eat themselves.

Here's a quick quiz, to help determine whether you're a watcher, a watcher-watcher, or just lazy. Take out your Crayolas and make a quick sketch depicting each of the following: Parade, waterfall, bow tie, lightning, eye, arrowhead, diamond. Gotcha!

You thought those were English-language words, but they're actually all names of monitoring waveforms and patterns. Didn't know that? Impostor! Masquerading as a production tech or engineer, but unwilling to do the work … the serious work of holding every aspect of production, from picture aesthetics to technical purity to delivery, to the highest quality possible.

Don't have the gear? You need to get the gear. Whether it's the gorgeous, soup-to-nuts rackmount analyzer, or a software solution that runs on your computer--get equipped, get trained, and get serious. This ain't a spectator sport; time to stop watching the watchers, and take control.

Out there, you might have noticed that the quality of some broadcast DTV, particularly some HDTV, ain't quite up to snuff. Lord knows Mario has.

This is particularly noticeable because, as we have known for some time, digital video and audio don't, as the expression goes, "degrade gracefully," as their analog counterparts do. Here's what Mario is talkin' about.

Assumin' NTSC video is of high quality when it is transmitted and no multipath situations are encountered, the primary quality-degradation mechanism experienced by the viewer is weak signal strength at the receiver. As the signal becomes weaker and weaker, the picture on the tube gets fuzzier and fuzzier, until eventually it just vanishes into the snow. For analog audio, just substitute the word "noise" for "snow."

Viewers have generally demonstrated a high tolerance for fuzzy NTSC pictures, largely because the fuzziness is just a random, incoherent degradation of the still-comprehensible images; no disturbing, visually unrelated artifacts like blocks are generated. Mario is here to tell you that the same cannot be said for digital pictures.

We all know about the digital "cliff effect," also known in the early days of DTV transmission experimentation as the "valley of death." In a nutshell, this may be expressed in this way: either ya get a perfect picture, or ya get no picture at all. Well, now that we are transmitting and viewing digital images daily, we know that this ain't necessarily the whole story.

We have experienced a passel of digital artifacts in received DTV pictures and we will experience a passel more.

DIGITAL DEGRADATION

One familiar digital artifact is caused by the old nemesis: weak signal strength. Valley of death notwithstanding, when the signal strength of an ATSC DTV transmission at the receiver becomes marginal, macroblock errors appear in the images. These are manifest as portions of the picture turning to garbage; garbage in rectilinear packages.

These errors can be large or small, ranging from a very short, thin horizontal rectangle to a substantial chunk of the picture. These artifacts come and go. At the extreme, the whole dadburn raster can turn into a pig's breakfast, resembling a screen full of shards of broken glass, before the signal disappears completely. This sort of degradation is not necessarily or typically the broadcaster's fault.

The other type of digital degradation Mario is seeing is caused by the broadcaster, particularly when the broadcaster attempts to pack 10 pounds into a 5-pound bag. The root cause of such degradation is the fact that a DTV signal is a stream of compressed digital data, and, as is the case with all digital data streams, the various components must share a finite amount of digital bandwidth. It's a mathematics game, and some play it better than others.

A broadcast television channel carries a data stream with a bandwidth of about 19.39 Mbps, into which all the compressed audio and video elements must fit. This works okay, for the most part, when a single HDTV signal is being transmitted on a channel. Usually.

We know that a broadcast HDTV signal is very highly compressed, and that the more motion the pictures contain, the more stress is placed on the encoding or compression device.

At the extreme, for example, in fast-moving sports and suchlike, a channel transmitting even a single HDTV signal can occasionally fall apart with compression artifacts. We can see portions of the image turn to square blocks momentarily as the encoder runs out of gas, and we can also see such blocks in a quick scene change or a fast fade-up from black or white. This is often called "tiling," and the appearance is much different from macroblock errors. The smaller the pixels, the smaller the blocks: SD tiles are larger than HD tiles.

We know fer sure, too, that 720p HDTV is considerably less stressful to the DTV encoder than is 1080i HDTV, for all those reasons we have heard before.

Mario's main point here has to do with what's goin' on out there with DTV broadcasting. For all the familiar financial reasons, broadcasters are taking advantage of the ability of their ATSC signals to carry multiple programs. Taking excessive advantage, in some cases.

Most, but not all, broadcast DTV signals carry an HDTV program, which may be called the "main channel." Many also carry one or more additional "subchannels," which can range from low-resolution, limited-motion weather channels, all the way up to a second network program. All these programs have to share the channel's19.39 Mbps bandwidth, and its encoding resources.

PACKING ATSC DATA STREAMS

It won't come as a complete surprise to discover that there is a limit to how much stuff can be packed into a single ATSC data stream. One real-life example is a station in a major market that packed one HDTV signal and three SD signals into a channel, a not uncommon practice.

This particular station did use 720p for the HD signal, but the total package was just too dang much for its container. When watching the HD signal random compression artifacts flashed through the images, the frequency of their appearance depending on what was going on in the programming in all the main and subchannels.

They often took the form of little blocks momentarily appearing in people's faces, outdoor scenes, etc. People's faces, for example, suddenly appeared to be behind screen doors. When this channel eventually dropped one of its subchannels, the situation improved, but did not entirely disappear.

Another real-life station in a much smaller market broadcasts a 1080i network program on its main channel, a whole other broadcast network in SD on its first subchannel, and an SD version of the HD main program on its second subchannel. Both the 1080i main channel and the first subchannel typically have a whole heap of tiling and sundry compression artifacts, and the first subchannel experiences occasional audio dropouts, not to mention serious lip-sync errors.

Methinks all this is not the best way to attract viewers. What can be done about it? Glad you asked.

Recent-generation encoders have improved greatly. At least one station in a major market, which primarily carries the signal of a broadcast network that broadcasts in 720p, is able, with state-of-the art encoders, to successfully broadcast two, count 'em two, 720p programs simultaneously.

The primary 720p signal is allocated more bits than the secondary one, and it looks right good, with only the occasional small bit of tiling to be seen. The secondary 720p program doesn't look as good, but it is adequate for the purpose, and it doesn't usually contain much fast motion. On the other hand, stations attempting to broadcast a 1080i signal and two full-resolution, full-motion SD signals, are probably kiddin' themselves.

Approaches to improving the broadcast DTV multicasting problem include selection of the most advantageous scanning formats, judicious allocation of the available bit budget, and use of state-of-the-art encoding devices. Like DTV receivers, succeeding generations of DTV encoders have steadily shown markedly improved performance.

Mario thinks there is a lesson here for economically beleaguered broadcast TV stations. Bad pictures are not the best way to attract viewers to broadcast television.

Comment on this or any story. Write totvtech@nbmedia.comwith "Letter to the Editor" in the subject line.

You might not have noticed, but sitting at the top of the mountain ain't what it used to be.

'Twas a time, not too long ago, when my ol' buddy Engineer Hank sat at the top of the mountain, because that's where the transmitter was. Like a varicose vestal virgin, he kept the RF flame alive, and the transmitter's glow warmed the surrounding community, bathing it in television programming. (Nellie the Neuron tells me that's what we used to call it—before "content," we called it "programming.")

Today, Hank's in the basement. He pilots an asset management server, a real-time H.264 encoder, multiple outbound IP streams and, oh-by-the-way, glances at the transmitter remote readout every so often, just to keep it legal.

Mountaintop to basement—ain't that just the way it goes.

FAREWELL, MCLUHAN

Sorry, Marshall… the medium is no longer the message. These days, the message arrives in spite of the medium; the transmitter's spittin' out bits, not pictures. And rather than standing at the summit of the content purveyors' mountain, the broadcaster now stands down on the plateau, shoulder-to-shoulder with Cousin Twitter and Sister Hulu. And pervy ol' Uncle Torrent.

Point is, people pick and choose content from a bazillion sources every day… news online, weather from the smartphone, a TV series from its website. Funny how all our ranting about impeccable quality has vanished like the fluff off a dandelion; unverified online encyclopedias, blogs masquerading as reportage, even "glorious" 3D delivered in compressed half-bandwidth streams. But the marketplace speaks louder than a vuvuzela, and this is what consumers want… varying degrees of quality, based on delivery medium, subject, and immediacy. So quit yer jawbonin' over 100 Mbps streams, lossless codecs and 5.1 surround—it can't all be champagne and caviar.

TO EACH HIS OWN

Many decades ago, when yours truly used to carry a little green screwdriver in his pocket (to tweak the analog cameras), there emerged an annoying practice of newspapers buying up TV stations, trying to corral all the various routes of media delivery for a given market. Foreshadowing, you say, of today's content-delivery culture? Not so, says I. Except for the advertising department, content wasn't purposefully shared among the outlets; it was more likely that they competed to become the apple of their media mogul's eye.

Today, down on the plateau, our shoulder-to-shoulder neighbors are likely to be ourselves. We're distributing multiple content streams over the air, multiplexing a network feed with a bunch of over-compressed, down-market secondary feeds; and the viewers love it. We've got our live stream on the station website, plus an archive of every news story we ever did, no matter how trivial; and they love it. We've got a station-branded smartphone "app" where Dr. Morty reads you the weather; and they love it. And we've got an RSS feed with the exact same headlines as everybody else has; but because it's got our station's name on it… they love it.

Sounds to me like we're about half-way to becoming indispensible again—remind me exactly what's wrong with that?

FOSSIL OR FACILE?

And so, students, tell me what you've learned from all this, no matter how distasteful the message has been. Don't make me trot out that ol' railroad-barons-would-own-the-airlines fable… you get the point. Stop bowing to the lesser god of TV, and become an evangelist for content delivery—pictures, music, movies, text, 3D, 2D, 1D, whatever.

Is it revolting? Mmm… more like a revolt. A revolt against the tyranny of being told what to watch and when. And the dastardly, subversive element that enables this revolution is your former best friend, technology. Ask the audience why they insist on watching absolutely anything, anywhere, at any time—"Because we can," they say. Because technology enabled it.

But wait—technology! That's your thing, isn't it? You've been using technology to deliver content since Zworykin wore short pants. You rule this content-delivery thing, dude!

So you're not on top of the mountain any more. So you're down on the plateau with everybody else. Big deal. Remember—you're the enabler… you're the content-delivery technologist, and you've got a technology stepladder that lets you stand a little taller than everybody else. Climb on up!

Mario Orazio is the pseudonym of a well-known television engineer who wishes to remain anonymous. E-mail him atmorazio@nbmedia.com.

You might not have noticed, but… it's getting harder to hear around here.

Not that I'm hard of hearing, mind you. (This is how rumors get started.) What's getting harder, it seems to me, is the amount of work it takes to make TV shows so others can hear them.

Okay, so it's not really about being unable to hear the sound; it's about A) the ability to make the audio comply with specific laws and specifications; and B) to make it sound nice.

Part "B" I'm down with that. That's what we've always tried to do—at least those of us who were paying attention. It's Part "A" that's killin' me.

RECIPE FOR ALPHABET SOUP

I know it's hard to believe, but I don't pore over the Federal Register each morning, looking for trouble; but methinks you would have had to have spent the entire fall of 2009 on transmitter duty up on the mountain to have missed the reports on the progress of H.R. 1084, popularly referred to as the CALM (Commercial Audio Loudness Mitigation) Act. It's hard to imagine our legislators so bereft of crises that they turn to the annoyances of daily life to find busywork… but here it is, living proof: legislation, passed by both houses, which reminds the FCC (aka the Commish) to tell broadcasters to follow the (existing) rules. Sheesh!

And so begins the alphabet soup of television sound: H.R. 1084, victorious where its predecessor, H.R. 6209, failed; ATSC A/53 Annex B, section 5.5; ITU-R BS.1770; and AC3's spec for Leq(A). Got that? Need anything repeated?

Mostly, though, it all boils down to one little, English-language word: Loudness. I studied long and hard to learn to use specific, scientific-sounding terms like "gain," "modulation," and "amplitude" instead of simply saying "volume." And now I'm told to use the most amorphous, least specific term I've ever heard, which I'll call "that loudness thing."

Now that takes me back… way back, to when consumer audio equipment was called a "stereo" or a "hi-fi." I stuffed my pockets with the proceeds of my newspaper route and had a parent drive me to a local purveyor of consumer electronics—the appliance store—where I bought a floor model H.H. Scott-brand receiver. And there, on the front panel, next to one of the many knobs, sat a small slide switch labeled "Volume" and "Loudness." I was suspicious then, and I remain suspicious now.

A NOTION OF LOUDNESS

But semantics aside, I'm thinkin' that the loudness thing is a concept surrounding how sounds are perceived rather than the millivolt values we measure. And that's a valuable concept; how often do we sit staring at the meters, thinking, "I know the levels look right, but it sounds wrong!"

Enter our friends at Dolby, who seemingly have a solution for everything, although methinks they sometimes need to discover a problem first, which might benefit from that solution. It's a bit like the old adage that, "…if it wasn't for lawyers, we wouldn't need any."

Anyway, the Dolby geniuses helped our friends who make movies—"The Cinemah"—who had a similar problem with inconsistent audio levels, except that their patrons paid cash for tickets, and demanded satisfaction (unlike TV viewers, who potentially pay nothing, and demand satisfaction.)

Of course, that loudness thing doesn't entail every kind of loudness. It mostly means normalizing dialogue loudness.

Dolby's processing algorithm created a parameter termed "dialnorm"—guess what that stands for?—which arguably became the standard we use today for that loudness thing. And those are the juicy bits which formed the core of ATSC A/53 Annex B, section 5.5 (Dialogue Level): "The value of the dialnorm parameter in the AC-3 elementary bitstream shall indicate the level of average spoken dialogue within the encoded audio program." In short: The ATSC says you gotta do this.

Two problems, though: you need to be able to measure Leq(A), and I'll bet dollars to donuts that you can't do that yet; and you need to be able to fix it. For which, of course, you'll first need to be able to monitor it.

I PREDICT…

We ain't customarily in the business of shilling for hardware and software developers, but I will make a few predictions: In your mad Googling for Leq(A) monitoring solutions, you'll probably encounter Dolby's LM-100, the Neural Loudness Control, and the Linear Acoustic LQ-1000 in the hardware aisle; and as for software, there's the free "Audio Leak 3" for Mac, among others; and you ProTools folks will be looking for the "Signal Tools" plug-in, I bet. But you didn't hear it from me.

Yes, it's a pain in that place where the audio engineer most customarily rests; yes, there's something new to learn; and yes, it's gonna cost somebody a bunch 'o money. But outside of the legal things, and the regulatory things, and the technology things, implementing that loudness thing ultimately satisfies Part B up above… "make it sound nice"… and that's a good thing.

Mario Orazio is the pseudonym of a well-known television engineer who wishes to remain anonymous. E-mail him atmorazio@nbmedia.com.

You may not have noticed, but I’m a pretty spiritual character. And I’ve just returned from a retreat.

Like the mystics of old, we go to the desert once a year to rejuvenate… to re-commit. We put aside our daily routines, and avoid contact with the things that normally distract us. We seek to learn new truths, and to exchange our learned wisdom with other humble pilgrims like ourselves.

But when we get to the desert, it’s usually loud, tacky and expensive, and our tent is mostly full of the same ol’ crap that we saw last time through.

This year was different. The NAB Show spoon-fed us large doses of so-called 3D (it’s actually stereoscopy) which, I’m told, Mister and Missus America are going to be demanding from us any day now, and in bulk volume. I’m not convinced.

But, hey, nobody asked me; and besides, over the years, I’ve followed every trend they’ve thrown my way. Want shaky-cam? I’m the shakiest. Quadraphonic sound? I’ve got four mics in my backpack. Widescreen and HD? I’m know, as a wide kinda guy, and my def is of the highest order. I imagine I’ll survive 3D, too.

But, as you all seem to know, I’m not out lookin’ for the trendiest and glitziest. When I cruise the show, I want to see the best and the brightest… the wackier the better. So hop aboard my camel, fellow pilgrim, for a quick tour of the stuff that made my list for 2010.

Michael Bravin, vp of product market development for ARRI digital camera products accepts the Mario for the ARRI Alexa.ARRI ALEXA

You can whine about your sombreros, rickshaws and kossacks, but when it comes to ethnic stereotypes, the Germans have taken it on the chin for years… especially the implications of a certain rigidity of thought. Inflexible? Rubbish! Look no further than the Arri Alexa, and you’ll see flexible thinking incarnate… a real electronic cinematography (EC) camera, not a modded TV camera, that does everything you can think of—plus a few things you never thought of. Quickly configurable with a big onboard menu, it’s fast (that means sensitive) and responsive (that means pretty); and because it’s from ARRI, it’s got access to every cinema lens, viewfinder and accessory ever made. It’s well-engineered, well-built, and just oozing practicality; so maybe some of those German stereotypes ring true after all.

Sage Nishimure from Sony accepts the Mario Award for the Sony HXRNX5U NXCAM Camera.SONY NXCAM HXR-NX5U CAMERA

Sometimes, when the planets align, even the mightiest of companies stops and listens to that little voice from below... the voice of the customer. Sony’s been getting pretty good at it lately, and to prove it, here’s the most useful little format to come down the pike in a long time. Seems our friends noticed that every shooter, great and small, seemed to have a tiny, inexpensive consumer AVCHD camera in their kit bag, despite the consumer-ish drawbacks of the format, like AC3-encoded audio. The light bulb goes on over somebody’s head, and a pro-formatted AVC platform is born – NXCAM, with full-bore PCM audio. And the NX5U, built on the bones of the Z5, is a competent, practical way to launch it.

Setsuko Watanabe, staff engineer (L), and Jan Crittenden, Panasonic Broadcast & TV Systems product manager, accept the Mario for the Panasonic AG-AF100 cameraPANASONIC AF-100 4/3" CAMERA

The smokin’ trend of the moment—the DSLR as cinema camera—shines a big ‘ole spotlight on a dark and unexplainable fact: TV camera imagers are small, too small to gather the kind of light that delivers that oh-so-sexy short depth of field we all seem to drool over. Panasonic runs to the rescue, though, with the AF-100 and its big honkin’ 4/3-inch chip; it’s ready to accept photo lenses, has AVCCAM on-board recording to SDXHC cards, and all the usual goodies. Plus, an extravagant new feature: audio, the track the DSLR’s forgot—just like an old-fashioned TV camera.

Bob Frye (L), senior product manager, Pro Monitor Solutions, and Trevor Davies, senior director, Dolby Broadcast & Imaging Products, accept the Mario for the Dolby PRM-4200 Monitor.DOLBY PRM-4200 REFERENCE MONITOR

Frankly, my darling, I’m less interested in who’s-watching-the-watcher, than in what’s-the-watcher-watching… and how does he have any idea whether the colors are right? And here’s yer answer—the watcher (or colorist, timer, grading supervisor or whatever) had better be watching this reference-grade beauty from, of course, Dolby Labs. Finally, it’s the LCD reference monitor we’ve been promised for so long, by so many; calibrated to a multitude of colorimetric standards, it even replicates the grunge of an overset, bargain-basement home flat screen, so you can see what your stuff is really gonna look like. Responsible for the best one-liner of NAB 2010: Mario: “Okay, turn the monitor on.” Dolby engineer: “It is on.” Now that’s what I call black.

(L-R) Toby Sali and Fred Holmes with Mojo Pro Audio, accept the Mario for the Uncompressed Digital Wireless Microphone System from Joey Gill, TV Technology correspondent.MOJO PRO AUDIO DIGITAL WIRELESS MIC TRANSMITTER/RECEIVER

I’m not one for draggin’ out the “I” word—“ingenious”—too often. So let’s just say that the Mojo wireless “made my brain chuckle”. Everybody hates wireless for its tendency to… fail. Imagine a multichannel, unlicensed, spread spectrum RF signal path, digital from end-to-end… say, what do they call that? Wi-fi? Bingo… and using 802.11G for wireless mics has got to be the idea of the century. No analog hybrids here; and there’s enough bandwidth left over to run an IFB back down in the opposite direction. And with a flip of a switch, that transmitter becomes a receiver. Still chuckling.

Blackmagic Design CEO and Founder Grant Petty receives the Mario Award for the UltraStudioBLACKMAGIC DESIGN ULTRASTUDIO PRO USB-3

File this one under “promise fulfilled”: They told us that someday, there’d be a USB so fast and robust that you could, well, actually do things with it. Other than run mice and printers. One of the first, at least by my reckonin’, to cash in on the potential of USB3 is Blackmagic Design, who brought a couple of goodies to the NAB show that you don’t need a Philips-head to install. My favorite: the latest version of Grant Petty’s iconic video-audio I/O, in a sleek desktop package. Now it’s time for the rest of the world to catch up. Again.

Dan Marshall (L), vice president of sales, and Sam Blackman, CEO & Chairman of Elemental Technologies, accept the Mario for the Elemental Live Streaming Processor.ELEMENTAL TECHNOLOGIES LIVE STREAMING PROCESSOR

Speaking of technological promise foretold: Our friends at the chip farms have told us for years that, kinda like using a coathanger as an 8-VSB antenna, the general-purpose processors on their graphics cards could be harnessed for other tasks. I dare ya – name three you’ve heard of. Stumped, eh? Well, you can start with the high-performing Elemental Live Streaming processor, which farms out compression tasks among not just the microprocessor cores, but the graphics processors as well. Just like you thought, it’s pretty fast, what with all them processors a-pumpin’, but the best part is that when a stream goes down, the whole kit-‘n’-kaboodle doesn’t have to be restarted; built-in traffic cop software redistributes jobs and keeps on streamin’.

Jim Tierney, chief executive anarchist, Digital Anarchy, accepts the Mario for Beauty BoxPro USB-3.DIGITAL ANARCHY BEAUTY BOX

Sometimes, innovation is bold-faced obvious: How come my hot new camera can apply all sorts of flesh-tone filtering… fixin’ zits and shrinkin’ pores… but my super-dee-duper compositing software can’t? Digital Anarchy has taken that cosmetician code and bottled it, so you, too, can plug it into your image processing platform, restoring youth and beauty, even if you didn’t spring for the good camera like you should have.

Bruce Sharpe, president/CEO of Singular Software, accepts the Mario for Dualeyes.SINGULAR SOFTWARE DUALEYES

So here’s where I gotta confess that ol’ love-hate thing: I love the pictures those DSLR movie shooters can get… amazing depth of field, gorgeous colors. What I hate is all the rigmarole and work-arounds that go into using equipment for the wrong purpose. Audio guys, with your separate sound recorder—are you listening? The notion of regressing toward dual-system audio, in this day and age… man, it sends a chill down the spine. But if that’s the path you’ve chosen, well… might as well do a good job gluing the sound back onto the pix; and that means Singular’s DualEyes. Don’t ask me how, but it restores sync without making a hundred test edits like I always used to. I call that “pain relief”.

Jim Collias (L) Zylight director of engineering and Charlie Collias, sales director, accept the Mario for Zylight Active Diffusion.ZYLITE ACTIVE DIFFUSION

Wish I had a nickel for every time I’ve seen the gaffer atop the ladder, barkin’ his nonsensical jargon at the lowly grip: “Get me a piece of shower curtain. No, wait, a piece of spun. No… hold on…” The guy can’t figure out how much diffusion media to mount on the light, and some poor so-and-so is gonna climb that ladder over and over until he figures it out. Now, a workday miracle—continuously variable diffusion! Zylite, makers of best-in-class LED panels, showed an electrically-adjustable sheet of liquid crystal that might mean the end of scissors and clothespins. And if they build that DMX-controllable version they talked about, that gaffer may never get up on the ladder again… or even out of the chair, for that matter.

You might not have noticed the conspicuous absence of any broadcasters on the Federal Communications Commission, fondly known as the Commish these days. Could this be why it appears that the Commish doesn’t much care about broadcasting anymore?

After all, broadcasting is so twentieth century. We have lotsa new technologies that we might need to put on the wireless bands; so many that we might just need to grab the television broadcast spectrum so we can sell it to the highest new technology bidder.

Never y’all mind that broadcast television is still the only way to reach practically every household in the United States. If it ain’t interactive, it don’t count. Mayhaps we need to appropriate the funds to buy every U.S. citizen a smart phone. Yeah, that’s the ticket!

A GREAT LOSS

In this context we are doubly saddened to hear of the passing of James Quello, a stalwart Commissioner who served from 1974 until he retired in 1998. He was a radio broadcaster by background, and he was a standard-bearer for free, over-the-air television (which Mario knows is anathema to some).

Quello served as Acting Chairman of the Commish for a time in 1994, but he wasn’t just acting (thank you!). He did plenty as Acting Chairman. He was certainly the last broadcaster to serve as Chairman, and he might just have been the last broadcaster to serve on the Commish at all. Mario begins to get a clue as to why the Commish doesn’t care about broadcasting nowadays.

Let’s have a look-see at who is serving on the Commish today, why don’t we?

Chairman Julius Genachowski has a background in the computer/IT world. Uh oh! Aren’t those the guys who want our spectrum? Michael Copps has experience in trade development in the Department of Commerce, on the staff of former Senator Fritz Hollings, and as a professor of U.S. history. Robert McDowell’s background is as a telecommunications industry lobbyist. Mignon Clyburn served on the Public Service Commission of South Carolina and as publisher of a weekly newspaper. Meredith Atwell Baker served as Acting Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information, and as Acting Administrator of the National Telecommunications and Information Agency, whose mission, among others, is to advise the president on telecommunications and information policy.

Now Mario does not dispute that all these Commissioners are fine, upstanding, public-minded public servants. But methinks broadcasting still has an important role to play in our 21st century society to entertain, inform, and alert the whole dang U.S. public.

It seems only reasonable that broadcasting should have at least one seat on the Federal Communications Commission, one whose job it is to regulate broadcasting. Not out of existence, Mario hopes.

Mario knows that we, the public, are obsessed with all the latest electronic gadgets and gizmos, and with all the different ways we can get them to communicate with each other (the devices, that is). Mario doesn’t have any issue with that.

NEW MEDIA TAKING OVER?

James Quello Methinks, however, that if the agency that administrates the airwaves and communications has one tiny fault, it might be that it is too willing to contemplate throwing yesterday’s technology in the dumpster in favor of the newest technologies. Sure, these newbies need a seat at the table. But they don’t need the whole table to themselves.

If the good members of the Commish have been keeping up with the news (on their Web-enabled telecommunications devices, for example), they may well have heard that more people, not fewer, are using antennas to receive off-air broadcast signals now that analog television has been shut off. And some of them are even (gasp!) cancelling their cable subscriptions.

From the time that it became apparent that HDTV was an idea whose time was coming in the United States in the 1980s, the beloved Commish did a right fine job of nurturing the creation of a terrific advanced television broadcasting system.

It went way beyond analog HDTV to digital broadcasting. It has packetized transport, so, instead of becoming a dedicated HDTV broadcast system, as was proposed in most of the proponent systems, it became a digital transport system that can also carry SD television, and all kindsa other data too. It’s a sight more versatile than anyone imagined it could be before it happened.

Then recently, everyone involved did a bang-up job of shifting television broadcasting completely over to DTV, shutting off all the analog full-power transmitters and freeing the spectrum they were occupying. Looking back at all that, Mario would say it was quite a heave.

Now, if there were a broadcaster or two on the beloved Commish, we would be less likely, methinks, to be hearing about “higher uses” of the television broadcast spectrum. Uses higher than serving the entire American public with information, news, entertainment, and emergency alerts? Mario thinks not.

Mario Orazio is the pseudonym of a well-known television engineer who wishes to remain anonymous. E-mail him atmorazio@nbmedia.com.

You might not have noticed… but I’m thinkin’ like a schizophrenic these days. That is to say, I’m of two minds. I’m simultaneously holding two opinions. And like a pair of college girlfriends, neither viewpoint is too happy to acknowledge the other.

Viewpoint number one: Think big. Traditional, old-school engineers and technologists were trained that way, weaned on Yugo-sized cameras whose heat plumes could be charted from space, and videotape recorders with curb weights posted as fractional tonnage. Television lighting fixtures were rated in kilowatts, and camera cables were knitted from hundreds of discrete conductors.

Because, if you were in big-time TV, everything had better be big. Camera pedestals pressurized with compressed nitrogen. A lavalier mic the size of a dill pickle.

I’ve been told that turnabout is fair play, though; and that the 1970s production revolution introduced “featherweight” 35-pound cameras, and shrunk tape from 2 inches to less than a 1/2 inch.

I recall being skeptical; actually, make that indignant. How could smaller be better? And yet our newer, smaller techno-toys could go more places and do more things than their heavyweight forebears. Like the dinosaurs, big technologies became victims of their own massive bulk.

And so, enter viewpoint number two: Smaller is cooler. More flexible; more creative. Maybe we can shoot the whole show on lipstick cameras… and tell the Teamsters that this time, we’re packing three cases, not 30.

SIZE MATTERS, OR DOES IT?

So here’s a recap, in case you just joined us: Big is good… small is not to be trusted, except, of course, when small rules the day, and big is a liability. Cripes. Think I’m gettin’ woozy.

But let’s draw a line here. That was all about big iron versus tiny technology; but that question doesn’t get to the heart of the matter. What about the signals themselves?

In the days before color, methinks you could’ve called the TV signal “small.” Even after they wrapped it in subcarrier, TV was a fairly modest affair, a mere 480 active scan lines, and only half of those transmitted on an infrequent basis. But just as we started moving from big hardware to little hardware, there arose this great hue and cry to make the picture bigger. Ironic, no?

With the advent of hi-def, big was once more king… more scan lines, please, and longer ones, and faster, too. If 525 was good, then 1080 must be better! And stretch that puppy out, too—let’s pretend we’re goin’ to the movies.

New lesson: Smaller equals bad; humongous is the fad. Make a note.

But the story doesn’t end here. When the ATSC and the Grand Alliance and whoever all else started searching for an implementation, they found that the bigger-is-better mantra didn’t hold much water in the bandwidth department… even started talking about needing two full broadcast channel allocations to make a single HDTV signal. Just imagine how that would’ve loused up the spectrum auctions.

And in the midst of all this head-scratching and chin-stroking, big ol’ analog TV looks down at the mongrel nipping around its ankles—digital—and gets this brilliant, if obvious, idea: Time to get small.

The rest, as they say, is history… MPEG-2, 19.4 Mbps and all that jazz. The immense pixel counts, multichannel sound, the whole works, is wrapped up in a bitstream so small that we can even tack on extra SD channels, like local weather, news, or shopping channels. (Because we need more shopping channels. Seriously.)

So… back one more time to the scorecard.

Small hardware was bad, and big was the way to go; but then small got good, and big was a bad idea.

Small pictures, though, weren’t as good as big pictures. But big bandwidth was bad, and pictures stayed small until big bandwidth got small. And then they got big. The pictures, that is.

But wait, there’s more!

BIG SCREEN TO LITTLE SCREEN

I’ve heard a lot of jawboning lately about watching TV on my phone… real broadcast TV content, wherever I go, and whenever it strikes my fancy. Ummm… well, okay. Whatever.

But who here remembers seeing full-sized C-band and Ku-band dishes in the neighbors’ yards? And are you sure that dish wasn’t in your own yard? It’s the RF version of the whole process all over again. The 40-element yagi on the chimney begets the 12-foot analog Ku-band dish, which goes digital and begets the 1.8 meter dish, which goes MPEG-2 and begets the 18-inch dish.

And now they want to send TV to my phone, and without so much as a telescoping whip antenna. Sheesh!

This is the really schizophrenic part, though. After convincing me that a 25-inch CRT wasn’t big enough, making me buy a 42-inch plasma, and telling me I really need a 60-inch OLED… our marketing friends want to sell me on the benefits of a 1.5-inch LCD broadcast stream.

I’m not sure I can process that. Really. Cowering before the grotesquely-large screen in a friend’s living room, and five minutes later, holding a magnifying glass over my phone to catch the local weather. Tearing at the neurons, tangling the synapses—it’s diluting my mental capacity down to a fraction of what it once was.

But I hear that, at least for the moment, small is better than big, so that’s probably just fine.

Mario Orazio is the pseudonym of a television engineer who wishes to remain anonymous. E-mail him atmorazio@nbmedia.com.

You might not have noticed, while you were out there using all your electronic gizmos, that, although Moore's Law is not being repealed, its days are numbered. "Moore" on this later.

Those of us familiar with electronic technology know that all modern electronic marvels are based on transistors—lots and lots of 'em. According' to that hi-falutin' reference work, the Oxford English Dictionary, the first time the word "transistor" appeared in print was in the July 1, 1948, issue of The New York Times, in a column called, "The News of Radio."

The item read: "A device called a transistor, which has several applications in radio where a vacuum tube is ordinarily employed, was demonstrated for the first time yesterday."

Someone—not Mario, dear reader, who, as a kid in the 1950s was foolin' around with crystal radios (which are based on a semiconductor device, by the way) and one-tube radios and the like—guessed that transistors didn't have a future, 'cause they were so fragile. Glad I didn't think of that!

Transistors got more rugged, of course, and much, much smaller. The concept we know as "Moore's Law," named for Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, was popularized by Moore in a 1965 article in the magazine Electronics, but was predicted by a computer scientist named Douglas Englebart back in 1959. It sez, in a nutshell, that circuit density doubles roughly every two years.

WHAT IT IS

What is a transistor, anyhow? With respect to binary logic circuits, it's an on/off switch. It's a three-terminal semiconductor device in which the state of its two output terminals is controlled by a third terminal, called a base for a bipolar transistor or a gate for a field effect transistor.

There are various types of transistors, and various logic families that have been used since digital logic first reared its head. Many of said logic families, for example, the once much-used TTL (transistor-transistor logic), consume a heck of a lot of power and generate a lot of heat. In the 1980s, it was decided to develop the CMOS logic family for large scale integration (LSI), and we'll soon see why.

The CMOS family uses a type of transistor called the metal oxide silicon field effect transistor (MOSFET, get it?). This here device is a field effect transistor (FET) in which the device's gate (control terminal) is placed on top of a metal oxide insulator, which is in turn placed on top of the semiconductor substrate. Aluminum oxide, polysilicon, and other metal oxides are used as said insulating materials.

A CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) logic gate uses a complementary, symmetrical pair of MOSFETs, one p-channel and one n-channel, in a totem-pole type of arrangement. Some (notably RCA, when they were in the semiconductor business) have called the logic family COS-MOS (complementary-symmetrical metal oxide semiconductors).

Whatever it's called, CMOS, or COS-MOS, it has two attractive qualities as an LSI logic family: (a) high noise immunity and thus freedom from false triggering; and (b) low static power consumption.

The CMOS logic gate draws no significant power unless it is actually switching, unlike a number of other logic families like TTL. This means it runs cooler, and methinks it doesn't mind so much being a little crowded in very large scale integration (VLSI).

PACKIN' 'EM IN

Moore's Law has been working over the decades, and individual transistors have gotten really, really small. This has enabled chip designers to pack billions of 'em into a contemporary processor chip—the period at the end of this sentence could contain about a million logic gates!

The transistors are photo-etched on a flat (planar) silicon substrate, and the industry is quickly approaching the ability to place individual molecules on the substrate. But wait! What happens to Moore's Law now that individual transistors can almost be made on a molecular level?

The most recent generation of processor chips is based on a minimum feature size of 45 nanometers (one nanometer is 10-9 meter), which is about 0.0005625 the width of a typical human hair. The next step down is to a feature size of 32 nanometers. This, dear reader, is gettin' very small.

At a recent chip design conference, Stanford University's Mark Horowitz, said, about size scalability, "We're at an inflection point, you better believe it, and most of the world is in denial about it."

One IBM chip designer, Brad McCredie, said, "We're done scaling. We've been playing tricks since 90 nanometers."

Others foresee that by using more advanced photolithographic techniques and changing the physical design of the transistor, it will be possible to scale down to the 5 nanometer feature size, which, if it can indeed be done, will preserve Moore's Law until around, oh, say 2020.

One new approach to transistor design is the so-called FINFET, which is a departure from the traditional planar design of transistors. The FINFET has a "fin" portion that extends into the depth dimension, effectively standing part of the transistor up on edge, "tipping" it vertically out of the plane of the silicon wafer.

This increases the density to which transistors can be packed, and imparts better insulating properties, making it easier to control switching states, gate leakage, and suchlike quantum maladies of VLSI design.

Other new technologies proposed to stave off the end of Moore's Law include such devices as gold and silicon nanowires, carbon nanotubes, and something called "DNA origami," (I am not making this up!).

Whew! Fasten yer seat belts. It's gonna be a wild ride!

Mario Orazio is the pseudonym of a well-known television engineer who wishes to remain anonymous. E-mail him atmorazio@nbmedia.com.

You might not have noticed that batteries don't charge themselves. Yes, you've stumbled onto Quest for Knowledge, NAB 2009 edition.

Look, there's only one legitimate reason to go to the big show each April. It's to get away from the office and maybe play a little golf in the desert sun.

On the other hand (where, hint to my secret identity, I still have five fingers), you probably ain't going to get your bean counters to approve a paid vacation these days. So you have to call it a need to learn about equipment.

The NAB Show greatly cooperates in this scheme. They offer miles of aisles and tides of guides. But enough about me and my ilk. How about that information?

Let's start with that aforementioned battery. I was wandering down a convention aisle when a sign grabbed my eye (which can hurt). It said Dynacore had a "self-charging battery."

Methinks that would make a good power source for a perpetual-motion machine. But I'm going to cut Dynacore a break. Their battery has a built-in charger, so you can plug it directly into an outlet instead of lugging around an extra system. And Dynacore ain't based in an English-speaking country, so they've got nothing to be ashamed of.

Likewise, I'm going to give a pass to those folks who say Anton-Bauer had the first solar-powered battery charger or that Marshall or Nebtek had the first LCDs visible in that there sunlight. I didn't see any such claims in their exhibits, and they can't control what we (ahem) "fact-checking" reporters and editors dream up.

ZERO DELAY

Boxx is a different story. Their Meridian transmission system was called "Zero-Delay." Really? Zero?

Light is pretty fast stuff. It'll get from one end of a studio to another before you can say boo, but it takes a good long while to get from the moon to the earth and a heck of a lot longer to get from the sun to either.

Heck, even at a mere 22,300 miles above the equator, geostationary satellites make a round-trip conversation take close to half a second for a reaction to get to the person who spoke. "Zero-delay?" I don't think so.

At least Boxx didn't keep me waiting too long. Right on their data sheet, "Zero-delay" is defined as less than 1 millisecond. I ain't going to say that ain't a pretty brief period, but it's enough time for about 63,000 HDTV pixels to go flying by, which is a larger number than zero in my book.

NTT, another bunch of folks with a speedy transmission system at the NAB Show, had this quaint way of referring to less than 1 millisecond, "less than 1 millisecond." And they ain't native English speakers, either.

Maybe Boxx was just being overly enthusiastic. At least Boxx's product sheet (and Web site) clearly explained their terminology. I'll chalk Fusion-io's giant "1,250" as a label for the 1,024 simultaneous streams they were feeding from a solid-state drive to too much or too little coffee consumed by the sign maker.

And I just feel sorry for J. P. Claude Inc., with their huge pile of literature announcing "Media Processing of Exiting Content" instead of "Existing Content," but, hey, it sort of works either way.

No, none of that got me riled up like being unable to find out about stuff that seems to matter. Remember B.E.T.? I ain't referring to Black Entertainment Television.

Back in the days of videotape, TDK wanted to be a major supplier, so they took out ads touting how good their B.E.T. was—some number per meter squared. So I figured this must be something important, and I tried to learn more about it.

I asked around at various tape suppliers, and they had no idea what I was talking about. Then I asked at TDK, and they had no idea what I was talking about. So I showed them the ad, and they wrote the home office.

A long time later, I got a technical paper about surface smoothness, methinks. It turns out B. E. and T. were the initials of the guys who made the measurements. I hope their mothers got to see the ads.

So, at this year's NAB Show, Panasonic introduced some new P2 cards. They're called the E series, which means the plain ones are now the A series.

LIFE SPAN

They're a lot less expensive, which means the E stands for economy, methinks. But, get this: Besides being a lot less expensive, they're also twice as fast! And they're available from the usual suspects: Panasonic, Fuji, Maxell—all of which had them in their booths.

Well, geez, why would anyone want to buy another A-series P2 card? That's life. That is, the reason you would want to buy more A-series cards is that E-series cards have more limited lifetimes—a mere five years. P2 cards have lifetimes?

"P2 cards are considered to be one of the most durable video storage mediums available," said Michael Hall, chief information security officer at DriveSavers, in a recent press release about how they can recover data from the little solid-state vaults. Lifetime issues? Heck, no.

"...Like all removable media, they are inherently susceptible to physical failure..."

Curiouser and curiouser. So I visited Fuji, Maxell, and Panasonic and asked about the lifetimes of P2 A&E cards (why do storage media use names that make them sound like basic-cable channels?). "The E cards will last at least five years," I was told. "The A cards will last longer." Why? What failure mechanism? How many write/erase cycles? Read cycles? Something? Anything?

Maybe some mother's kid knows.

Mario Orazio is the pseudonym of a well-known television engineer who wishes to remain anonymous. E-mail him atmorazio@nbmedia.com.

You might not have noticed that, in order to solve a problem, it helps to know what it is. Meanwhile, you probably have noticed that gravity exists. Yes, once again, I'm here to rant about aspect ratio.

If you're reading this sorry excuse for fish wrap, chances are pretty good that you're either an engineer or know one. Engineers solve problems.

Ask an engineer how much two and two is, and watch in fascination as a spreadsheet gets built, and various numbers appear on the screen, depending on errors of formulas or formatting. If you see 3.99, consider yourself lucky. It's within "engineering accuracy."

Now ask an engineer to solve a real problem, like people committing suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. Education? This is not an area of engineering expertise. Counseling? Likewise. Barriers? Maybe, but potential suicides might climb over them. Nets? Not bad, but there are liability issues. What if the impact with the net causes death or disability? Too dangerous.

Aha! The ideal solution! Tear down the Golden Gate Bridge. Never again will there be another suicide jump off of it. Alternative solution: Kill everyone; no one will ever again commit suicide. Both solutions are presented to management, which will choose, based on preferences, for either the Golden Gate Bridge or life. "But, Mario, isn't that a rather extreme and absurd example?" I'll cop to extreme. Absurd? Have you watched any television lately?

NEW EXAMPLE

Once upon a time, cinematographers shot film, and all was well—as long as you didn't count the time and effort of processing that photochemical imaging medium. (My last remaining neuron, Nellie, wishes to announce that the last three words of the previous sentence were used to show that the SMPTE Journal has absolutely nothing over TV Technology).

The aspect ratio of the pictures on said film varied starting approximately from Day Two. Maybe Edison picked a screen shape of 4:3, but, by the time the NTSC said it had picked 4:3 to match "motion picture practice," movies had already switched to 11:8 for a decade. And before that, they were narrower than 4:3 because of the soundtrack eating into the frame. And after that, they got wider than 11:8 (the "Academy aperture"), wanting to offer something TV couldn't.

By the time the dust settled around the early 1980s, pretty much the narrowest film aspect ratio was 4:3 (ratios, like digestive systems, have colons), and the widest was CinemaScope (which someone once told me was the first English word with a capital letter in the middle).

Nellie informs me that I could do a whole other column on the shape of CinemaScope (assuming my masters at TV Technology would be willing not to withhold my daily gruel if I did such a thing). But that wasn't the rant I had in mind for this month, so call it "64:27."

'Round about then, folks had been considering modern HDTV for a while ("modern" being thousand-line or more), so SMPTE set up a group to look into high-def electronic production. One of their questions was imager shape.

So they solved what they saw as an engineering problem. Enter spreadsheet formulas. Lo and behold (and I still ain't sure how to lo), the minimum imager-area loss for any shape between 4:3 and 64:27 is 16:9.

Okay, I cheated a little. The engineers on the SMPTE HDEP group used 4:3 for the narrow end alright, but they called CinemaScope 2.35:1, which made the shape for minimum area loss a wee mite less than 16:9. But there's the fun parade of facts if you round upward.

First, (16:9)=(4:3)x(4:3). And (64:27)=(16:9)x(4:3). But, wait! There's more!

A 16:9 aspect ratio allows a big 4:3 image to be displayed next to three stacked smaller 4:3 images on the same screen. The 16:9 aspect ratio is near the geometric and linear means of the then-most-popular global movie-screen shapes, 1.66:1 and 1.85:1. It's close to the shape of shooting 35mm film with three perforations per frame edge instead of four. It was close to the shape of a proposed 1.5x anamorphic-lens shooting system. It was close to an existing standardized cinema screen shape (1.75:1). And there's more!

In adapting Rec. 601 to 16:9, the new sampling rate of 18 MHz wouldn't violate the multiple-of-2.25-MHz criterion. A memory read at 4fsc could create a 16:9 image; at 3fsc it could create a 4:3 image. It provides integer values for multiplexed-analog-component systems. For HDTV, it fits existing memory sizes. It worked in Thomson's Dynamic Pixel Management cameras.

That's all true. It's also a load of hooey. For instance, if the new shape was 5x3, it would allow a big 4x3 picture with four smaller 4x3 images stacked next to it.

The bigger problem is that pictures ain't an engineering problem. Thanks to gravity people move horizontally, which is how come cinematographers shoot film with common sides regardless of picture shape. Folks move across the frame edge simultaneously in any shape. But the 16:9 imager shape is like tearing down the bridge. To get a 4:3 picture, you lop off the sides.

At least during the digital-analog simulcast period, broadcasters could carry full 16:9 on their digital channels and pick letterbox or center cut for the analog. Now that analog's gone (or leaving), there's just the 16:9.

Meantime, most Americans still watch 4:3 screens and get their TV via cable or satellite. Those redistributors don't assign techs to watch each channel and adjust the downconversion instantly based on what's on. They just lop off the sides (lest customers complain of annoying black bars).

Now, then, producers could use AFD to specify how different-shape screens should show every moment of every commercial or program, and that AFD metadata could be recorded and carried right through the whole broadcast chain (just like dialnorm). And cable and satellite ops could use metadata-sensing downconverters.

Gotta stop. Nellie's in hysterics.

Mario Orazio is the pseudonym of a well-known television engineer who wishes to remain anonymous. E-mail him atmorazio@nbmedia.com.

You might not have noticed that broadcasters still exist. The reason you may not have noticed is that some famous broadcasters are into other businesses.

That ain't exactly wet-ink news. At one time or another, if you bought a Fender guitar, a Steinway piano, a copy of Woman's Day magazine, a Columbia record, a ticket to a New York Yankees game, a DVD of a Paramount movie, a Child Guidance toy, or a Holt, Reinhart & Winston book, you were sending money to CBS.

All four major U.S. commercial TV networks are associated with movie distribution studios. Three are associated with theme parks (and methinks my last remaining neuron, Nellie, wouldn't be too surprised to learn that the fourth is, too).

DIVERSITY LIVES

Like any big conglomerates, they're diversified. Maybe that'll help them survive the biggest economic mess since The Great Depression (and I ain't referring to the hypothetical day when Mr. Rogers didn't smile), but, unfortunately, it tends not to focus their interest on broadcasting.

Hey, they ain't alone. Last month, we celebrated the 88th (or so, but 88 is a lucky number in big chunks of Asia, so I'm going with it) convention of the good old National Association of Broadcasters. So, can you name one exhibitor that showed a TV transmitter?

The NAB convention ain't been a majority-broadcast convention in I don't know how long—decades probably. I remember when they stuck Internet things over at the Sands Convention Center, and it was more crowded there than at the main convention halls.

Heck, even when broadcasters, themselves, exhibit stuff, it ain't necessarily broadcast. A big chunk of the Central Hall at the NAB conventions for the last few years has been devoted to NHK. Methinks that's a Roman-alphabet abbreviation for "Japan Broadcasting Corp.," but what they've been showing has been on a 40-foot-widescreen. Either living rooms are a lot bigger in Japan than I've been led to believe, or Super Hi-Vision ain't exactly intended for ordinary broadcasts to the home.

EXAGGERATED REPORTS

"But, Mario, isn't over-the-air broadcasting dead?"

To paraphrase Mark Twain (who paraphrased himself), those reports have been exaggerated. More to the point, you'd better hope they're wrong.

Here's a case in point, a report from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press issued on March 12 of this year, not one whole heck of a long time ago. It lists "Regular Sources of Local News." Based on a survey of more than 1,000 U.S. adults conducted earlier the same month, 66 percent use TV, 41 percent newspapers, 34 percent radio, and 31 percent the Internet. If you add in online TV, the TV number increases to 68 percent.

So, how about we delve into those sources a wee mite more? Talk about dying media, and newspapers pop right to the top of the list. The Rocky Mountain News, which had been Denver's newspaper since 1859, didn't quite make it to its 150th birthday. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer followed. Expect more papers to close soon.

The Pew Internet number is strong and growing, but 13 percent of it is online newspaper sites and 11 percent online TV sites. Take away those, and just where is the local news that folks get from the Internet supposed to come from, eh?

Likewise, as more and more radio stations get programmed remotely, they ain't going to have much in the way of local news departments. That leaves TV, but it ain't immune to our analysis.

There are a whole heck of a lot of sources of TV news that ain't local U.S. broadcasters, and I include in that grouping broadcast-related ones like Fox News and BBC World News. But that ain't local news.

I'd be royally thrilled to be proved wrong, but methinks that, except for a handful of local cable operations, the only source of local news on TV comes from a local broadcaster. So, if local broadcasts go away, so does the public's number one source of local news. Q.E.D.

That's news. How about sports?

SPORTS TOPS THE LIST

This time, let's try Nielsen Media Research, with results of an HDTV study released in December of last year. First of all, they found that sports events were the most popular form of HDTV programming. Guess what was number two? Right, sports commentary programming. HDTV households watched 45 percent more sports events and 31 percent more sports-commentary programs than they did dramatic programming.

Dramatic programming can be had on dozens of cable and satellite channels, not to mention DVDs and Blu-ray discs and Netflix and other downloads. Sports, on the other hand (where—hint to secret identity—I have five fingers), except for ESPN and a few other outlets (including boxing on HBO and Showtime) belongs to broadcasters.

Shall we continue down Nielsen's list? It probably ain't any big surprise that sports is tops when it comes to HDTV, but number three is—ready?—political programming. Methinks C-SPAN didn't go HDTV when I wasn't looking, so that, too, goes into the broadcast category. Want to sell more HDTVs? You'd better hope TV broadcasting continues.

VIVA LA BROADCASTING

I ain't here to be a cheerleader for those broadcasters; I'm more of a worry wart. Many folks who are getting direct reception of off-air digital broadcasts are finding they don't get all of the stations. Top-engineer Merrill Weiss recently reported on some scary reception issues in the field relating to suspension-bridge towers. Methinks they ain't going to be dismantled to assist broadcasters. So there's selective reception.

Some TV broadcasters have responded with plans for robust mobile transmission. But, (A) the scary Weiss report was based on mobile stuff, (B) digital TV stations ain't the only source of mobile programming, and (C) do folks really want to watch TV on cell phone screens?

At least the mobile-TV folks are trying to figure out ways for over-the-air broadcasters to stay in business (without necessarily teaming up with movie studios, theme parks, or piano manufacturers). Produce or distribute TV programs, equipment or sets? Help keep broadcasting alive!

Mario Orazio is the pseudonym of a well-known television engineer who wishes to remain anonymous. E-mail him atmorazio@nbmedia.com.

You might not have noticed that equipment doesn't always work. That's actually a good thing, not a bad one. No, this ain't my idea of an April Fool's Day joke.

Maybe you have noticed the part about equipment not always working. Any time you think someone has made a foolproof system, take a gander at the Grand Canyon. If a trickle of water can do that, you ain't got a snowball's chance in a megawatt transmitter of getting through life without something popping on you.

If you've got a redundant system, you can be sure that whichever unit is on the air is the one that'll fail. If you've got an automatic switchover system, count on the automatic switchover breaking. Got dual power supplies feeding a diode bridge? The diodes will fail in a way that'll get you.

EVERYTHING BREAKS

In the hazy mists of what was once my memory (one working neuron named Nellie), I seem to recall a show in my youth when a clipped piece of wire landed between signal and ground at the very moment the countdown to live transmission reached zero. A mentor came by to cheer me up after I'd found the malicious metallic millimeter. "Equipment knows when it's on the air, kid."

Now then, there ain't any doubt in what's left of my mind that equipment has gotten better. Back in the days of tube-based amplifiers and cameras, we'd be popping those glass heaters in and out on a daily basis. Cameras and monitors needed to be adjusted at every opportunity. Editing videotape with fluid, microscope and blade approached the complexity of brain surgery, and I ain't entirely sure from which direction.

So, yes indeedy, I'd much rather have today's equipment. But, no offense, I'd rather have it with the training we had in the old days. Case in point: bars and tone.

Color bars were invented for setting up composite-color encoders. I figure a bunch of you are thinking, "What does 'setting up' an encoder mean?" Maybe some of you are wondering what composite color is.

Anyhow, I won't dwell on bars. Tone is bad enough.

Tone, in case you ain't noticed, is, pretty much by definition, one amplitude of one frequency. As a convenient level at which to set a reference, it's fine. But that's just about all it can do. Back in the old days, we knew that, so we ran both frequency and amplitude sweeps. We also knew that FM emphasis would boost high frequencies one whole heck of a lot, so we compensated (if you don't understand this sentence, look up "preemphasis;" it'll be a worthy part of your education).

OUT OF THE BOX

These days? Well now, I was asked a while back to check out a plant. Tone stuck in one end came out at the same level at the other end—unless you boosted its level a bit. Then it clipped. The engineer who put the facility together wasn't bad but hadn't been educated about peak levels and headroom. The analog-to-digital converters seemed to work fine right out of the box, so no one bothered to check the settings for reference level.

The place had some stereo synthesizers, too. When one of them was bypassed, there was about a 10 dB imbalance favoring the left. When another was bypassed, just about as much imbalance favored the right. No one had educated the engineer about how that type of stereo synthesizer worked, sending some frequencies to one channel and others to the other. Single-frequency tone went one way on one and the other way on the other, and gains were "adjusted" so the system was "balanced," which really meant they were wildly misadjusted to create a huge imbalance. But everything "worked" right out of the box.

Did I mention how we used to slave to get color right on old monitors? Nellie says I did. These days, you just flip on the old LCD, and everything's great.

Now then, I ain't going to get into the contrast ratio or color gamut or even vertical viewing angle of that there LCD. I'll just ask a simple question. Before you bought it, did you ever feed it black?

If you've ever done shading—er, painting—um, if you've ever tried to match the color on two or more cameras (even those delightful, modern, chip-based jobbies), you know that one of the toughest things is to get the blacks properly color balanced. So, having a monitor that can display a nice, flat, purely black black is pretty important for that purpose. But I digress.

BE PREPARED TO FIX IT

Nellie made me write at the beginning of this sorry excuse for thoughtful opinion that all equipment eventually breaks. But that's okay. That's why we humans hang around, to notice the failure and do something about it.

Folks say practice makes perfect. I don't know about that, but I do know that back when equipment went on the fritz all the time, we got a lot of practice at noticing problems and fixing them.

When you know an amplifier is bound to fail, you keep a spare amp handy, you know how to patch the inputs and outputs quickly, and you keep your eyes and ears alert to the first signs of failure. When everything "works" right out of the box, you get a little complacent about spares, labeling and training. Maybe today's equipment works better than the old stuff did, but it seems to Nellie and me that we see more down time than we used to.

When you know a color monitor is going to drift, you check its calibration frequently against a reference. When you think the monitor is fine right out of the box, you end up airing yellowish (or insert your favorite color here) pictures on account of the monitor being too blue (or insert color complementary to your favorite color here).

Yes, I know the economy is tough, and training costs money. But everything breaks.

Mario Orazio is the pseudonym of a well-known television engineer who wishes to remain anonymous. E-mail him atmorazio@nbmedia.com.

You might not have noticed that the Emmy award for Lifetime Achievement in Technology & Engineering was given in January to Ivan G. Seidenberg, chairman and CEO of Verizon Communications. Maybe there's a method to that madness—something TV broadcasters, regulators and legislators might want to take note of.

It's madness on account of Emmy awards traditionally having something to do with TV. Verizon, unless my last remaining neuron, Nellie, is very much mistaken, is a phone company. "But, Mario, hasn't Verizon also been providing multichannel TV service?"

You've got a point there, a point being a zero-dimensional infinitesimal dot. At the end of October, Verizon reported it was serving a whopping 1.6 million TV customers, having added 233,000 in the ending quarter. If they've done even better since then, they might have been up to a full two million by the time the Emmy was awarded. That would put them well below Bright House Networks, a cable-TV company you might never have heard of, which had more than 2.3 million subscribers as of June.

NO OFFENSE

Now then, I ain't scoffing at Verizon's achievement. Getting even 1.5 million subscribers in just three years ain't bad. Near as Nellie knows from nosing through Verizon's online press releases, the company's FiOS TV service started in late September of 2005.

That's how come it's madness. Seidenberg's a nice, diligent guy. It looks like he started out as a cable-splicing assistant for New York Telephone, right out of high school. With a little time out for Vietnam and college, he stayed in the telco biz until he became the big cheese at Verizon. If there's a telco equivalent of a lifetime-achievement Emmy (the Alex?), he probably deserves one.

Heck, go ahead and give him some kind of visionary Emmy, too, for dreaming up FiOS TV way, way back in 2004, and maybe even a charitable executive Emmy for sitting on the board of the Museum of Television and Radio. But, although three years is apparently the lifetime of an ant queen, it ain't very much of the average human life. Lifetime Achievement Emmy award for television technology and engineering? It is to laugh! But then there are disasters.

I ain't talking here about TV shows that don't even register on Nielsen's charts. I'm talking about real disasters: weather disasters, earthquakes, wars—stuff like that there. Some of them last longer than the lifespan of an ant queen. Most of them last longer than the lifespan of a mayfly, which, Nellie tells me, is a night or two.

LOCAL NEWS IS STILL HOT

How do you get your news? Fewer and fewer folks get it from newspapers. More and more are getting it from the Internet. But that's big news like the size of the Madonna-Ritchie divorce settlement. When it comes to local news, survey after survey says most Americans get it primarily from TV stations.

It's on account of lots of reasons. For one thing, Nielsen says TV viewing increases every year. We're up to eight hours and 18 minutes per day per household as of the third quarter of 2008. That's the highest ever.

Then you've got your viewing habits. You catch the news and then primetime, primetime and then the news, or news and then primetime and then news again before bed. Late-shift workers fit it in, too, or go for a morning news show.

For another reason, those crawls and marginal notices can provide news to part of a viewing area while letting those in other parts keep enjoying that autopsy footage. Try adding news to a radio station's music programming without interrupting it.

Then you've got your on-camera news people, the ones getting soaked in the hurricane or singeing their eyebrows near the forest fire or diving under the anchor desk during the earthquake tremors. They're us. When they say, "Let's get out of here," it's time to go.

Anyhow, whatever the reasons, TV is still the number one source of local news. That's fact one. Fact two is that disasters often cause power to go away. Fact three is that analog TV (at least the U.S. full-power broadcast flavor) is supposed to go bye-bye this year.

I wish I could mention a fact four of many inexpensive, reliable, battery-powered digital TVs being available in stores. But I can't. Nellie won't let me lie like that.

MADNESS IN THE MAKING

So, let me try on a post-transition disaster scenario for you. There's a disaster—fire, earthquake, hurricane—you pick it. Said disaster knocks out power. Along with lost power goes lost high-speed Internet access, even if your cable-TV cable is intact. Don't believe me? Kill your main circuit breaker and see how long your broadband modem continues to function.

Your cell phone will keep working—if the towers are still up. But I wonder how much data rate the wireless phone company will devote to Web surfing when everyone's trying to make phone calls. And I wonder what happens when your battery runs out.

Now then, your main TV went dark, too. But, if you live in a disaster-prone zone, chances were pretty good that you had one of those $5 Wal-Mart or Walgreens battery-powered black-and-white jobbies and a stash of batteries. Or maybe you had one of those portable radios with a TV-audio band.

Yes, I know you're supposed to turn on the old portable radio, but what do you tune it to—one of those stations programmed from a thousand miles away with no newsroom in your area? I don't think so.

So maybe the Emmy for lifetime achievement is meant to cover a lifetime spent providing wired communications service that works even when the power goes out. Maybe it's meant to instruct us that the phone company still has more concern for service reliability than the developers of digital TV ever had. Maybe picking someone who started splicing cables is meant to indicate that wireless ain't necessarily the be all and end all.

Yes, maybe so. Otherwise, it's all madness.

Mario Orazio is the pseudonym of a well-known television engineer who wishes to remain anonymous. E-mail him atmorazio@nbmedia.com.

You might not have noticed that Feb. 17 is going to be a good day to celebrate TV technology. But it ain't a day most of us are going to have to do anything different with that there technology.

As for the celebrations, you could start with the anniversary of Pope Pius XII naming St. Clare of Assisi as the patron saint of television in 1958. Nellie, my last remaining neuron, and I slaved away for entire seconds coming up with this list of other stuff that happened on Feb.17:

It's the birthday of celebrities Kelly Carlson, Janice Dickinson, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Paris Hilton, Michael Jordan, Mary Ann Mobley, Huey Newton, Lou Diamond Phillips, Denise Richards, Rene Russo, Montgomery Ward, Dame Edna, and Larry the Cable Guy, and they've all appeared on TV.

In 1995, it was the date of the 11th Soap Opera Digest Awards. In 1955, KTVF went on the air in Fairbanks, Alaska. In 1958, WETV started transmitting public television in Atlanta, and, in 1964, WMEM did the same in Presque Isle, Maine. In 1938, John Logie Baird demonstrated color TV to the public in London.

ANALOG SHUTDOWN

There's also something you might have heard of about an analog shutdown. Now then, that doesn't mean analog TVs are being turned off. Nope. All the analog TVs connected to cable, satellite, telco IPTV, video games, DVD players, and stuff like that there will work the same as they did on Feb. 16 (which is when daily TV newsreel broadcasts started in 1948).

As for analog TV broadcasts received over the air via antenna, in every country of the world other than the United States of America, nothing special is going to happen on Feb. 17, and that includes border broadcasters in Canada and Mexico. In Wilmington, N.C., nothing's going to happen. In any market, Class A and other low-power analog broadcasts can continue into Feb. 18 (when something named Pluto, which we used to call a planet, was discovered in 1930) and beyond.

If you're a full-power, U.S. TV broadcaster who hasn't yet shut down analog transmission, you can bust out the champagne to celebrate a mandatory reduction in your power bill starting at midnight that night (assuming a bizarre bill in the Senate to delay things for a whole whopping month doesn't become law). A bunch of us will have to do some fancy footwork changing frequencies for our digital transmissions, but even that group can still celebrate the energy savings. Yes, there are plenty of reasons to celebrate on Feb. 17.

What there ain't next Feb. 17 is a requirement to do anything digital, high definition, surround sound, widescreen, or anything like that there. Allow me and my poor, overworked neuron, Nellie, to take a crack at explaining why not.

DIGITAL DEADLINE?

First there's that digital-transmission bit (okay, more like 19.4 million of those bits per second). Some stations started transmitting that way in 1996. A bunch of others were required to transmit that way in 1999. Most of us had to do it by 2002, and all of us were supposed to do it by May of 2003.

Yes, I know that not all of us made that deadline, for solid reasons and weak ones, but that was the deadline. There is no deadline for transmitting digitally next Feb. 17. Zip. Zilch. Zero. None. Analog might go bye-bye (see all the above exceptions), but digital surely ain't starting then.

Okay. So much for digital TV starting on Feb. 17 of next year. How about that other stuff?

I hate to pop anyone's balloon, but digital TV just ain't the same thing as HDTV. Our Beloved Commish said as much back in 1997: "The commission will not require broadcasters to air 'high-definition programming.'" They also don't care about widescreen, surround sound, multicasting, nor most of the other wonders of the digital age. Yes, you've got to transmit dialnorm audio metadata; no, you're not required to transmit any subchannels. And you've had to deal with that dialnorm since you started transmitting digitally, and, (not that I want to beat a dead horse, or a live one, for that matter), the very last deadline for transmitting digitally was back in 2003.

Now then, none of this means there ain't things we ought to be doing before Feb. 17 rolls around. Wilmington was pretty instructive.

LESSONS LEARNED FROM WILMINGTON

Some folks didn't know they needed digital adapters. Some didn't know they needed antennas. Some didn't know they needed to hook the adapters to their TVs. One whole heck of a lot of them didn't know how to use the adapters. Oh, and by the way, in a place where some folks rely on portable TVs for hurricane info (on account of some local radio stations forgetting to do things like run local news), there didn't seem to be any portable digital TVs or adapters.

This here publication is called TV Technology, not TV Station Technology, so, if you're reading this, and you work in the TV-receiver-making business, you might study that last sentence a bit. But, unless you've just returned from a vacation on Mars, you've probably already heard the screaming from Washington on that little point.

As for those of us who do work at TV stations that are going to pull the analog plug on Feb. 17, maybe some education would be a good idea. I hear tell that in Wilmington some FCC staffers were helping set up digital receivers. Methinks that workforce won't be available to the rest of us.

Go forth and survey the marketplace. Print up batches of instructions. Instruct those who answer the phones. Post Web pages. Promote your current DTV transmissions. Actively prepare for what might be an onslaught of angry phone calls.

As for the print-shop bills, just submit them to the bean counters with a note explaining the costs are related to the start of digital transmission coming up on Feb. 17. The truth is tougher.

Mario Orazio is the pseudonym of a well-known television engineer who wishes to remain anonymous. E-mail him at morazio@nbmedia.com.

You might not have noticed that TV used to come in slower frame rates. I ain't talking here about 720p versus 1080i. Yes, the frame rate of the former is usually double that of the latter, but the number of pictures per second is exactly the same.

No, I'm talking about the old days of TV, the really old days, like, for instance, back in the 1920s. Methinks the first video pictures had eight scanning lines at eight frames (or pix) per second, a nice symmetrical arrangement.

I ain't any TV technology historian, so take these next figures with a grain or two of sodium chloride, but methinks there might have been a 12-line 12-fps system before a 30-line 25-fps system. Heck, even the latter ain't terribly asymmetrical. I'm pretty sure there was a 45-line 15-fps system in Chicago that had 3:1 interlace, which would have made it 45 pix per second, another perfect step on the gradient-one stairway of progress. And then the slope changed to cliff-like proportions.

STEEP SLOPE

There were 240-line systems at 25 pix per second, 405-line at 50 pix per second, and 441-line at 60 pix per second. That there last one was transmitted at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Some folks say that was the beginning of mass-market TV. Nellie (my last remaining neuron) and I kind of figure it was the end of progress on the picture-rate end.

In two months, it'll be 2009, 70 years after 1939. Scanning lines per picture have sure as heck advanced in that period. After 441, there were 525, 625, 819 and 1125. You might know that last one better as 1080, which is a number of active lines, whereas numbers like 525 and 1125 refer to total lines, including the vertical blanking interval. And I ain't done yet. Switching the progress list to active lines, you can buy LCDs with 2160 lines, and that ultra-high-definition Japanese system that keeps showing up at NAB conventions and other places has 4320 lines.

There surely has been continuing progress in lines per picture. But in pix per second, progress ended in the 1930s. HDTV has the same 60 pix per second as 1939 World's Fair TV (or maybe even a little less: 59.94 at our latitude and longitude and 50 in some other parts).

"But, Mario, isn't 60 all we need?"

Now, there's an interesting question. Methinks there's more than one answer, depending on the unmentioned words at the end.

If the question goes, "Isn't 60 all we need to turn individual pix into apparent motion?" then Nellie and I answer, "Heck, yes!" That rate, which some folks call the fusion frequency, seems to be down around 16 per second or so. Don't hold me to an exact figure. Not only ain't I a historian, but I ain't a vision scientist either.

If the question goes, "Isn't 60 all we need to eliminate flicker?" then Nellie and I answer, "It depends." It depends on factors like screen brightness and peripheral vision stimulation and even what you get used to.

In a movie theater, the screen is pretty danged dim compared with a TV set. That doesn't mean 24 pix a second is enough to eliminate flicker (which is how come movies are called flicks), but stick a two-bladed shutter into the projector, and 24-fps becomes 48 pix a second, and that's enough.

Over in foreign climes, like the mother country, folks watch TV at 50 pix a second and think it looks fine. On their first night over, Americans recoil at the flicker; then they get used to it, too.

Meanwhile, on your desktop, where you lean into a computer monitor competing with office lighting, chances are you're using a refresh rate of 72 or 75 or maybe even 90 per second. Anyhow, the range between 48 and 90 is less than an octave; 60 is definitely in the correct ballpark.

If the question goes, "Isn't 60 all we need for detail?" then Nellie and I answer, "Heck, no!" I mean, you can see the problem on almost any sports show. The batter swings and connects, and the director calls for slo-mo or a freeze. If the camera wasn't shuttered, the slo-mo shots are all a blur, which means you were watching that blur in the first place. If the camera was shuttered, then maybe the freeze frame is nice and clear, but the original, normal-rate video looked jittery and shuddered (or, as some high-faluting unmasked engineer might say, "It had judder.")

Now then, there used to be a few good reasons why frame rate didn't increase the way lines did. For one thing, every doubling of frame rate doubled the amount of info that needed to be recorded or transmitted. For another, it sped up camera scanning. And, for a third, it sped up display scanning (and LCDs had a hard time dealing with even just 60).

Well, then, welcome to the future. This here is the age of compressed video. If you increase frame rate, there's less change between frames, so it's easier to compress them. It also makes each frame sharper, so it's easier to predict interframe motion. Now then, in addition to not being a historian or a vision scientist, I ain't the world's greatest expert on entropy coding, either, but, the way I figure it, going from 60 pix a second to 120 ain't going to take anywhere near twice the data rate.

As for high-speed cameras, there are one whole heck of a lot of them doing slow-motion stuff. Anything that can shoot 120-fps slow motion can also shoot 120-fps normal motion.

Those LCD displays, I've got to admit, are a problem, but LCDs are getting faster all the time, and they ain't the only display technology in town. At NAB in April, field emission technologies showed some car racing shot and displayed at 240 fps, and it was good.

Yes, time for hi-def: high temporal definition.