- Posts tagged Work
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R&D Workspaces: Some Quotes
One of the challenges I work on in developing BBC R&D North's new premesis (both the interim solution and our long term base at MediaCity:UK) is figuring out just what we as a department need to do our work. I've talked a little about the technology, but the physical environment is important too. Just what makes a space that engineers can work effectively in? I'd love to hear any suggestions you may have (use the comments), but I also thought I'd share some quotes I found when trying to quantify and communicate the environment we're trying to create.
The Technology Cool Wall
Behold the BBC Research & Development Cool Wall! The latest project from myself and my colleague Tony to engage the wider BBC in technology and our work. We're rather pleased with it...
N.B. I ought to point out that this is only an internal thing, for our own discussion and amusement. Therefore if you can make out any products and where they lie on the wall, that is not to be taken as a BBC view, or endorsement of particular products over others! More to the point, virtually everything moves up and down the wall as there's very little we can all agree on...
BBC brings back test card for HD
The BBC is transmitting a test card in high definition to help viewers optimise their TV and home theatre settings.
The card, much anticipated by Digital Spy forum users, airs for 90 seconds once every two hours in the BBC HD channel's preview loop. A second test signal, which airs later in the loop, is designed to ensure that viewers with home theatre audio setups are able to precisely synchronise sound with video.
In a BBC Internet Blog post, Andy Quested - principal technologist, HD at BBC Future Media and Technology explained: "Many of you have been asking for a test signal to help line up your own HD TVs, we have been listening but it's taken a while to get it sorted."
Quested's post offers a detailed guide to using the two test signals, which when used correctly offer optimisations for brightness, contrast, colour and sharpness. Audio-video sync, which has been problematic on BBC HD's surround sound output in the past, is also adjustable by users who connect their set top boxes to AV systems with delay controls.
Because the signals air at different times - 1 hour into the preview reel for the test card and 1 hour 50 minutes for the sync signal, Quested suggested that viewers set a manual recording on set top boxes starting an hour after the last programme of the day on BBC HD airs.
I made this happen :-)
Box + Pipe = Lab ?
It's been quite a while now since I started working on BBC R&D's North Lab. I've thoroughly failed to provide any updates, for which I apologise, but I think it falls under the category of "the more is happening, the less time you have to blog about it"! We've been ploughing ahead with our interim lab which will tide us over for the next two years or so on the existing BBC Manchester site, and planning for MediaCity:UK at Salford, which is our longer-term solution. My main focus was to be the former, but I've increasingly been pulled in to helping plan for MCUK; as you can probably imagine, it's a very large project requiring a lot of effort. But perhaps we're starting to work out just what it takes to build an R&D lab...
A Boring Blog Post
It's been quite a while now since I moved to Manchester... 6 weeks to be precise. (I had to go look at my calendar to work that out!) So what's happened? Well, everything and nothing really. Life continues much as normal, and though I've been desperately looking for a funny story to share with you, an anecdote of life up north that will make you smile, I've failed thus far. This can probably be seen as a guarantee that this post will be dull as dog poo, but I'll try to give you a brief update anyway.
Welcome T' Frozen North
Manchester greeted me yesterday with howling winds and a few brief showers. Not the best of starts weather-wise after the glorious sunshine that bathed London last week. However I'm now sitting in the Research & Development office of the BBC's New Broadcasting House in Manchester, getting settled in. How I came to be here was somewhat of an interesting story, and I explained a little here. But what I'm doing over the next 6 months will be even more interesting, and it's a journey I hope some of you might like to join me on. We have the task of establishing a new Research & Development lab in Manchester ahead of the BBC's move to Salford Quays. Setting up a new broadcast and media research lab isn't something that happens often, so just how we go about it will be full of creative and technical challenges.
Metadata: Getting it right, even when it's wrong.
Well, today is my last official day working on BBC HD audio. Somehow I don't think this project will leave me alone just yet, but after a week's leave, my main focus will be elsewhere. So I thought I'd take the opportunity to talk about something which has consumed a fair bit of my time, but which I haven't blogged much about: metadata. For the uninitiated, metadata is "data about data". A photo's metadata for example might tell you what camera it was taken with, where it was taken, what exposure was used and so on. In the case of BBC HD's audio, metadata is carried by the Dolby E and Dolby Digital streams we use, and has two main functions: it describes the audio being carried, and it controls the decoders in your homes. One parameter, often called dialnorm (for Dialogue Normalisation), tells your decoder how loud the programme is, so that it can attempt to smoothe out differences between programmes and channels to give you a more consistent loudness. Another set of parameters control what happens when your decoder downmixes the audio, meaning when it produces a stereo mix for your stereo speakers from the surround sound we may be sending. It's important stuff, so we have to make sure that metadata survives our distribution chain, and sometimes we even have to add metadata to a programme automatically, which can be tricky. Here's some of the work we've done...
It's Grim Oop North, isn't it?
That Syncing Feeling
It's been a long time since I've updated you, for which I apologise. However the good news is this will hopefully be my last post about lipsync issues on BBC HD. That's in part because I'm really running out of bad puns based on the word 'sync', but mostly because - and I realise I'm tempting fate here - we may have got to the bottom of it all. Let me elabourate...
