In a discussion with my manager today I described a tendency I have to approach any new area of work by finding something in it that's close to my previous work. Not only had my manager already noticed this problem, he'd given it a name - the Slartibartfast syndrome.
It's nice to work for someone who has the same cultural references.
Showing posts with label bbc. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bbc. Show all posts
Monday, 29 September 2008
Thursday, 5 June 2008
Bringing colour back to Dr. Who
Over the years I've been at Kingswood Warren I've occasionally worked on projects that primarily benefit the BBC archives' restoration work, the most successful of these being the transform PAL decoder. A while ago I was introduced to another possible restoration job - recovering colour from black & white film recordings. This is all explained in some detail on the working group's wiki, but the general idea is that black & white film recordings sometimes captured the PAL colour sub-carrier patterning (when someone had forgotten to filter it out) and it might be possible to recover this colour.
My first, and second, thoughts were that this was a forlorn hope. You'd have to realign the film image with its original TV scan lines to stand a chance, and this just didn't seem possible. I'm glad to report that I've been proved quite wrong, as you can read in this thread on the Doctor Who restoration team technical forum.
My first, and second, thoughts were that this was a forlorn hope. You'd have to realign the film image with its original TV scan lines to stand a chance, and this just didn't seem possible. I'm glad to report that I've been proved quite wrong, as you can read in this thread on the Doctor Who restoration team technical forum.
Wednesday, 27 February 2008
Is my job safe?
I've been mulling over an article from the Sunday Times for more than a week now, and I still don't know what to make of it. It's a report of an interview with Zarin Patel, the BBC's director of finance, which says:
Ashley Highfield, head of Future Media & Technology, sent out an email saying "nothing to worry about" soon after the Sunday Times article hit the streets, but neither he nor Patel has issued any public retraction of the story. Highfield's email makes it clear they will be looking for "partnerships" to get best value. A few years ago BBC Technology was sold, lock, stock & barrel, to Siemens. They are now described as "partners".
The last thing I want is to be TUPE'd to another employer in two or three years time. I'm prepared to put up with the relocation to west London, as I plan to take early retirement in 2014 and so will only have to tolerate the stress of commuting for five or six years. However, if my early retirement plans are to be blown to bits by being transferred out of the BBC to an employer not of my choosing, shouldn't I just go to another employer now?
"Patel will also examine the future of BBC’s research and innovation centre, which could be commercialised. The division helped to develop industry standards such as high definition television and Nicam digital stereo. It has an annual budget of £30m."The BBC's Research and Innovation department is where I work. It used to be the engineering R&D department, but has been renamed several times in the last couple of years. It's been continually reorganised as well, with a steady loss of staff. We're due to relocate from Kingswood Warren to west London this year, which will mean a further loss of staff. Now it looks as if the woman who controls the purse strings wants to sell us off.
Ashley Highfield, head of Future Media & Technology, sent out an email saying "nothing to worry about" soon after the Sunday Times article hit the streets, but neither he nor Patel has issued any public retraction of the story. Highfield's email makes it clear they will be looking for "partnerships" to get best value. A few years ago BBC Technology was sold, lock, stock & barrel, to Siemens. They are now described as "partners".
The last thing I want is to be TUPE'd to another employer in two or three years time. I'm prepared to put up with the relocation to west London, as I plan to take early retirement in 2014 and so will only have to tolerate the stress of commuting for five or six years. However, if my early retirement plans are to be blown to bits by being transferred out of the BBC to an employer not of my choosing, shouldn't I just go to another employer now?
Tuesday, 5 February 2008
Twickenham
Had an interesting day last Friday setting up machines in an outside broadcast van to record a dozen HD camera feeds of the 6 Nations England Wales rugby match on Saturday. This is for the iview project. This creates a moving 3D computer model from several camera views, which can then be rendered from (almost) any viewpoint to create a (moving) virtual camera view. Sport are very keen to have this, but there's still a lot of work to do.
Anyway, to capture the camera feeds we used 6 rack mount server PCs, each with 6 500GB drives and a dual channel HDTV capture card. It's important to grab uncompressed images, as any compression artefacts would interfere with subsequent processing. The data rates involved are pushing these PCs to the limit, and not everything went smoothly on the day. I'd spent the previous two weeks learning more than I ever wanted to know about Linux's disc caching strategy and memory management, but still didn't get to the bottom of why the process is not 100% reliable.
Anyway, to capture the camera feeds we used 6 rack mount server PCs, each with 6 500GB drives and a dual channel HDTV capture card. It's important to grab uncompressed images, as any compression artefacts would interfere with subsequent processing. The data rates involved are pushing these PCs to the limit, and not everything went smoothly on the day. I'd spent the previous two weeks learning more than I ever wanted to know about Linux's disc caching strategy and memory management, but still didn't get to the bottom of why the process is not 100% reliable.
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