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Our Blogs Open Sauce linux.conf.au: The Beeb and the penguin
Our Blogs Open Sauce linux.conf.au: The Beeb and the penguin | linux.conf.au: The Beeb and the penguin |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Sunday, 27 January 2008 | |
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Page 6 of 6 Cunningham says the BBC has also got a number of forward-looking projects in the wings. Featured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
"There's a lot of work going into... not exactly what you might call blue skies but things that might be five or 10 years away from actual practical systems - the virtual studios and 3D virtual studios, image analysis and taking scenes and pulling out objects from scenes and putting them into 3D models and using them in that way. "There's already a system being used in sport that uses a number of these techniques, and what that does is, using a number of cameras around the soccer field for example, they will record the footage and then be able to interpolate between cameras, which is sort of a virtual camera, so you can fly around the scene and see the action from a different angle where no real camera exists. "On the production-automation side of things, what I find exciting is really reducing all the road bumps in the way between acquisition to play-out, ... and streamlining the whole thing. And using commodity equipment, and really putting a price pressure on the equipment that the BBC purchases. So if they can buy an off-the-shelf system from a major company like Dell or HP they get support that they like, load software onto it, and then have a system that does any of the other processing that's necessary. And it would make production just so much smoother and more cost-effective. There are complete digital file-based systems but they're just way beyond the budget of many productions... and they have to make all sorts of compromises in their production because of that. If we can get rid of those difficulties, we just allow production to be more creative." The flexibility that FOSS permits is a big plus point. "...one of the productions that we were just working on recently, I think which is called Dragon's Den - we were able to play back some of the footage much more, well, instantly for continuity purposes. Because in this particular production they have to make sure that when someone walks out through a door and then comes back through another door, they've got the right clothes on, they're holding the box in the right arm, that sort of thing - continuity. We were able to instantly replay it, whereas before they probably wouldn't have bothered because it meant rewinding the tape, and we would have had to rewind the tape an hour, look through all the labels - there are paper labels on the tapes - trying to work out which tape it was on, and then play it back. They just don't have the time to do that because the tapes are in the machines. They only had hired enough cameras to handle what they needed to record. That's one area where we can speed things up, allow the production to take better decisions or new decisions. Because they can review material straight away." Cunningham uses OpenSUSE on his desktop. "Several of my colleagues use it as well. We're not constrained as much by the BBC desktop which is really just a business thing - it's just for getting emails to people, it's allowing them to file all their expense claims, and they support that functionality. If you tried to do anything else, like software development, or video editing, you might need a completely different system. So post production areas I've seen, they've had completely self-contained systems of their own - their own network, their own storage. "They might be Windows systems, they might have BSD - in fact, I've seen Audacity, the free client, sitting around on their desktops, and they use it occasionally when importing CDs, just because it's got friendly tools for doing the conversion and a few other things. But that's not because of any BBC policy. It's just because the editors have realised that this is a really handy tool. They put it on their systems and they use it." He's a C++ man when it comes to programming. "My colleagues might use IDEs, whereas I'm a vi and make person so I just have text windows with vi and make... I use perl for doing nightly builds and regression tests and things like that." Cunningham and his wife will be presenting their papers at the multimedia mini-conference at the Melbourne University tomorrow (January 28). |
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