BBC Internet Blog - Ant Miller

Super Hi Vision (and 3D, and Stereoscopic, and DSLRS) in TC0

Ant Miller Ant Miller — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:44:46 +0000

The Super Hi Vision camera

After years of being mothballed Television Centre's TC0 burst back to life with a bang today as R&D brought together one of the biggest experimental broadcasts in years. BBC Sport asked us to help them demonstrate a selection of the latest broadcast technologies that will be available for the 2012 games, so we have brought in the NHK Super Hi Vision system, stereoscopic 3D, a couple of our own 3D projects, and 6music were using their own rig (plus a few cheekily sited Flips) to capture content for their website. At the height of activity this morning, when own own 'making of' crew, plus BBC Click were on set, there were probably in excess of 25 cameras trained on the band!

Read more and look at lots of lovely pictures at the BBC Research and Development blog

R&D (South Lab) Progress

Ant Miller Ant Miller — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 12:18:57 +0000

Happy new year to everyone out there, and straight off, let's look at the imminent relocation of the R&D (South Lab) from Kingswood Warren to Centre House. As you might imagine, such a massive programme of work is having a huge impact on the department right now, so we thought it was worth giving you a quick update on progress over the Christmas and New Year break.

Site Preparation

No one would expect a standard 1980's office block, and one that's been out of use for two and a half years at that, to be immediately ready to accommodate a world-class broadcast engineering research laboratory, but what may surprise is the speed with which the site has been converted for our needs...

Read more and comment at the BBC Research and Development blog

Anechoic and Free Field Chambers

Ant Miller Ant Miller — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 08:37:01 +0000

Welcome back from the Christmas and New Year break - we took a little time out here in R&D to recharge batteries, fuel cells and exotic energy systems, as we have a tremendously exciting few months ahead of us. We'll post about that soon, but lets kick off the new year with another great video from Quentin Cooper's further exploration of R&D.

In today's film Quentin meets with Chris Chambers and Ranulph Poole, two of R&D's most experienced engineers, and explores the peculiar spaces that are our 'controlled environments'.

Watch the video and comment at the BBC Research and Development blog

ArcHak Archive Development Hack Day

Ant Miller Ant Miller — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:59:00 +0000

R&D hosted over 40 colleagues from across the BBC on the 3rd of November for an intensive day of invention, innovation and development. The format was a 'hack day'- we've run them before on a larger scale, often with partners, (such as Hackday London 07, and Mashed) but this was a different, more specialised set up.

This time we just pulled in people from within the BBC who have been working independently on projects, technologies or systems that touch the archive in some way.

The BBC 'Archive' as managed by the Information and Archives dept is a massive and varied collection- it includes video and film, radio broadcasts and recordings from the very earliest days of the corporation, and written archives and sheet music from well before. Add to that hundreds of thousands of photographs, and you begin to get a picture of the vast collections we hold. Beyond that though is the 'metadata'! This is the crucial cataloguing information; the production notes, the cast lists, running orders, music notes, accounts even. Today every moment of broadcasting is planned, coordinated and tracked by using millions of pieces of information about the programmes, their content, and event the way we deliver it to you, the audiences.

Read the rest of ArcHak Archive Development Hack Day and leave your comments on the R&D blog.

BBC R&D on saving the archive

Ant Miller Ant Miller — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:10:13 +0000

[Editor's note: This piece first appeared in Ariel last week.]

For 15 years a dedicated cadre of engineers and managers from R&D has been working to develop tools which will preserve the BBC's vast archive into the future.

The latest product of their efforts is the ASTOR demonstrator - (aka 'the world's heaviest laptop') which is currently being tested by the archive and network media research engineers.

It's big, runs pretty hot, weighs close to half a ton, and can store dozens of hours of HD content, but perhaps most amazingly is that in its brief few months of existence, it's clocked up more than 10,000 miles. That's because in April, Rajitha Weerakkody and I took the prototype box along to NAB (the world's largest broadcast technology conference and exhibition) in Las Vegas.

The story began three years ago, when R&D started looking at the best ways to store large amounts of AV content in digital form. We produced a huge amount of data as well as recommendations and proposals, but it was clear that the digital storage industry couldn't match the needs of our archive, nor the needs of the thousands of other broadcasters who faced the same challenge.

Led by the technologist Richard Wright, R&D joined forces with academic researchers and industry experts to develop a new system which could manage the vast volumes of digital data. This became known as the 'Avatar-M' research project, and we revealed the first technical prototypes at the NAB. We're hoping to thoroughly test the kit at Kingswood over the summer, before enhancing the platform and possibly incorporating elements of the Dirac video codec (also produced in R&D).

In September the kit, plus its trusty band of demonstrators, will take to the road once more - this time to Amsterdam for the European forum for broadcast tech, IBC.

Ant Miller is Senior Research Manager, BBC Research and Development.

Find out more about the Avatar project at the project site