IEEE COURSE at TechCon

 Bridging the Gap: Video and IT Technology for Engineers

This year PBS is collaborating with IEEE to offer up a special add-on opportunity: a 1-day course on IT video and technology aimed at personnel with an operations background. This course will last the full day on Wednesday, April 11 (please make travel plans accordingly), and it carries a fee of $150. Public television staff have an exclusive window on registering for this course through January 20, 2012; after that date it will be open to the public. Registration for the course must be completed by February 21, 2012.

Course Title: Bridging the Gap: Video and IT Technology for Engineers (brought to you by IEEE and PBS) 

Date: Wednesday, April 11, 2012, 8am-5pm (lunch will be on your own)

Cost: $150; You can register for this course via our registration page here.

Description: The modern broadcast industry relies upon twin areas of expertise: broadcast video technology (such as digital video, compression, metadata, and broadcast workflows) and information technology (such as Ethernet, IP, SAN/NAS storage, and firewalls). Everyone recognizes the goal of having cross trained IT and television professionals who are able to service and plan modern facilities that utilize modern file-based workflows.

For the IT professional, moving content across networks is a natural extension of their expertise, but they often don’t know enough about the content to understand what makes video and audio files unique. And, gaps in training of IT professionals leave them confused about terminology that comes from video and audio practices.

Similarly, television professionals know how pictures and sound are created from the camera and microphone, but face a steep learning curve to understand the terminology and technology that comes from the IT world that forms the basis of modern file based facilities.

The “Bridging the Gap” course was specially created by the IEEE Broadcast Technology Society to help address the need for technical people who understand both broadcast video and IT. In development for several years, this course has been well-received by a number of audiences, and is being readied for nationwide rollout in 2012.

Previous students have commented on “Bridging the Gap”:

 “…video basics; younger engineers need this more than anything”

“The class makes you realize the areas of our knowledge which are challenged & need more exposure”

 “Course was just right for me…”

“great overview…”

 “My son works for [manufacturer]…he could use this course too!”

 “Good info on recent standards and new file workflows”

 “Excellent Course!”

Normally, “Bridging the Gap” is designed to be given over two full days of classroom time to a target audience of maintenance engineers and technicians. For PBS TechCon12, we will be presenting a condensed version of the course in one day for chief/senior engineers. This version of the course will contain significantly less background material, with topics selected to be of interest primarily to attendees with in-depth video experience, and relatively less IT knowledge. The material for this one day course will be selected from the following topics that comprise the traditional two-day course:

        Sampling Images, Sampling Grids, Progressive and Interlace

        Basics of baseband digital video transport

        ANC data, embedded audio, Caption basics

        Active Format Description

        DTV Basics OSI and Internet models

        Ethernet cabling & addressing

        ARP, DHCP, NAT Files and streams

        Essence, metadata & wrappers

        Compression basics

        Causes of latency and effects

        AES audio basics

        Audio metadata

        Controlling loudness & lipsync Content identifiers (ISAN, ADiD, UMID)

        Metadata Schemas

        Wrappers & KLV coding

        GXF, MXF

        AMWA AS02 and AS03 Storage Technology

        NAS, SAN, DAS, SATA, eSATA, SCSI, SAS, FC, RAID

        Cloud storage

        Comparing video servers and IT storage

        Subnets and Switching

        Bridging, switching, and routing

        WAN connections Spanning Tree Protocol

        VLANs

        Jumbo frames

        Security concerns

        Tunneling

        Firewalls and DMZs Video Servers Content Management

        BXF & linking business systems & metadata

        Broadcast News issues

        Non-linear systems

        MOS Ingesting & QC for essence and metadata

        File management & HSM

        Virtualization

        TCP and acceleration

        Course Chapters

        Network Troubleshooting

        Monitoring in a flat panel world

        References (documents and books)

 All attendees of TechCon12 are invited to attend this special pre-course, for a small addition to the normal program fees. This one-day version of the course provides an ideal way for senior engineering personnel to experience the course first-hand, and help them determine if this course would be of benefit to other personnel within their facility. Plus, you might just learn something you didn’t know!