Hitomi, a provider of audio/video alignment and latency tools, is demonstrating how broadcasters can solve latency and lip-sync challenges with its solution.
With television coverage of live events like sports becoming ever more compelling, and the growing move into remote production for even the largest coverage, the need to find a simple, reliable and extremely accurate way to measure differential latencies between multiple video and audio sources is vital. Matching lip-sync by eye is always challenging, especially when the audio leads the video, which is impossible in real life and so particularly difficult for the human mind to compute.
At booth SL5080, Hitomi says it has the simplest, most precise and most widely used solution in Matchbox. With the MatchBox Glass app, a camera assistant simply holds an iPhone in front of the camera lens and the audio and video test patterns pass through the complete chain, to be measured and aligned at the final control point. The whole process takes seconds.
Russell Johnson, Director at Hitomi, said, “While productions are getting more complex, the basics do not go away. Lip-sync errors are hugely distracting to the audience, and when you have a lot of sources then there is a lot to align.
“We are continuing to enhance our products to make it even easier to achieve minimum latency and precise sound/vision alignment, even as the channel count goes up.
“That is why we are working on a software alternative to our proven hardware analyser. It gives users a simple ability to scale. If you have 64 channels to align you are not going to use 64 hardware analysers, but they could all be monitored in software.”
Find out more at the UK Pavilion at the 2024 NAB Show, which is taking place at the Las Vegas Convention Centre from April 13-17.