IBC: Hitomi To Display Flagship Solutions For Lip-Sync & Latency

Hitomi Broadcast, a provider of audio/video alignment and latency management tools, will attend IBC, Sept. 15-18, Amsterdam (stand 10.A42). The team will be on-hand to demonstrate its workflow solutions to one of the most persistent and increasing issues in live and remote productions: ensuring perfect synchronization between audio and video.

At the heart of Hitomi’s suite is lip sync measurement solution MatchBox. Assisting in end-to-end assessment, MatchBox Glass, a convenient free-to-download iPhone app, streamlines the process of setting up each feed, based on objective data and eliminating guesswork.

For remote productions — especially those covering major sports events requiring substantial feed transmissions to the central control room — understanding and managing lip sync and latency is imperative. The MatchBox software is equipped with a feature to gauge end-to-end latency over any given circuit. It’s recommended to first use MatchBox Latency for assessing the delay over each circuit, following which MatchBox Analyzer ensures synchronization of visuals and audio.

Russell Johnson, Hitomi Broadcast director, says: “The annoyance that lip sync errors bring, whether it’s an audio-visual mismatch of speech or delayed sports commentary, is universal. With MatchBox, we provide an exact calculation of latencies and delays so that production companies can prove their feed is perfectly synchronized. Events like IBC allow us to demonstrate to attendees, within a matter of moments, the ease of its application.”

Building on its success at this year’s NAB Show, Hitomi will also be showcasing its new cloud-based lip-sync measurement capabilities at IBC. Visitors can experience a live demo of the file-based variant of MatchBox.

Hitomi said that as it “continues to evolve to cater to the industry’s need for latency minimization, the latest iteration of MatchBox provides precision analysis of latency and lip-sync shift, ensuring optimal alignment based on analytical data rather than intuitive matching.”

Johnson added: “IBC is a crucial platform for us to not only illustrate the simplicity and transformational potential of the MatchBox system for remote productions and outside broadcasts but also to unveil our latest innovations such as our allegiance to SMPTE ST2110 and our progress in cloud-based solutions for MatchBox.”