About Me
Hi, I’m Marc Bach. I am a Student at the Technical University of Berlin studying Media-Technology, which is basically a mix of computer science and electrical engineering with a focus on media applications like audio and video processing. This course fits me perfectly as I have always been interested in both the hardware and software side of things while also having a passion for working with cameras.
Combining all these aspects, I like to work at movie and tv productions as either a camera assistant or video engineer. I have worked on several productions in these roles and have gained a lot of experience rigging cameras, setting up video signals and working with video mixers.
Since 2022 I am a part of the team for SchleFaZ - Die schlechtesten Filme aller Zeiten (The worst movies of all time), a german comedic tv show where two hosts basically make fun of “bad” movies while really getting into the characters and the story, oftentimes dressing up as them.
At this production I am responsible for the whole video processing chain, from the cameras to the multi-view setup for the director. I usually help setting up and configuring the cameras, plan and set up the video signals and work with the video mixers and routers to get the video signals to the right places. This production also requires some amount of networking as we also use an IP based intercom system and configuration networks for the video mixers which I am also responsible for.
Occasionally I work as a camera assistant for other productions, like music videos or short films. Here I get to work with and learn a lot about many different cameras, lenses, gimbals, drones and other camera equipment.
In 2022, while just starting to work at a small tv production studio in berlin, my colleague and mentor who is a professional video engineer, asked me to improve his camera matching workflow. He was working for multiple different productions that required live camera color and exposure matching and was looking for solutions to make this process easier and more efficient. At the time, there were some software tools available to display waveform and vectorscope data, but he wasn’t satisfied with the available solutions. So as I was also interested in programming and software development, I started to work on a tool that would help him with this task.
This started my currently main project, LiveScopes.tv, a software tool that displays live waveform and vectorscope data from a video signal, while also allowing to capture and compare these signals using a built-in split-screen view. The tool is designed to be used in a live production environment and is optimized for performance and ease of use. It is currently in use by several professional video engineers and camera assistants and is being continuously improved and expanded with new features.
This project really kick-started my interest in software development and I have since also worked on other smaller projects that are usually also related to video processing or camera technology.
While working on LiveScopes.tv I got to learn a lot about image processing, different video formats/encodings, color spaces and performance oriented software development in general. Since video/image processing usually requires a lot of computational power, I also got to learn a lot about parallel computing and GPU programming. While starting with CUDA which is a parallel computing platform and application programming interface model created by Nvidia, I have since transitioned to OpenCL which is a more widely supported standard for parallel computing that can be used on more than just Nvidia GPUs.
During this time I really fell in love with the C++ programming language and have since used it wherever possible. Of course C++ is not always the best choice for every project and while working on other things like websites, smaller tools or scripts I have also extensively used Python and JavaScript/TypeScript.
The UI for LiveScopes.tv is written in Dart using the Flutter framework which is a cross-platform app development framework that allows to write apps for Mobile, Web and Desktop using a single codebase, although the software currently only targets Windows. However the main image processing part of the software is written in C++ for performance and compatibility reasons.
In my free time I like to play with self-hosting and home automation. I have a small server running at home that hosts game servers and other stuff like a Nextcloud instance. This hobby has also led me to learn a lot about networking, server administration and security, while using tools like Docker on Linux to manage my services.
This blog is a collection of my thoughts and projects. Whenever I feel the need to share something I have learned or worked on that I think might be valuable to others, I will write about it here.
I hope you enjoy it!