BS Honors College , Broadcasting

John Luff is an independent consultant in television technology and faciliity design. He has 39 years of experience in broadcasting, post production, facilities management, remote production, project management, technical consulting and system design. He is a consultant and lecturer on emerging media technologies, and is a graduate of the Honors College of Ohio University. 

In his career of 39 years in broadcasting he has been an editor, master control operator, cameraman, maintenance technician, manager, business owner, and consultant. He has been active in SMPTE since 1973 and has served the society on various engineering committees.  He currently serves as SMPTE Conference Vice President.  In 2005 he was elected a Fellow of the SMPTE. He was the chairman of the Journal Award Committee twice, Chaired the Sarnoff Award Committee, as well as having been a session chair at conferences. He has presented papers to several chapters of the Society in the US and Canada on technology and system integration issues. He has attended all winter SMPTE conferences since 1973 except 2, and in 2007 attended NAB for the 39th time. He is a past Chair of SBE Chapter 20 in Pittsburgh.

For over 10 years he managed the coverage of large news events worldwide for the European Broadcasting Union. These efforts took him to Asia, Europe and the Americas for summits and elections and such notable events as the Pro-democracy uprising in China in 1989, the Hong Kong Handover in 1997, numerous summits in Moscow, elections in East Berlin, Prague, and Johannesburg, and coverage of 10 American political party conventions beginning in 1980. Those events, seen all over Europe, originated from over 35 venues. 

In 1986 he was part of the management team deployed to Moscow by Turner for the inaugural Goodwill games, where he was responsible for the Technical Operations Center during the live broadcast shift.

As a designer he executed facilities across North America, and built several mobile units, including the first progressive scan HDTV mobile unit, which was built in 129 days for Panasonic and ABC for inaugural coverage of Monday Night Football in HD in 1999. he also was the project manager for the design and integration of ABC’s HDTV Release Center that fed HD to ABC affiliates on the first day of regular HD service, 11/1/98.

He has written well over 100 articles for Broadcast Engineering magazine and contributed two chapters to the NAB Engineering Handbook.