NAB 2013: Pure Hi Res Poker (Pt 3)

Blackmagic’s pocket-sized surprise
Blackmagic announced technology collaboration with Autodesk, support for Adobe Premier Pro and After Effects, a 4K camera, a pocket-sized cinema camera with a Super 16-sized HD sensor, and a stock of modern day ‘glue’ products designed to create a full 4K workflow.
Blackmagic director Stuart Ashton first explained the smaller camera. “People anticipated we were going to produce a 4K camera, but they were not expecting the Pocket Cinema Camera ($995). For something not much bigger than your iphone it produces a hell of a punch,” he said.
It gives you 13 stops of dynamic range and records to a built-in SD cardholder (Apple ProRes). It uses Super 16 lenses via MFT adapter.
For an extra $3,000 you can get the new 4K camera, with its Super 35 size sensor, global shutter, and support for 6G-SDI video connection.
“Ultra HD is here today,” said Ashton. “The bigger events use Ultra HD, and you have to ask how do we get this into the broadcast world. That’s really been the hurdle, and it is why we have been working with other manufacturers to develop 6G-SDI. It is four times the bandwidth of SDI, which means we can play 4K down a single cable.”
The new switcher, capture and play back devices, audio monitoring devices are for a clear aim. “We are trying to complete that full Ultra HD workflow. The only thing now is we need to see how the transmission element develops,” said Ashton.
The key of all the new back up products is the ATEM Production Studio 4K, which has 8 inputs, 6G-SDI and HDMI 4K video connections, plus the usual vision mixing tools – downstream keying, chromakey, transitions, media pool, multi view, plus audio mixer. As usual, the Blackmagic price will rock a few traditions.
To Blackmagic’s credit, it has continually developed Da Vinci Resolve. V 10 has added Support for DCP delivery (direct from the timeline), and it now has an online editor for finishing projects passed on from NLE stations. Resolve Live takes the user into on-set grading.

Axon champions AVB as SDI goes flat
Peter Schut, the CTO at Axon, was heralding an industry first – 3 Gig 1080p on a 10 Gb/s Ethernet infrastructure, with a two millisecond latency over seven switches – and championing the merits of AVB.
“Today we use a 48-port 10 Gb/s Ethernet with a 160 Gb/s uplink to do an AVB. That device costs something like $22,000, and it is a tremendous amount of horsepower,” he said. “It is 1 480 Gb/s non-locking backbone, so you can imagine if you want to do a couple of 3 Gb/s devices to run over that device you have plenty of head room.
“The price erosion of Ethernet is also way faster than SDI, which is fairly flat. Five years ago 3 Gb/s was expensive, but it is now the level of HD,” he added. “What the production industry is using is a star network of SDI connections, so if you do a soccer match and have a truck outside and use 24 cameras in the stadium, you will have 24 expensive cables running from truck to camera. Imagine you could use AVB in a networked environment – one 200 Gb/s link coming to the stadium, a couple of switchers and local connections.”
The one cable not 24 would save money and labour. “What will be possible with AVB is that we are going to build a single wire infrastructure for everything,” said Schut. “All connections can be injected in a standard Ethernet network. The thing we had to do was to make it synchronous, and make sure it was data aware.”
AVB is an IEEE 8.2.1 addition – three technologies on top of the standard Ethernet. They are the Layer 2 protocol that makes sure we are timed; stream reservation that you can fill up until full and nothing can collapse it, and the forwarding and cuing system.
Axon is building devices with respect for the hybrid world. “If we switched to SVB tomorrow we wouldn’t have an issue,” said Schut. “But we will have bridges from SDI to AVB. We are building an SPG with a time clock/stamp on it, and we are creating a multi-viewer with AVB in it, and a cross converter too. This is the end of SDI, but it will take time.
“We need friends and competition to drive into AVB. We want a camera with an AVB connector, and a production switcher from the market,” he added. “This is production video. It is sports, concerts, and live shows – all the applications where you want a synchronous real-time video environment, because you need to make decisions on the fly.”

Screen Systems in the right place for web subtitling
Screen’s Polistream system is very much an established fixture with broadcasters, and in recent times the company has had to concentrate on cracking OTT and Web subtitling.
“This is something we have been looking at for some time,” said marketing manager Dean Wales. “The problem with any of the OTT or web subtitling is it is so unpredictable because broadcasters have no idea what player it is going to be played out onto. We have come up with a system, irrespective of player, that’s always in the right place, scaled correctly and not obstructive to the imagery.
“We use bit maps. It goes on as an image. The subtitling sits on the web server and when the content goes through there is a tag within that unique URL which goes back and pulls the right bit maps through,” added Wales. “It always knows where it is going to be situated. It always looks good because it is a BMP.”
Wales’ colleague John Birch is a member of the EBU workgroup that is defining the replacement for the existing STL format. The new standard will be XML based and Unicode to support all the world languages.
Archives are a big element of Screen’s business, and there is one huge difference between the American and European/Asian models for captioning. “Americans like to put the captions in early in the postproduction phase, but the European/Asian model for subtitling is that the binding is done very late, as the programs are transmitted,” said Wales. “Most of what we do is involved in supporting archives and subtitles which get joined as shows go on the air. When content owners distribute their material to foreign networks it is that foreign broadcaster who is responsible for getting it subtitled or translated.”
Read the article in the online edition of Regional Film & Video here.