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13/08/2015

The Immersive Experience: Everything For The Full House Consumer Set Will Be At IBC, Pt 1

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The title chosen for the IBC conference – The Future of Media in an Age of Disruption – reflects neatly on a show where the widest mix of technologies ever seen in Amsterdam will vie for visitor attention, writes George Jarrett...

A much sharper conference strategy founded on a producer per session structure has retained the very popular free strand What Caught My Eye, which this year offers Blue Sky Thinking, Everything Capture, and New Technology, New Content as its guest presenter subjects.

The opening Forum session Broadcasting in an Age of Challenge will set the tempo for sessions looking at The Impact of the Internet on TV, The IP Infrastructure Revolution, MAM – new apps for Metadata and Cloud Technologies, and Is VOD the New Broadcasting Gold. On the technical side, the intrigue falls on the three-part HDR: From Zero to Infinity, High Efficiency Video Coding Meets UHDTV Broadcasting, and Breaking the Codec: Are Current Video Compression Standards Enough? The SMPTE session (looking at where are we now, and where we are going) asks the question everyone will arrive at the RAI with. Another free session, that should attract the audio community, is Immersive Cinema Sound.

Going into IBC we belong to a $530 billion sector, but it is starting to feel so much bigger now the industry sits so close to the consumer. The old IBC and NAB we knew are now long gone. These shows are now close cousins to the CES.

The show always offers a dozen blinding bits of technology not seen or previewed at NAB, but many people will be getting their first looks at products like Dolby Vision and Dolby AC-4; Blackmagic Design's URSA Mini and 4.6K digital film sensor; Sony's BVM-X3300 reference monitor and HDC-430 camera; the Imagine Zenium software platform; Canon's EOS C300 Mk II camera and its design step away from DSLR, plus the 2,000 Nit reference display; the JVC GY-L5300 camera; the Wohler audio pitch correction tool; Grass Valley's GV Convergent SDN; Quantel's 8K 60p demo with Pablo Rio; the Miller Cineline 70; and the Evertz MVIP-11.

Industry initiatives to look for will include the Sony IP Live Production System – the re-working of SMPTE 2022 supported by over 30 vendors, and the Academy Color Encoding System (ACES). It took a long time to get to V1.0, and IBC should show us the elements due in V2.0. Now that extended dynamic range (HDR) can be a software upgrade to consumer sets, the last hardware issue remains higher frame rates. Everything for the full house consumer set will be at IBC and immersive audio is going to be a big discussion area. Augmented Reality will also be a cool subject, and AVB gets closer to its adopt or not status. The breaker as far as Pay-TV goes will be the pre-show arrival of Sky Q, a 4K Sky Box that will hurry a lot of Sky's rivals in the UK, Germany and Italy to start with.

Ncam (with Vitec Videocom, 11E55) are making big impacts in the areas of camera tracking and virtual production technology. They will showcase an entry-level camera tracking solution designed primarily for broadcast applications of virtual graphics or augmented reality, that only require pan, tilt and zoom functionality. The company's core tracking technology detects the slightest movements of the camera itself, not the camera head.

CEO Nick Hatch said: "Platforms on a high tower, crane or cherry picker will tend to move about a little, and encoded systems are typically unable to track these movements, so the graphics no longer lock to the video. The new Ncam PTZ software will detect these movements and maintain alignment."

The market knows the Ncam Live 7D, which uses a lightweight sensor bar attached to a camera to track natural markers in the environment. This enables the camera to move freely at all times, generating a continuous stream of precise positional information which feeds a real-time graphics engine. On movie sets it gives you a pre-visualization system to match live and VFX elements. The new PTZ product provides much the same functionality but for fixed position cameras.

Pixel Power (7A31) has a new software-defined play out solution designed to sit as an automated hub in a software-defined network, and provide the branding and play out functionality. Called StreamMaster, it is ready to run on standard hardware or as a virtual machine in a data centre – effectively a channel without a box – but it can also be supplied as a standalone device with SDI I/O to support hybrid and transitional applications.

The intention is to put sophisticated audience-retaining options like multi-layer 3D graphics and squeeze backs into systems available across the spectrum, from online and on-demand broadcasters to pop-up channels. The software is automation agnostic so it can be added to an existing play out infrastructure with no change in workflow or operational practice.

Elemental (4B80) – in the front line of creating software defined video solutions for content delivery, in tune with frontline technologies like UHD and MPEG-DASH – will showcase new disruptive innovations designed to enable content owners to succeed when facing next-generation video complexity.

Elemental will lead with advanced MPEG-DASH implementation, automatic provisioning of live channels in the cloud, CDN-independent ad insertion, 4K with high dynamic range, and workflows for optimising content monetisation.

CMO Keith Wymbs said: "Only the scalability and flexibility of software can keep pace with the relentless advance of video technology. This is illustrated by Comcast X1 Cloud DVR, Sky Go and NOW TV. Software is eating the video industry as it has with other technology industries in the past."

Other technology demonstrations will be a variety of live and file-based 4K and HEVC streaming applications, virtualized and cloud-based services, and linear video workflows featuring high-quality encoding integrated with advanced system management – plus a 4K HEVC statistical multiplexing solution.

Eyeheight (8B97) will front its IBC booth with its BroadcastSafe compliance software for Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut and Avid Media Composer, all of which can be downloaded for free assessment.

BroadcastSafe, largely created from recommendations from broadcasters, post houses and freelance editors, is a complete plug-in legaliser, safe-area generator and graphic measurement toolset. Users can verify and conform content prior to submission to any file-based quality control system. The software will perform composite, RGB, RGB-plus-Y and simultaneous composite plus RGB legalising – with user-adjustable soft clipping at high and low thresholds. Precise chroma-space conversion and accurate limiting ensure compliance, while keeping the full gamut available for creative use.

Editors would select from an extensive range of presets, or work in custom mode (15 configurable parameters). The broadcast evaluate display indicates which parts of a video image require adjustment in order to be fully broadcast compliant.

Cobham (1F41) will be highlighting its specialist knowledge of RF with two new transmitters – the SOLO7-OBTx and the SOLO8 SDR. The first is a new camera-back transmitter that gives users 1080p60 and 4:2:2 with integrated camera control. It comes with swappable RF modules (340MHz – 8.6GHz) and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video encoding. Latency, depending on mode, ranges from 1s to an ultra-low 10ms.

Continued in Part Two...

This article is also available to read at BFV online.
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