HD) motion defects become much more noticeable, so being able to offer higher frame rates is more important for Ultra HD than normal HD. The current cameras use four 1.25-inch eight megapixel CMOS sensors (two for green and one each for red and blue) and weigh about 20kg. All the SHV coverage will be
done at 60Hz, and will be projected on screens of up to 400-inches diagonal (10m). The production team will also be doing some shooting around London before the Games begin, to capture the Olympic city, which will be one of the shows on offer when screenings begin on 23 July. The other will be a tour of the Olympic park. The Games begin on 28 July.
Camera switching The BBC and NHK, who have been working on the project for two-and-a-half years, are building what is effectively the first Ultra HD station for the Games at Television Centre in west London, with a complete channel operation, “creating a highlights channel as well as delivering live feeds,” says Plyming.
The signals will be sent from the NHK OB van at the venues to Television Centre using an 80Gb dual-diversity dark fibre link. Recording will be onto Panasonic solid-state storage racks at TVC, using 32 64GB P2-based cards to provide two hours of recording. The OB van will only be able to do straight forward switching between the cameras, as realtime effects aren’t yet practical for 8K video. “The thing that I’m having to
train my team to do is to stay with the shots much longer, because there is so much to see,” says Plyming. “We need to allow people to take it all in. However, staying with the shot longer makes it quite different from the TV experience.” To create the 22.2 Surround Sound, the project will have access to the hundreds of microphone points in the stadium, and will also have some football-sized globe microphones (housing 22 mics), positioned close to the cameras, which have been given very good positions at each venue. To transmit the pictures, the
project will make use of academic and private IP networks and satellite links. In the UK, JANET (the Joint Academic NETwork) has a 20Gb backbone, but the signals will be compressed in to two MPEG transport streams, so that they should require no more than a gigabit per second. NHK believes that portable and remote point-of-view
cameras, compact recorders, and card-based edit systems will become available for SHV over the next five years, with expanded post production systems, master monitors, and a 22.2-channel Surround Sound production
system emerging within the following five years. It expects Ultra HD production equipment to reach the same level as HD is now by about 2017, and hopes to offer a satellite to home service in the 21GHz band by about 2020.
The bigger picture: One of the current Ikegami Ultra HD cameras
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