6 TVBEurope News
NEWS INBRIEF Investment at JCA
JCA has announced an expansion plan to address the increase in demand for digital media services it is experiencing. The first phase of the staged expansion plan takes the form of a £600k+ investment. The expansion of bandwidth provision, an increase in storage and extra transcoding farms for automated versioning and delivery will enable JCA to meet the increase in demand it is experiencing in the digital and distribution sectors. The new kit, which will support the JCA team, includes HDCam SR Decks, additional standards conversion capacity via an Alchemist Platinum HD, XDCAM, further PF Clean licenses and Mac workstations.
www.jca.tv
IABM trains in Germany The IABM Training Academy will offer its ‘Broadcast and Media Technology — Understanding Your Industry’ course at two venues in Germany. German media industry expert and trainer Jürgen Burghardt will run the two-day course, which will be offered in German 18-19 July in Munich and 5-6 December in Cologne. The course is for broadcast staff, technology suppliers, post production personnel, and other professionals who require an appreciation of broadcast and media technology as opposed to an in-depth understanding of it. “We’ve received very positive feedback about this introductory course, which has run in the UK for more than a year now, and we’re excited to be introducing a new version tailor-made for staff at Germany’s broadcast and media companies,” said IABM Director General Peter White.
www.iabmacademy.org
DPA Mics hits 20 DPA Microphones is commemorating 20 years of developing high-quality microphones for the pro audio industry. The company was founded in 1992 by Morten Stove and Ole Brosted Sorensen, two former employees from the measurement company Brüel & Kjaer (B&K). “In the last 20 years, we have continued to develop cutting-edge ways to make an audio tech’s job easier and faster, always aiming for the highest sound quality. Innovation, reliability and service have been trademarks of DPA Microphones since the very beginning, and we intend to keep creating products that embody these traits,” said Christian Poulsen, CEO of DPA Microphones.
www.dpamicrophones.com
www.tvbeurope.com July 2012
EAVC4 enables the same quality encoding with 20% less bandwidth
Unlocking the future of multi-screen TV delivery
ATEME recently announced a ‘breakthrough’ new technology in the field of video compression for multiscreen delivery. Jake Youngtalks tech to Chief Strategy Officer Benoit Fouchard
BROADCASTERS HAVE had to format video-on-demand content for multiple screens since the advent of over the top video. The streaming techniques used to deliver content through the open internet or to tablets and smartphones use multiple profiles for a single device. As ATEME’s Benoit Fouchard
explains: “The way it’s done is that the stream adapts to the available bandwidth. The client device will switch to a lower bandwidth profile, so potentially lower resolution or lower bitrate. For these new devices, a perfect viewing experience will require multiple profiles to be generated simultaneously. “The number of profiles that
broadcasters have to deliver is increasing, the channel lineups are not getting smaller and there’s more and more HD content. All of this poses a challenge in terms of transcoding complexity and the volume of the processes that have to be aligned in parallel.”
An evolution in encoding ATEME claims to have launched a major leap forward in encoding technology. EAVC4, with its bold slogan ‘Beyond the industry’s requirements for high fidelity MPEG-4 coding’, offers the ability to tailor video content for
specific screen sizes and available bandwidths through an optimised encoding software algorithm. “EAVC4 is coded in assembly
code, so it’s very optimised in terms of speed,” he explains. “A number of statements have been made in the press that maybe the only way this [software transcoding] is going to be doable for broadcasters is to use hardware acceleration,” says Fouchard. “We are making an argument that when you go to hardware acceleration you compromise the picture quality.” Because a lot of attention is
already shifting to the next compression standard HEVC, ATEME wanted to send a strong signal to its clients. “Although we are already developing HEVC, we haven’t given up on improving H.264 or MPEG-4. We didn’t want to just ride the wave of HEVC and let customers think that maybe this is the end of any improvement that they can expect with MPEG-4 deployments.” Resulting from a redesign on
previous software codec generations, the EAVC4 encoder significantly elevates the level of available video quality. “People can actually encode for the same quality with 20% less bandwidth, and still deliver the set quality that they had decided to offer to their
Benoit Fouchard: “What we try to do inside our compression software is identify where the human eye is going to land”
subscriber base,” says Fouchard. But the machine measurement is actually only part of the story. “Most important to viewers is the perceived video quality,” he says. ATEME has built rate-control
and psycho-visual enhancement tools to solve specific artefacts, for example, the perceived quality of an area of interest rather than the peak signal to noise ratio for the entire picture. “What we try to do inside our compression software is to identify where the human eye is going to land,” says Fouchard. EAVC4 approaches processing
video for multiscreen output with a patented technique called Multi- Screen by Design. Its encoding
core is specially designed to provide high efficiency output of multiple formats as required for Adaptive Bitrate delivery. “With EAVC4 we have thought of the need to deliver multiple resolutions. It’s a need that wasn’t there when we released our codec engine last time back in 2008,” says Fouchard. The next step for ATEME is to
offer EAVC4 to its existing customers. “We want to make sure it’s available broadly to broadcasters,” says Fouchard. “Broadcasters who have a smaller amount of content or channels can benefit from this technology through an aggregator or through a post production facility.”
XOR Media and Adobe collaborate
on file-based production workflow By Melanie Dayasena-Lowe
Flexibility in monitoring: At IBC2012 Kroma will showcase its new 7000 series of monitors available in 9-inch (in two different versions, for field work and studio), 17-inch and 24-inch. It includes independent waveforms for Y, Cb and Cr, vectorscope and histogram and feature 3G/HD/DH-SDI, PAL, DVI-I and HDMI inputs. Audio monitoring is assisted by its improved Vu-meters (1dBFs definition) that can display up to 16 audio channels at once. Monitors also feature audio inputs (analogue and embedded audio in the SDI signal) and outputs (analogue and digital AES-EBU, headset and speakers). New features are the In Monitor Displays (static or TSL protocol), and Tally on screen or lamp. Correct camera calibration is assisted with the addition of two new functions: False colour and Luma check. — Melanie Dayasena-Lowe
XOR MEDIA (formerly SeaChange Broadcast), developer of IT storage for media applications and private cloud data centres, has teamed up with Adobe. Together, the two companies will offer media companies a file-based production workflow for broadcast production. XOR Media’s Universal MediaLibrary (UML) enterprise storage system features edit-in-place and storage sharing in a private cloud, allowing media editors to access files directly in the UML from the workspace of the
Adobe Creative Suite 6 Production Premium software. The UML also allows edit-while-
ingest for live broadcasting stations, giving the production team the ability to manipulate files before ingest is completed so that content is edited and played ‘near to live’. XOR Media says its UML is unique in its ability to support simultaneous NAS and SAN connectivity, so that media files are accessed without volume reconfiguration or gateways. It is an open, cloud-capable, and media-centric storage that can scale from a per ‘brick’ capacity of 72TB to a grid capacity of 144PB, all in a single global namespace.
www.xor-media.com
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