Our IBC Wrap-Up section is designed to provide context and perspective to what happened out on the showfloor at IBC2012. Leading off our in-depth analysis is Mark Hill, reflecting on 3DTV, Ultra HD, workflows, MAM and IP networks
IBC WAS noticeably over its brief but intense all-parties love affair with 3D this year, at least as far as TV goes. Production managers (and budgets) will be much relieved and perhaps some of those ‘big brand’ names leading the 3DTV charge in public, but very sceptical in private, will now relax their guard a little. As an industry, we got far further this time round than Baird did some 70 years ago with his particular vision of high definition, 3D (even auto stereoscopic 3D) television. Somehow now though, it feels like time to let it fall back again. Of course, 3DTV development will keep bubbling under and will have its applications. Just as enthusiasm for 3D was
waning this year, interest in ‘big’ pictures was waxing. The ‘4K’ and ‘8K’ 2DTV looked so good that it was no effort for the brain to imagine the 3D part (it’s been doing it for years). Those collectively responsible for TV programme production have long since mastered the techniques necessary to add the perception of depth to images captured, processed and consumed as distinctly 2D. How logical then just to carry on in much the same fashion, but with a larger canvas?
Studio-side, working with
bit rates in the tens and hundreds of Gbps that accompany big pictures will doubtless come as a bit of a jolt and will surely signal the death knell for copper cable-based infrastructures and conventional cross-point routing for such demanding applications. The chance to capture big
pictures (fourth generation ‘high’ definition) with fewer artefacts will be welcomed with open arms by the ever quality-conscious image engineering community. Manipulating such images to meet particular artistic or financial constraints will further underpin the importance of post production. Distributing the results will bring new challenges and opportunities. Lest we get too carried away with the video, the importance of the accompanying audio should not be forgotten. With many over-air HD services currently getting by (= making money) quite happily with 2.0 (stereo) sound, there remains much scope for 5.1, 7.1 and perhaps even 22.2 sound systems. If only loudspeakers were subject to Moore’s Law we’d be further forward here than we are.
(Above): At IBC Sony ‘showcased its Media Backbone Conductor (MBC) … the changing face of what was once a business focused first and foremost on the supply of electro-mechanical gizmos’
Blackmagic Design’s Stuart Ashton: At IBC, Blackmagic was clearly ‘looking to demonstrate that silicon and software has still further to go’
A semi-conducting rock and a hard place Sandwiched between developments in camera image sensors at one end of the content value chain and flat panel displays at the other, the industry now appears totally locked into a Moore’s Law-like technology route march. From this situation, content (rights) owners/exploiters must continue to extract considered and successive plateaux of stability on some ‘Broadcaster
Law’ basis, as they address consumers with their offerings and collect the resulting revenues. Broadcaster Law is currently
far from being in step with Moore’s Law as it relates to the frequency at which the industry hits the paying consumer with big change — black and white to colour; mono to stereo; SD to HD; analogue to digital; etc. The ratio between the cycle times of former and the latter is however diminishing.
Does anyone watch television any more? One of the great things about radio has always been that you can do something else while consuming the content that is produced. IBC saw an industry getting quite excited about the prospects for providing for the needs of ‘second screen’ users’. Hereabouts, however,
between one adult watching TV while reading a book and one (young) adult watching TV while exercising (aka playing a game of basketball on a laptop), there is scant evidence of much ‘watching’ of TV at all! Forget 50fps, or more. One every 10 minutes, or so, would