4 TVBEurope Opinion


www.tvbeurope.com January 2013


4K looks to be the obvious link to 8K arriving in 2018


A gem of an event


CVMP is a mini ‘Siggraph in Soho’ created by The Foundry and in its ninth year. R&D endeavours behind many forms of media creation are mulled over by academics and the film and television craft skill community. George Jarrett reports from last month’s conference held in London


IN EXPLAINING how NHK, the BBC and OBS came to trial Super Hi Vision during the London Olympics, John Zubryzcki, archives research section leader at BBC R&D, identified everything impractical about deploying the system as it exists, right down to racks and racks of P2 and hard disc recorders, and network error performance issues. He had two main messages. The consumer industry is looking for what comes after its attempt to push 3D, and 4K looks to be the obvious link to 8K arriving in 2018 — although NHK might prefer 2020 to coincide with Japanese TV’s 100th year anniversary. “You don’t notice it is not 3D


when you are fully immersed in 8K,” he said. “But we really need to confirm the sweet spot between frame rate and dynamic resolution, and also standard resolution for that matter.” He confirmed that shooting sports action at 60fps, which the camera could not track, caused blur. “Work at BBC R&D has shown there is a real benefit in going up to higher frame rates: 120fps is good, and we did some encouraging work at 300fps,” he added. NHK has now gone with 120fps,


but Zubryzcki prefers 300 fps for the longer term. He added: “We need a standard for a single interconnect, and for single recording and processing systems. NHK has been the only equipment source for Super High Vision, but that will slowly change. The bottom line is that people may find uses for 8K in R&D.” NHK itself has gone for an experimental full-resolution 33


Film and TV craft skill professionals gathered in Soho for CVMP 2012


mega-pixel sensor in what looks like a standard HDTV camera body, and for “practical reasons” has chosen 120fps. It has the expected Beyer pattern filter, and uses 35mmm stills camera lenses.


The R&D stars The many short papers published to coincide with CVMP are all required reading, and the event itself was a combination of technical sessions, long, heavily detailed keynotes, and a delightful mini exhibition, all biased mainly towards post production. Amongst the exhibits there


were three new developments that stood out, and The University of Bath’s remarkable vectorisation technology (see TVBEurope November) also had its public debut with video footage that had been vectorised and rendered. Backed entirely by Ray Dolby,


Tandent has put five years’ worth of R&D into the magical tool Lightbrush, which takes a single image and separates it into the illumination and the reflectance plus its natural colours. “If you want to edit shadows


you could go into Photoshop, but that is challenging due to light


variations,” said director of research Bruce Maxwell. “With Lightbrush you can edit the illumination and reflectance individually, and the calculations to do that are the secret sauce.” It has been used on one feature


so far. “It gives you the chance to re-visit a scene and re-take the picture,” said Maxwell. The demo proved some interesting points; analysis is easier via separation, and it is good to understand the relativity of fill and direct light, and the relative strengths. This first app suggests others in the area of computer vision. Ncam, a two-year project, is


a realtime camera tracking system designed to give directors, cinematographers and VFX supervisors a proxy of their VFX in realtime when shooting on blue or green screen stages. It reflects the massive use of virtual production in both movies and episodic TV. “It is an immersive system


that allows you to create great compositions of VFX and virtual assets — things that are not there at the time of shooting,” said demonstrator Martin Chumney. “Bringing that into the production phase allows you to compose


Emmerdale soap finds new Eclipse By Fergal Ringrose


CLEAR-COM INTERCOMS play a key role on the long- running British soap opera Emmerdale. The show is filmed at ITV’s new HD complex in Leeds and on location in Northern England’s Yorkshire Dales. Production team members for


the soap, which airs six episodes a week to an audience of almost 10 million, employ the Clear-


Com Eclipse-Median digital matrix intercom, V-Series panels and ICS-1016 digital intercom stations to ensure access to fast communications across the ITV complex’s various studios. The size of the new Eclipse system, which is larger than ITV’s previous Eclipse-PiCo system, allows the Emmerdale crew to communicate between the five studios and two production galleries at the ITV complex.


“With both a quick move and


production schedule, we needed a talkback system that would be flexible enough to meet our needs as we grew into the new complex, while also being immediately recognisable to the crew,” said Steve Ridley, a senior engineer at ITV. “We wanted something that


gave us the same capabilities with an increased channel count.” Eclipse Median is a four-wire system with connections to


shots and choose the correct focal length of your lens.” Framing up on something that is not there is one thing, but Ncam also records all relevant data and relays the composites of the virtual assets and live action to the production team. It comes as one piece of powerful hardware and a single software package. “A lot of thought has gone into making sure it keeps its realtime capabilities,” said Chumney. “We are attached to Autodesk’s Motion Builder, which provides the virtual assets feed for Ncam. Anything that has been pre-built in pre- visualisation or by a VFX company can be brought in, providing it follows certain rules, and all the data can be re-deployed on set.” The One Of Us miniature modular shooting system one-cam, created initially for 30% of the shots in Jonathan Glazer’s movie Under The Skin, produces filmic images from a resolution of 2336X1752 pixels and gives 12-bit uncompressed raw images that mixed well with the 70% of Glazer’s shots done with an Arri Alexa. The sensor is Super 16 frame width; frame rates run to 30fps, the camera head measures just 70mm wide, 70mm high and 50mm deep. It records to SSD, and works with a recorder similar in size to a 16mm camera body. All these stats won the one-cam a place at the London Olympics opening ceremony too. Expect a finished single CCD


product at IBC — currently there are a few prototypes — in small single camera form, and in a multi-cam system.


For the CVMP proceedings visit www.cvmp-conference.org


cameras, the ICS-1016 digital base stations and other analogue sources. The standard port-wired panels are used in the control


rooms, but the team takes advantage of the system’s network connectivity and V-series panels to run communications between any of the floors within the complex. With the voice-over- IP capabilities available for the Clear-Com Eclipse system, ITV also has the option of upgrading it to include Concert’s collaborative workgroups feature over LAN, WAN and Internet. www.clearcom.com


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