30 TVBEurope Wrap-Up
High frame ratesand NAB tech collaboration
Conversation around virtualised playout and revolutionary distributed computing — along with Ultra HD and HEVC. George Jarrett shares his NAB perspectives
NAB SHOWED that we have reached a point where the market is concentrating very hard on facilitating several new technologies at once — specifically Quad HD as an originating preference to start with, the virtualisation of resources, and the wonderful chain of benefits that H.265 (HEVC) instigates for so many manufacturers and end users. The word ‘trend’ can be put in cold storage until IBC looms, even though high frame rates were widely discussed, and 8K was often cited as the originating horizon beyond 4K. The good thing is that broadcaster 4K is linked in one area to HEVC, and Virtualisation is linked closely to the rush of private cloud initiatives that many companies felt obliged to offer at NAB. Mention the issue of bandwidth
resources and uses them all in the same manner as far as the customer is concerned. “The cloud can be a valuable
resource, but is often not the most efficient way to get things done. At the end of the day, cloud simply means a computer somewhere else, owned by someone else. Most customers have vastly under-utilised compute and network resources that can do the job more effectively without creating large bottlenecks to and from the cloud,” he added. “Just think about trying to upload a large, raw SDI capture to the cloud for transcoding. It would be painfully slow and expensive, but the cloud is great for overflow or when computer resources are not already available.” The key here is smart software
Quantel had one of the best show demos — Pablo Rio at 60fps, supported by the AJA Corvid Ultra card
though, and that always induced a cough, followed by confirmation that this is something every cloud service has to crack because proxy quality is not what users expect long term. The biggest commercial factor
evident at NAB was the huge number of technology collaborations — Blackmagic with Autodesk, AJA and NVIDIA with Quantel, Bluefish444 with Sony, and Ikegami with Arri being some of many dozens. For those who had time to count, ATTO had 64 partners at the show.
Another factor was the huge
number of companies that concentrated on improving stalwart products and technologies with big user bases. Harris and Grass Valley scored heavily for doing this well, but the prize here went to Avid for V11 of Pro Tools (see p42), which has double the processing power, a Media Composer video engine, and a brand new 64-bit floating-point audio engine — all for the eye-catching price of $699.
What is virtualisation?
The first and most memorable mention came from Snell, concerning its partnership with Fox to virtualise playout. The second came from David Barton, CEO and CTO of Epoch Inc. “Virtualisation is
about being able to migrate ‘master control’ (playout control and processing) to a pure software solution,” said Snell chief architect Neil Maycock. “This enables
broadcasters to install generic IT
Harmonic has put HEVC encoding into its ProMedia line of adaptive bit rate solutions for multi-screen processing and delivery
hardware rather than dedicated video systems.”
Thus any infrastructure would
adapt to different requirements as easily as running different software applications, in a market where there is great uncertainty about exactly what services will generate key revenues. On Demand looks like it will dominate all of scheduled programming bar live sport. “Virtualisation has two
benefits. Costs can be reduced and more readily aligned to revenue, and the time to market for a new service is greatly reduced,” said Maycock. “Whilst this enables services to be hosted in the cloud it isn’t inherently linked with cloud. Most installations are likely to be in-house or in private data structures for the foreseeable future. We’re having most conversations with the big media companies, where the infrastructure investment challenges are biggest. It will become a trend for all sizes of broadcasters eventually.” David Barton’s technology company has revolutionised distributed computing. His view of virtualisation is: “It is when all of a customer’s resources are placed into one pool and do not need to be dealt with individually.” Epoch displays them all as unified, ‘soft’
that can use underutilised resources along with the cloud. “The next wave of virtualisation is to not only make physical assets virtual, but also to configure and utilise those assets in realtime on behalf of the user,” said Barton. “This combines aspects of distributed computing with Virtualisation and expert domain knowledge (video science, production and distribution in this case). It is incredibly difficult to do.”
Are broadcasters being bullied over 4K?
The wide assumption is that broadcasters will repeat what they did when they saw HD about to dominate — shoot in the highest possible resolution to future proof key content. It was important at NAB to spot the Ultra HD demonstrations that were 60fps, and many of these were reliant on AJA, Matrox and Bluefish444. Other demonstrations, as on the Evertz booth, were important for showing HEVC technology in the distribution of 4K. But where Evertz suggested
Ultra HD has more traction than 3D did — but won’t be a big deal until 2015 because the rest of the architecture needs to come — other companies were more gung ho. One of the products to state that broadcaster 4K is here now was Panasonic’s incredible 20-inch
www.tvbeurope.com May 2013
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