48 TVBEurope Audio for Broadcast
NEWS INBRIEF Game Changers
The IABM and NAB named the winners of the second-annual Game Changer Awards at NAB. The Award recognises five products judged to have the greatest potential to revolutionise the industry. This year’s winners are Bridge Technologies for PocketProbe, Masstech for Emerald for News, TC Electronic for LoudnessRadar, isovideo for Viarte, and Emmis for TagStation. The Game Changer Awards were open to all broadcast, digital media, and entertainment industry manufacturers and their products, and the award winners were selected by a panel of impartial experts who toured the show undercover and reviewed products and solutions during the first two days of the show.
www.theiabm.org www.nabshow.com
fasp on Harmonic MAS Harmonic has embedded Aspera fasp in its Media Application Server (MAS), the core of the company’s media asset management platform, enabling high-speed ingest, distribution, and transfer of full resolution media and metadata as part of global automated file-based workflows. MAS is a service- oriented architecture (SOA)- based platform that hosts and coordinates applications that comprise an enterprise-class content management, preparation and delivery platform, providing a common control centre for all media processing tasks including transfers, transcoding, caption processing, file-based quality control and archive management. Aspera fasp transfer software can move file-based media of all sizes, securely, at high-speed, across global distances, and can be easily embedded.
www.asperasoft.com
Automated ingest Centralparq, a private cloud platform that’s part of Infostrada, one of the largest providers of cloud-based broadcast and editing services in Europe, has partnered with EVS to create an automated news and sports ingest workflow. The collaboration will see EVS’ IPDirector and Centralparq’s MediaDoQ ingest system speed up the ingest process.
www.centralparq.com www.evs.com
Surround capture and processing
Forward-thinking broadcasters are moving to discrete 5.1 audio workflows where possible — so why might we need audio upmixers and downmix processors, or indeed, a single processor that combines both? Pieter Schillebeeckx, product manager for SoundField at TSL Professional Products, provides some answers
HIGH DEFINITION video with 5.1 audio has been a fact of life in the more advanced parts of the global television industry for several years now, but on the audio side, many broadcasters still do not have established workflows for archiving or editing in 5.1, and there are still very few available effects and music libraries in true 5.1. Other broadcasters would like to provide audio in surround, but cannot yet make the considerable investment required to mix in discrete- channel 5.1. Stereo audio, in short, is likely
to be around for many years at least, and some means of rendering this in 5.1 is needed by HD broadcasters for the foreseeable future. Before the advent of purpose-designed upmix processors, broadcast mix engineers used additive algorithms, such as reverb, delay or EQ, to deal with this problem. However, the results are
usually unsatisfactory at best. You can, of course, simulate surround channels by subtly processing the audio information in the left and right channels of a stereo broadcast with delay, reverb, EQ or some combination of all three, and routing the results to the surround channels, but this approach can play havoc with stereo compatibility, and this is a potential quality concern if the resulting 5.1 broadcast mix is ever auto-downmixed to stereo, as inevitably occurs when surround is used as the audio broadcast format even for people listening in stereo. What’s more, although the audible effects of reverb and
consumers still receiving SD. Archive or legacy stereo material needs to be upmixed into 5.1, and at the same time, 21st-century discrete-channel 5.1 audio needs to be downmixed into stereo. Broadcasters therefore need a
Signal Flow: Upmix and Downmix with AutoDetect and CrossFade
phase shifts can be easier to conceal in sports broadcasts, when the audio being processed into surround is often stadium crowd noise (and thus quite reverberant anyway), the ‘additive’ approach (so called because the processing is used to add new sonic information to the original audio) works much less convincingly on dialogue or the professionally recorded audio from a musical concert, which is often very dry- sounding and lacking in reverberation. In this case, an additive approach will create surround information that completely lacks the tonal qualities of the original audio. However, the past few
However, upmixing has
proved to be only part of the requirement for broadcasters whose workflows are not yet in discrete 5.1 from ingest to playout — which, at the time of writing at least, means
Stereo audio, in
short, is likely to be around for many
years at least, and some means of
processor or set of processors capable of upmixing and downmixing in realtime. Ideally, said processor(s) will auto- detect what format is incoming and upmix or downmix as required, or pass the audio through unaltered if it’s already in the correct format. In an OB truck or broadcast studio: Here, similarly, an upmixer is required for stereo jingles or archived clips, and a downmixer is needed at the end of the workflow to provide a high-quality stereo stream for broadcast to legacy equipment. If the upmix side of the process is designed to produce a stereo- compatible 5.1 mix (thus excluding most additive upmix processors), the downmixed stereo can also be used as a quality-control check to see what will happen to the 5.1 mix when it is auto-downmixed by metadata further down the broadcast chain.
years has seen the release of dedicated stereo-to-5.1 upmix processors that derive all of their surround and ambient content from information in the stereo original, without adding unnecessary reverb or phase shifts. 5.1-to-stereo compatibility is maintained at all times, and even dry-sounding programme material can be used to create a 5.1 mix that sounds tonally remarkably like the original. This is exactly how SoundField’s upmix processor, the UPM-1, works.
rendering this in 5.1 is needed by HD broadcasters for the foreseeable future
everybody in the international broadcast community. Since 2010 we have identified
at least three main uses for combined upmix and downmix processors in modern broadcast workflows: In a Master Control Room:
At present, playout for broadcasters who operate in surround always needs to be in simultaneous 5.1 and stereo — the latter for the many
In an editing suite: Most editing suites are stereo, and will be
for the foreseeable future. With a combined upmix and downmix
processor, 5.1 audio can be downmixed to stereo, edited, and then upmixed back to 5.1 at the
end of the process. The sheer cost of
implementing a complete surround-compatible production workflow for many broadcasters means that it will be many years before everyone has a complete surround-compatible production workflow in place — if indeed this ever comes to pass. It would seem a fair assumption that upmix and downmix technology is here to stay.
www.tvbeurope.com May 2013
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