4 TVBEurope Opinion By Fergal Ringrose
I’M GRATEFULto Lewis Kirkaldie of Cinegy for introducing me to the Gartner Hype Cycle at our recent IT Broadcast Workflow conference at BAFTA (see page 17). Addressing the journey from tapes to files in broadcasting Kirkaldie said, “we reached a point where everyone got really excited about files but it was really hard and everyone fell into the trough of disillusionment and felt that tapes were so much easier. We’re now climbing up the slope of enlightenment. “The cloud has been ramping
itself up the peak of inflated expectation. It’s an industry- recognised concept. We’ve been working with Deluxe to try and make sure this trough of disillusionment is moved past as quickly as possible by delivering real services to real customers at realistic prices.” What was Kirkaldie talking
about? The Hype Cycle is a branded graphical tool developed
Slope of Enlightenment:More instances of how the technology can benefit the enterprise start to crystallise and become more widely understood. Second- and third- generation products appear from technology providers. More enterprises fund pilots; conservative companies remain cautious. Plateau of Productivity:
Mainstream adoption starts to take off. Criteria for assessing provider viability are more clearly defined. The technology’s broad market applicability and relevance are clearly paying off. Sound familiar? You bet. Of course some new technologies, having zipped through the Technology Trigger and the Peak of Inflated Expectations, crash and burn in the subsequent Trough of Disillusionment, never to be seen again. So how does the Hype Cycle
apply to the central focus of our IT Broadcast Workflow event – that cycle from tape-based SDI to file- based workflows in broadcasting? This was our fifth ITBW event and
“We need to accelerate the process; that way we’ll learn where the logjams are. That way we’ll know if 2014 is realistic”
Mark Bos, Boundless Productions
and used by IT research and advisory firm Gartner to represent the maturity, adoption and social application of specific technologies. Each cycle drills down into the five key phases of a technology’s lifecycle. Technology Trigger: A potential technology breakthrough kicks things off. Early proof-of-concept stories and media interest trigger significant publicity. Often no usable products exist and commercial viability is unproven. Peak of Inflated Expectations:
Early publicity produces a number of success stories — often accompanied by scores of failures. Some companies take action; many do not. Trough of Disillusionment:
Interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver. Producers of the technology shake out or fail. Investments continue only if the surviving providers improve their products to the satisfaction of early adopters.
it told us we’re still on the journey. When we started, the typical broadcast operation housed islands of digital in a sea of videotape; whereas ITBW 2013 told us that the end of videotape really is fast approaching.
In fact, in the UK at least, we’ve got a deadline: 2014. That’s the date confirmed by the Digital Production Partnership in its opening panel session (see page 16). Kevin Burrows, DPP Technical Standards lead and CTO, Broadcast & Distribution at Channel 4, said that by this IBC the group hoped to have a firm date in 2014 from which all UK TV production companies will be required to deliver their content on a file format. “At what point in 2014 we can’t quite say yet – we’re hoping it will be later in that period,” said Burrows. That’s not to say it will all be plain sailing. In fact, the DPP panel posed a number of questions. Mark Bos, Boundless Productions/FreemantleMedia
www.tvbeurope.com August 2013
“We’re looking forward to sharing important new developments in our work” – Mark Harrison, BBC
Hype Cycle of Files DPP panel on stage for July’s IT Broadcast Workflow conference at BAFTA
UK said, “we need to make the production process a lot more simple: camera choice, data wrangling, ingest, post and the output to the broadcaster.” Andy Tennant, ITV Studios,
asked, “how do you fit the cool production technology [like GoPros] into the broadcast workflow, and not break it? How are you going to ingest, and how big is the server?” Post production consultant
Neil Hatton said, “we’re on a journey – we’re probably only just over half way. Now we get in to the [area] between the edit and the link into the broadcasters. It’s going to be very difficult – because it’s going to be significantly slower than tape. “You can’t QC a progress path,”
said Hatton. “You have to watch the programme during playout. You can define QC parameters, but you still have to sit and watch and listen to the content. The other problem with auto QC is [handling] four programmes at once. With post you actually want to do one programme, four times as fast. Some of them [auto QC packages] are very slow, much slower than realtime – that’s got to change. “And what about export and
transcoding?” asked Hatton. “We’re increasing the amount of time it takes to master a programme – at least until we see good old Moore’s Law kicking in. We need much faster processing than we’ve got at the moment, so that we’re not always running things so damn close to the wire.” Mark Bos agreed, saying “we need to send a QC file – it’s just good working practice. We need to accelerate the process; that way we’ll learn where the logjams are. That way we’ll know if 2014 is realistic.” Tennant observed, “we’ve now got to go and actually
deliver that common standard. Otherwise people will be reluctant to use it. We must commit now, to crossing the Ts and dotting the Is to make sure we can get there in 2014 – and we’re starting to see it happen with the manufacturers.” At IBC the partnership will announce a number of major pan-industry initiatives (DPP session Saturday 14 September 15.30-17.00 main auditorium, and Workflow Village Event Sunday 15 September 17:00-18.00, Workflow Solutions Theatre). The AMWA AS-11 and UK
Broadcaster standards have been updated to include audio compliance to EBU R128 Loudness from traditional PPM levels; inclusion of guidance on use for UHD (4K) cameras; addition of Shim Version to allow for updates; reduction in line-up and clock/slate time from three to one minute total; optional addition for the carriage of multichannel audio metadata within a programme file; removal of the requirement to deliver an associated sidecar xml file; and general clarification of the spec. The DPP’s Metadata
Application, which provides an easy way to enter and embed the required data into the MXF programme files (making them compliant with the AS-11 DPP standard), has been updated to support these revisions to the standards. Commenting on the announcements, Mark Harrison, DPP Forum & Production Futures lead and controller of Production, BBC North, said, “It’s been a busy year for the DPP, with a lot of new initiatives coming to fruition, and we’re looking forward to sharing a number of important new developments in our work.”
EDITORIAL Editorial Director Fergal Ringrose
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