14 TVBEurope IBC Wrap-Up
UHD, QC and AVB: unscrambling IBC
Excitable sellers set out new tech faster than they could answer the deluge of questions arising from standards makers and prospective buyers. If ever there was a need for a roadmap, IBC2013 was it. Reflections from Mark Hill
WITH THEfire-sale on 3D TV over, the shelves at the Amsterdam RAI had been swiftly restocked with 4K TV — or ‘UHD-1’, in European TV parlance. Like some pop-up store, here were UHD-1 cameras, servers, switchers, encoders and (the suspected root cause of all the disruption) displays. UHD is set to fare better than
3D, as the former is essentially just more of the same that TV professionals already handle on a day-to-day basis: no Z-axis, dual optics, dual paths and unfashionable spectacles. Despite what many on the show floor would have us believe, however, we are a long way from 4K being ready for primetime. Beyond our mutual nod to, and liking for, the obvious spatial resolution improvement of UHD-1 (let’s agree not to mention
Mark Hill: With the change of the physical comes adoption of further layers of the OSI seven-layer model and firmly into the world of IP/IT
UHD-2 specifically) over today’s HD, there is a lot of work to do if it is to be put into practice. We cheer, as UHD brings with it the death knell for our elderly, analogue compression fiend,
interlace. All UHD pictures will be displayed progressive scan and, crucially, acquired using cameras capturing whole frames at a time rather than making a frame from two fields, captured successively. Of course, this will not relieve the industry of the challenge of having to add into the edit legacy content acquired as interlaced and in inferior resolutions. Moving the job of de-interlacing (and up-scaling) of legacy content wholly to the broadcaster environment, rather than the domestic one, will at least guarantee that far more money gets spent on these demanding processes, with better results.
Quality brings quantity Committing to gathering frames brings with it an opportunity to set the frame rate. In Europe, there is a good measure of agreement that the minimum frame rate for
UHD should be 50fps, while as much as 300fps has been suggested as beneficial. If UHD is going to take off anytime soon in Europe, 50fps looks like a reasonable starting point, with perhaps 120fps as a future (worldwide harmonised?) step. UHD colourimetry is also set to benefit from an update, now that we are no longer constrained by the chemistry of the glowing phosphors of the CRT. An opportunity also exists to increase luminance and colour signal resolution from the current 8/10-bit norm to 12-, or even 16-bits. Such a move would pave the way for High Dynamic Range (HDR) working. Crudely summarising, the HD to UHD-1 upgrade equation looks something like: [Increase spatial resolution = 4x bitrate required] x [Capture pictures
faster = 2x to 12x bitrate required] x [HDR/increasing bit-depth 1.25x to 2.00x bitrate required] = 10x to 96x bitrate required. This might be compared with a figure of 2x for moving from interlaced- to progressive-scan HD, all other things being equal.
Compression to the rescue UHD represents a massive increased demand for bandwidth, processing power and storage volumes, all of which add up to money but rarely in a simple, linear fashion. To lessen the shock on the bottom line, we look again to video compression technologies to reduce the number of bits to be processed, stored and transported at the many points in the ‘glass to glass’ experience. Even at this early stage, it seems likely that base-level UHD-1 pictures can be coded for transmission so as to occupy as little, or no more, bandwidth as today’s HD pictures. Those having 1.5G HD
infrastructures at the heart of their station must now be wondering whether there will ever now be a need to upgrade to 3G- capable ones. 3G infrastructures can accommodate HD (1080p50/60) working, but if your operation is based on HD (1080i25/30), are you really going to move to HD progressive as your next upgrade? Despite the appearance on the show floor of ‘6G’ coax-based interfaces, signal bandwidths for Ultra HD suggest that the Serial Digital Interface (SDI) has run out of road. Yes, for UHD you could start cabling equipment up with multiple paths of 3G and 6G coax interfaces, but we gave such practices up a long time ago with analogue component video and surely have no desire to return to those days. UHD heralds the move
away from broadcast industry proprietary, copper cable-based SDI and bespoke networks and towards the increasingly fibre- based interfaces and generic data networks of the IT world. This will represent a step change for systems integration (SI) companies and the installations they deploy in future. Interconnects in fixed
installations will move from cut length, terminate on demand copper cables, BNC plugs and jackfields and towards off-the- shelf, pre-terminated lengths of single-and multi-mode fibre, plugged into optical interface ports. Faster, lighter, more eco-friendly. With the change of the physical comes adoption of further layers of the OSI seven- layer model and firmly into the world of IP/IT.
www.tvbeurope.com November2013
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