January 2014
www.tvbeurope.com
TVBEurope 15 News & Analysis Live dynamic range enhancement
By Adrian Pennington and Holly Ashford
A DANISH technology start-up is introducing an image processing system that it claims significantly enhances live TV pictures, including Ultra HD. Michael Jonsson co-founded PION with Kenneth Tang Learke and in 2009 the decision was made to set up a new project, which resulted in PION’s LiveScene technology. LiveScene addresses the image quality limitations such as lack of highlight and shadow detail, noise and poor contrast of live television broadcasts. In a demonstration of LiveScene at an event last month, a live feed was displayed of Chelsea football pitch at Stamford Bridge. The low winter lighting was manipulated and white balance adjusted to define pitch lines, as well as improve the clarity of advertising logos on the stands. In terms of an addition to a company’s workflow, the SD/HDI feed can easily be plugged in anywhere in the chain, PION explained. Whereas any similar technology to be available only in post, LiveScene allows for image enhancement in a live environment. “We are optimising the
dynamic range by bringing down the highlights and extracting detail from the shadows,”
explained Kenneth Tang Laerke, PION’s CEO. “For example, when a stadium during a football match is half drenched in sunlight and half in shade, it is extremely hard to pull out highlights with current technology. We’re able to bring that into a quality, using sophisticated image processing, that is frankly unseen before.”
Triple impact The company aims to impact three main areas with the product: broadcasters, advertisers and consumers. There is a pressure on broadcasters to attract and retain viewers, and as the number of content providers increases, so does the competition. Broadcasters are also competing for “fewer advertising dollars”, so keeping advertisers happy is key to success: this means creating high-quality lighting and picture conditions onscreen so that ad logos etc, are visible. Finally, despite the growing control consumers have over content, high-quality video and audio are still of huge value to viewers. Aimed at OB and studio
production environments, the LiveScene product takes the live uncompressed feed from broadcast cameras, or an inbound compressed stream from live ENG or event coverage, and enhances it in realtime.
LiveScene takes live uncompressed feed and enhances it in realtime The single rack unit, plus
control panel, fits into an existing OB or studio-based infrastructure, and is said to “drastically enhance” the work and profile of the camera control unit operator or studio technician.
Although claimed to be a
realtime process, Tang Laerke admits to a fixed latency of two frames. “In traditional High Dynamic
Range imaging you have to shoot multiple exposures or use more than one camera,” he said. “PION is similar technology-wise to HDR, but we are able to do it with one camera or a number of cameras. We have no special requirements in terms of what camera you are using, so we could achieve better image quality from even fairly low-end cameras.” Although PION wouldn’t disclose names, it said it was
testing the technology with OB companies and broadcasters. It also said the UK was its main focus given the attractiveness of the UK’s OB market. Primarily focused on the sports market for the moment, the company also revealed its interest in news production, entertainment and large-scale events such as festivals.
Addressing the issues of 4K Richard Yeowart, MD of Arena Digital, who has not seen the product, observed: “The pictures always look great in the OB truck — most of the loss/compression is down to the onwards signal transmission. You end up with a fraction of the data at home that we start with, good compression and codecs are the key.” Tang Laerke asserted that lack
of detail in highlights and shadows is a major issue for
broadcasters. “One of the things consumers most appreciate is improved dynamic range, over resolution and smoothness and frame rate,” he said. “This becomes even more of an issue as the resolution gets higher. Viewers move closer to the screen and the pixel count rises so you see more of these issues.” Michael Jonsson, PION CTO,
added: “With the advent of Ultra HD acquisition we believe our Live Camera Enhancement is perfectly placed to address the quality issues that capturing and processing live 4K and beyond will bring to a production.” Planned future enhancements include a product tuned to improve colour correction. There is also the possibility that the process could become more automated in the future. The cost of a single unit is around £20,000 and PION has hinted at further trials lined up, and lots of interest from customers beyond the arena of live sports production. “Commodity technology is the
enabler for us,” said Tang Laerke. “We are using off-the-shelf GPU technology that only recently became powerful enough to process 30fps at 1080p, or 60 interlaced in realtime.” Tang Laerke and Jonsson
founded PION this year, backed by Danish venture fund Seed Capital. The entrepreneurs previously formed Danish digital imaging photo software company Pixmantec and created the RawShooter software application.
www.pion.tv
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52