London trial includes three 20kg cameras with four, 8-million pixel 1.25-inch CMOS sensors
London 2012 SHV workflow By Adrian Pennington
SHV pictures are streamed across the UK’s JANET research network, a 20GB high bandwidth IP network, taken to Washington via other academic networks, and streamed to Tokyo and Fukushima via the GEMNet2 network of telco NTT. These networks have enough capacity at a fraction of the cost of commercial CDNs. “It is impossible to distribute
SHV over satellite at the moment so we are forced to use IP over fibre and to think about a step-change in the way we produce content with this amount of data,” said Tim Plyming, project executive, digital & editor live sites, BBC London 2012. “Having to produce over dark fibre is a good learning curve for our move into a more IP production base.” Acquisition for the trial in London is by way of three 20kg cameras with four, 8 million pixel 1.25-inch CMOS sensors (two for green and one for red and blue) at four venues (opening ceremony, aquatic centre, velodrome, basketball arena). “We will take uncompressed
camera feeds at 80Gbps from the Olympic venues back to Television Centre where we are building a production suite to produce a live feed and a 45 minute updatable highlights feed,” he explained. “This includes an ability to render the world’s first SHV graphics.” The signals go via an NHK
OB van to TVC and the VIP showcase by dual-diversity dark fibre. From TVC it is compressed into IP packets — 16 x 1080i signals converted into 8 x 1080p signals — and sent to the public screens as two MPEG transport streams. Recording is also made to 32 Panasonic P2-based 64GB cards, providing two hours of recording. The OB van includes an 8-channel vision mixer, an 8×8 router, slo- motion playback capabilities and HD up converter. For audio, 22.2-channel
point recording microphones capture sound for mixing in a separate audio relay vehicle and on an audio mixing board that can output 22.2 channels. The main SHV devices built
by NHK for the Olympics production include an SHV Recorder/Player based on
H.264/AVC-Intra100 with a compression ratio of 15:1; a slow-motion playback system
which records up to 120 minutes uncompressed SHV onto 64 x SSD units of 512GB each. There
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is the newly developed SHV Superimpose Edit system with key/fill output, cuts, feeds, wipes and remote control selection made in 4K and realtime upconverted to SHV. An SHV
Switcher for wipe/mix and Picture in Picture is available in HD only and an editor with capacity for four hours of content stored on an array of 2TB drives.