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8 TVBEurope News & Analysis NEWS INBRIEF


New loudness solutions from NUGEN Audio


BVE2014 saw the UK debut of the NUGEN Audio MultiMonitor. MultiMonitor is NUGEN’s loudness and true-peak


monitoring software that offers up to 16 individual loudness and true- peak meters to monitor mono, stereo, and 5.1 formats for up to 96 individual audio channels. This standalone software provides real-time monitoring in full compliance with global loudness regulations and standards. Also shown at BVE were the NUGEN Loudness Toolkit and Complete Loudness Solution, plug-in collections offering loudness metering, logging, correction and more. www.nugenaudio.com


Host Broadcaster selects Avid for Sochi


Avid’s broadcast solutions have been chosen by the Host Broadcaster to power the production workflow for the Winter Olympic Games. An integrated Avid workflow allowed the host broadcaster to manage thousands of hours of content captured at multiple sites and instantly make it available to Rights Holding Broadcasters in Russia for multi-device delivery to viewers around the world. www.avid.com


Fail every programme The subject of automated QC and PSE fell to ITV technology strategist Rowan de Pomerai. Gone are the days of tape world QC with a person in a dark room armed with waveform monitors, audiometers and several monitors. Technical measurements are all wrapped in software processes. “We can analyse files, preferably in faster than realtime, and give you the results to review, and to take into your human reviews too. It would give an inclination of particular areas you have to watch out for,” said Pomerai. One problem is people wanting


to create their own QC device and QC workflows — that will fail every programme. Pomerai said: “Buy any QC product. But turning on all the tasks and plugging it in will fail everything. The reason is that you can test so many things, and set so many parameters. Tuning this to test the right things is really difficult.” This is where and why the DPP has looked at the fantastic QC definitions created by the EBU, and produced an intelligently shortened set of must dos.


“This goes through all the tests that the DPP thinks need to be done on a finished programme, and what the thresholds and tolerances are,” said Pomerai. “The idea is that vendors will be able to help us


with setting up profiles for their QC devices.” This will give producers a


minimum baseline. In “real English language” the DPP explains mandatory tests for things that must be passed, and editorial and technical warnings. Photosensitive epilepsy is another area where the DPP has tested and approved various devices. “Broadcasters will not be running a full QC on files certified as passing the DPP process. What we will do is basic file integrity checking, and there will be a spot


www.tvbeurope.com March 2014


DPP’s increasingly sophisticated bi-monthly forums attract large knowledge-hungry audiences from both the production and post sectors


metadata. Tucker looked at the vendor support of AS-11. “Some are not currently


providing full AS-11 files, but can provide the raw essence,” he said. “So you can do most of your work and you would import that valid essence file into the DPP metadata app and wrap in relevant metadata. “There are many implementations of AS-11 out there, and when considering products, one question you should ask yourself and the vendor is, How intuitive is the UI? Some products


Do an anti-virus check John Wollner, head of technology at BBC North and Nations, covered the issues around delivering files to broadcasters. It is about connectivity, the transfer mechanisms across that connectivity, security, file integrity and notification. Wollner reviewed all the plusses and minuses of the internet, managed and direct service connections, and said that USB hard drives and LTO data tapes are verboten. His first


“How can I be confident as I learn this process that what I have got in terms of my file is something that has a reasonable chance of getting to a broadcaster, and on air?”


check by the play out director to make sure it is the right bit of content,” said Pomerai.


Validate prior to wrapping Shane Tucker, a development engineer at Channel 4 and DPP metadata app project manager, talked about the creation and export of a DPP AS-11 file, which is an AVC Intra 100Mbs file wrapped in with metadata and delivered as a single MXF file. This MXF file has descriptive editorial, technical and structural


just present you with 60 fields and say, there you go, enter it.” There is little validation, and


you might end up tapping in data already entered in your NLE. Do the fields drop down and offer options, or are they blank? Re-populating fields can lead to mistakes. The answer is validation. “Look at validating prior to


wrapping. As there are a lot of metadata fields, it is quite easy to make the odd mistake and have metadata not matching the essence,” said Tucker.


Andy Tennant, ITV


like, after doubting FTP and the cloud, was third party accelerator tools. “Security is the key issue. Bear in mind that broadcasters are receiving tens of thousands of files every year,” he said. “They do not have the time to manually check every file. We will use automated processes, and if there is any non- compliance we will reject it. “Do an anti virus check, because to broadcasters the worst nightmare is a virus in their system.”


Encryption is the key, but things to note include the fact that using other things like checksum might add delays to transfers. Neither the DPP app nor the DPP XML schemer will support checksum. So what trips people up?


“The AVCI class 100 codec for DPP is the SMPTE specification not the Panasonic spec. There is no debate or argument,” said Wollner. “The audio channels have to be BWF not AES, and that is another thing tripping people up recently. Audio channels have to be individual tracks (for HD).” The third party accelerators


provide notifications, a function that can be automated, and Wollner used (Signiant) Media Shuttle to demonstrate the ease with which files can be sent. “Our children’s TV


department get suppliers to deliver stuff using Media Shuffle,” he said. “As a test we got a supplier in Toronto to send a completed programme that was 38GBs. A 40-minute asset, it arrived in 38 minutes.”


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