Video Archives – Page 93 of 172 – The Broadcast Knowledge

Video: The Good and the Ugly – IP Studio Production Case Study

Posted on 22nd January 2020 by Adam K

What’s implementing SMPTE ST-2110 like in real life? How would you design your network and what were the problems? In this case study Ammar Latif from Cisco Systems presents the architecture, best practices and lessons learned they gleaned in this live IP broadcast production facility project designed for a major US broadcaster. Based on SMPTE ST-2110 standard, it spanned five studios and two control rooms. The central part of this project was a dual Spine-Leaf IP fabric with bandwidth equivalent of a 10,000 x 10,000 HD SDI router with a fully non-blocking multicast architecture. The routing system was based on Grass Valley Convergent broadcast controller and a Cisco DCNM media controller.

As the project was commissioned in 2018, the AMWA IS-04 and IS-05 specifications providing an inter-operable mechanism for routing media around SMPTE 2110 network were not yet available. Multicast flow subscription was based on a combination of IGMP (Internet Group Management Protocol) and PIM (Protocol Independent Multicast) protocols. While PIM is very efficient and mature, it lacks the ability to use bandwidth as a parameter when setting up a flow path. Ammar explains how Non-Blocking Multicast (NBM) developed by Cisco brings bandwidth awareness to PIM by signalling a type of data (video, audio or metadata).

The talk continues by discussing PTP distribution & monitoring, SMPTE 2022-7 seamless protection switching and remote site production. Ammar also lets us see how the user interfaces on the Cisco DCNM media controller were designed which include a visualisation of multicast flow, network topology and link saturation of ports.

You can find the slides here.

Watch now!

Speaker

Ammar Latif
Principal Architect,
Cisco Systems

Video: How many Nits is Color Bars?

Posted on 21st January 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Update: This webinar is now available on-demand. Links in this article have been updated to match.

Brightness, luminance, luma, NITS and candela. What are the differences between these similar terms? If you’ve not been working closely with displays and video, you may not know but as HDR grows in adoption, it pays to have at least a passing understanding of the terms in use.

Date: Thursday January 23rd – 11am ET / 16:00 GMT

Last week, The Broadcast Knowledge covered the difference between Luma and Luminance in this video from YouTube channel DisplacedGamers. It’s a wide ranging video which explains many of the related fundamentals of human vision and analogue video much of which is relevant in this webinar.

To explain the detail of not only what these mean, but also how we use them to set up our displays, the IABM have asked Norm Hurst from SRI, often known as Sarnoff, to come in and discuss his work researching test patterns. SRI make many test patterns which show up how your display is/isn’t working and also expose some of the processing that the signal has gone through on its journey before it even got to the display. In many cases these test patterns tell their story without electronic meters or analysers, but when brightness is concerned, there can still be place for photometers, colour analysers and other associated meters.

HDR and its associated Wide Colour Gamut (WCG) bring extra complexity in ensuring your monitor is set up correctly particularly as many monitors can’t show some brightness levels and have to do their best to accommodate these requests from the incoming signal. Being able to operationally and academically assess and understand how the display is performing and affecting the video is of prime importance. Similarly colours, as ever, a prone to shifting as they are processed, attenuated and/or clipped.

This free webinar from the IABM is led by CTO Stan Moote.

Watch now!
Speaker

	Norm Hurst Senior Principal Research Engineer, SRI International SARNOFF
	Stan Moote CTO, IABM

Video: Analog Luma – A History and Explanation of Video

Posted on 17th January 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

There are many video fundamentals in today’s video looking at how we see light and how we can represent it in a video signal. Following on from last week’s look at analogue 525-line video we take a deeper dive in to light and colour.

The video starts by examining how white light can be split into colours, primaries, and how these can be re-combined in different amounts to create different colours. It then moves on to examining how the proportion of colours which create ‘white’ light isn’t as even as you might imagine. This allows us to understand how to create brighter and dimmer light which is called the luminance. We’re introduced to the CIE 2d and 3d colour graphs helping us to understand colour space and colour volume

Modern video, even if analogue, is acquired with red, green and blue as separate signals. This means if we want a grey-scale video signal, i.e. luminance only, we need to combine using the proportions discussed earlier. This biased version of luminance is what is called ‘luma’ explains the video from the Displaced Gamers YouTube Channel.

On top of human perception, much of the 20th century was dominated by CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) TVs, which don’t respond linearly to electrical voltage, meaning if you double the voltage, the brightness doesn’t necessary double. In order to compensate for that, ‘gamma correction’ is applied on acquisition so that playback on a CRT produces a linear response.

Pleasantly, an oscillator is wheeled out next looking at a real analogue video waveform demonstrating the shape of not only the sync pulses but the luminance waveform itself and how the on-screen rendition would be seen on a TV. The video then finishes with a brief look at colour addition NTSC, PAL, SECAM signals. A prelude, perhaps, to a future video.

Watch now!

Speaker

Chris Kennedy
Displaced Gamers,YouTube Channel

Video: Where can SMPTE 2110 and NDI co-exist?

Posted on 16th January 2020 by Russell Trafford-Jones

When are two video formats better than one? Broadcasters have long sought ‘best of breed’ systems matching equipment as close as possible to your ideal workflow. In this talk, we look getting the best of both compressed, low-latency and uncompressed video. NDI, a lightly compressed, ultra-low latency codec, allows full productions in visually lossless video with a field of latency. SMPTE’s ST-2110 allows full productions with uncompressed video and almost zero latency.

Bringing together the EBU’s Willem Vermost who paints a picture from the perspective of public broadcasters who are planning their moves into the IP realm, Marc Risby from UK distributor and integrator Boxer brings a more general view of the market’s interest and Will Waters who spent many years in Newtek, the company that invented NDI we hear the two approaches of compressed and uncompressed complement each other.

This panel took place just after the announcement that Newtek had been bought by VizRT, the graphics vendor, who sees a lot of benefit in being able to work in both types of workflow, for clients large and small and who have made Newtek its own entity under the VizRT umbrella to ensure continued focus.

A key differentiator of NDI is its focus on 1 gigabit networking. Its aim has always to enable ‘normal’ companies to be able to deploy IP video easily so they can rapidly benefit from the benefits that IP workflows bring over SDI or other baseband video technologies. A keystone in this strategy is to enable everything to happen on normal, 1Gbit switches which are prevalent in most companies today. Other key elements to the codec are: free, software development kit, bi-directionality, resolution-independent, audio sample-rate agnostic, tally support, auto-discovery and more.

In the talk, we discuss the pros and cons of this approach where interoperability is assured as everyone has to use the same receive and transmit code, against having a standard such as SMPTE ST-2110. SMPTE ST-2110 has the benefit of being uncompressed, assuring the broadcaster that they have captured the best possible quality of video, promises better management at scale, tighter integration into complex workflows, lower latency and the ability to treat the many different essences separately. Whilst we discuss many of the benefits of SMPTE ST-2110, you can get a more detailed overview from this presentation from the IP Showcase.

Watch now!

This panel was produced by IET Media, a technical network within the IET which runs events, talks and webinars for networking and education within the broadcast industry. More information

Speakers

	Willem Vermost At the time, Senior IP Media Technology Architect, EBU Now, Design and Engineering Manager, VRT
	Marc Risby CTO, Boxer Group
	Will Waters Formerly Vice President Of Worldwide Customer Success, Now Head of Global Product Management, VizRT
	Moderator: Russell Trafford-Jones Exec Member, IET Media Manager, Support & Services, Techex Editor, The Broadcast Knowledge

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