Webinar Archives – Page 8 of 54 – The Broadcast Knowledge

Webinar: Crafting quality: Skills for successful UHD and HDR production

Posted on 28th May 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Webinar date: Thursday May 30th 2019
Time: 16:00 BST / 11 am EST / 8 am PDT

Experienced advice is on hand in this webinar for those producing in HDR and UHD. Productions are always trying to raise the quality of acquisition in order to deliver better quality to the viewers, to enhance creative possibilities and to maximise financial gain by future proofing their archives. But this push always brings challenges in production and the move to UHD and HDR is no different.

HDR and UHD are not synonymous, but often do go hand-in-hand. This is partly because the move to UHD is a move to improve quality, but time and again we hear the reasons that increasing resolution in and of itself is not always an improvement. Rather the ‘better pixels’ mantra seeks to improve quality through improving the video using a combination of resolution, frame-rate, HDR and Wide Colour Gamut (WCG). So when it’s possible, HDR and WCG are often combined with UHD.

In this webinar, we hear the challenges on the way to success met by director and producer Pamela Ann Berry and The Farm Group. Register to hear them share their tips and tricks for better UHD and HDR production.

Register now!

Speakers

	Pamela Ann Berry Director/producer
	Aidan Farrell Senior Colourist, The Farm Group, UK
	Pete Collins Head of Scripted Pipeline, The Farm Group, UK

Video: An Overview of the ISO Base Media File Format

Posted on 24th May 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

ISO BMFF a standardised MPEG media container developed from Apple’s Quicktime and is the basis for cutting edge low-latency streaming as much as it is for tried and trusted mp4 video files. Here we look into why we have it, what it’s used for and how it works.

ISO BMFF provides a structure to place around timed media streams whilst accommodating the metadata we need for professional workflows. Key to its continued utility is its extensible nature allowing additional abilities to be added as they are developed such as adding new codecs and metadata types.

ATSC 3.0’s streaming mechanism MMT is based on ISO BMFF as well as the low-latency streaming format CMAF which shows that despite being over 18 years old, the ISO BMFF container is still highly relevant.

Thomas Stockhammer is the Director of Technical Standards at Qualcomm. He explains the container format in structure and origin before explaining why it’s ideal for CMAF’s low-latency streaming use case, finishing off with a look at immersive media in ISO BMFF.

Watch now!

Speaker

Thomas Stockhammer
Director Technical Standards,
Qualcomm

Video: AV1/VVC Update

Posted on 22nd May 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

AV1 and VVC are both new codecs on the scene. Codecs touch our lives every day both at work and at home. They are the only way that anyone receives audio and video online and television. So all together they’re pretty important and finding better ones generates a lot of opinion.

So what are AV1 and VVC? VVC is one of the newest codecs on the block and is undergoing standardisation in MPEG. VVC builds on the technologies standardised by HEVC but adds many new coding tools. The standard is likely to enter draft phase before the end of 2019 resulting in it being officially standardised around a year later. For more info on VVC, check out Bitmovin’s VVC intro from Demuxed

AV1 is a new but increasingly known codec, famous for being royalty free and backed by Netflix, Apple and many other big hyper scale players. There have been reports that though there is no royalty levied on it, patent holders have still approached big manufacturers to discuss financial reimbursement so its ‘free’ status is a matter of debate. Whilst there is a patent defence programme, it is not known if it’s sufficient to insulate larger players. Much further on than VVC, AV1 has already had a code freeze and companies such as Bitmovin have been working hard to reduce the encode times – widely known to be very long – and create live services.

Here, Christian Feldmann from Bitmovin gives us the latest status on AV1 and VVC. Christian discusses AV1’s tools before discussing VVC’s tools pointing out the similarities that exist. Whilst AV1 is being supported in well known browsers, VVC is at the beginning.

There’s a look at the licensing status of each codec before a look at EVC – which stands for Essential Video Coding. This has a royalty free baseline profile so is of interest to many. Christian shares results from a Technicolor experiment.

Speakers

Christian Feldmann
Codec Engineer,
Bitmovin

Webinar: Talking to the TV: Transforming the viewing experience with voice control

Posted on 13th May 2019 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Thursday 16th May 2019, 16:00 BST / 11am EDT / 8am PDT

Controlling services by voice is on the rise. Recently we have seen Google move all their Nest hardware control into Google Assistant and the abilities of Alexa and Siri continue to grow. All of these smart speakers and voice-controlled AI assistants have seen rapid adoption in homes, the UK being the biggest adopter with voice assistant devices now used in more than a quarter of all households.

With a shift away from the on-screen EPG and clunky remote controls to a world where any content is a voice command away, who owns the voice interface with the consumer and the vast amount of valuable data it creates? Does this put more power in the hands of the Silicon Valley tech giants as their voice assistants and AI algorithms become a new gatekeeper? And how should content owners respond?

This webinar explores the value of voice control for content, and finds the best strategies for broadcasters and platform operators to develop voice interfaces and maintain control of the user experience.

Register now!

Speakers

	Patrick Byrden Senior Director of Customer Solutions, TiVo
	Ashley Grossman Senior Manager, Personalisation & Discovery, Liberty Global
	Morvarid Kashanipour Head of Product Design, Com Hem

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