Video: Early Live Trials of VVC & EVC for OTT Delivery

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Much of 2020 was spent looking forward to the release of VVC, EVC and LC-EVC. A trio of MPEG standards fitting different use cases across this industry and beyond. Now they’ve all been released, it’s time to filter through finding which are the right fit for your workflows.

In this video, Thibaud Biatek from ATEME looks at using EVC and VVC for online streaming. EVC, is the Essential Video Codec, and VVC stands for the Versatile Video Codec. If you’d like to know more about the codecs themselves, check out this video talking about all of them. The driver for new codecs highlighted in the video is that internet traffic is over 70% video. But taking a step back, we need to remember that these codecs all come delivering more than just compression savings. Some, like LCEVC bring easier compression on embedded systems and easier decoding for AI applications. VVC represents the state of the art in compression techniques and EVC offers a totally royalty-free encoding option which is missing from all other MPEG codecs.

MPEG are very open that VVC is the same fundamental design as MPEG 2 was, it’s the techniques in each functional block which have improved in both quantity and ability that marks the difference. As such, Thibaud notes that you can create the same base code for an EVC codec as for VVC, thus you only need one software library to deliver an encode for both codecs. If you look at partitioning the screen into blocks, we see that VVC does everything EVC does but ads the ability to have diagonals. Screen Content Coding (SCC) is a speciality of VVC which adds it as a standard capability, unlike HEVC which had it optional. EVC also has SCC but only contains Intra Block Copy to implement it; VVC has three more on top of IBC.

Thibaud outlines how ATEME have done their initial implementations of VVC and EVC. Though they are not yet full implementations, they are seeing notable improvements over HEVC, particularly for VVC’s encoding of 8K which is attributed to the larger block sizes allowed in partitioning. He then takes us through the trials to date which have involved UHD VVC over satellite to the current test which is a real-time VVC encode to a CMAF ladder of 720p, 1080p and 2160p. In partnership with Akamai, this was then distributed as CMAF to the end-user which was using IETR’s openVVC decoder.

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Speaker

Thibaud Biatek Thibaud Biatek
Reasearch & Innovation Engineer
ATEME

Video: In Stadium Production Workflow and COVID 19

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

As COVID-19 has wrought many changes to society, this webinar looks to see how it’s changed the way live sports is produced by the in-stadium crews producing the TV shows the cover the ups and downs of our beloved teams. We know that crews have had to be creative, but what has that actually looked like and has it all been negative?

The SMPTE Philadelphia section first invites Martin Otremsky to talk about how his work within the MLB has changed. Before the beginning of the season, Martin and team weren’t allowed in the stadium and had very little notice of the first game for which they were allowed to prepare.

Crowd noise was a big issue. Not only was the concern that the players would find it offputting in a silent stadium, but it was soon realised that swearing and tactics chat could easily be heard by other players and the mics. Bringing back crowd noise helped mask that and allow the teams to talk normally.

The crowd noise was run off three iPads. One which ran a 3-hour loop of general crowd noise and then two which had touch screen buttons to trigger different types/moods of effects dealing with the noises of anticipation and reactions, when the crowd would be at ease and when they would be ‘pumped’. This was run on the fly by two operators who would keep this going throughout the game. The crowd noise required a fair bit of fine-tuning including getting the in-stadium acoustics right as the speaker system is set up to assume the stands are lined with absorbent people; without a crowd, the acoustics are much more echoey.

Link to video

The Covid protections dealt with people in 3 tiers. Tier 1 was for the players and coaches all of whom were tested every 48 hours and where they would need to be. Tier 3 was for people who could go everywhere not in Tier 1. Tier 2 was one or two people who were allowed in both but under extreme restrictions. As such the crew in Tier 3 found it hard to do a lot of maintenance/configuration in certain places as they had to leave every time Tier 1 staff needed to be in the area.

The operation itself had been pared down from 28 to 9 people which was partly achieved by simplifying the programme itself. The ballpark often had to be flipped to accommodate another team using it as their ‘home’ stadium which caused a lot of work as graphics would have to be reworked to fit the in-stadium graphics boards. Crowd noise would have to cheer for a different team and the video & production graphics had to be swapped out. Matin ends his presentation with a Q&A session.

Next up is Carl Mandell for the Philadelphia Union football/soccer team. They had been lucky enough to be at the end of a stadium technical refresh of their LED displays and their control room, moving up to 1080p60 HDR. Alas, the COVID restrictions hit just before the home opener, robbing them of the chance to use all the new equipment. Their new cameras, for instance, remained unused until right near the end of the season.

Link to video

Unlike the MLB, Carl explains they didn’t choose to do crowd audio in the stadium itself. They ran virtual graphics to fulfil contractual obligations and to brighten up the relatively empty stadium. Unlike MLB, they were able to have a limited crowd in the stadium during most matches.

For the crowd noise used in the broadcast programme, they used audio taken from their ten-year archive of previous games and allowed the chants and reactions to be under the control of fans.

One COVID success was moving the press conferences on Zoom. Whilst the spokesperson/people were actually in the stadium with a PTZ camera in front of them and an 85″ TV to the side, all the media were brought in on Zoom. Carl says they found that this format produced much more engaging conferences which increased their international appeal and raised the viewership of the press conferences.

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Speakers

Carl Mandell Carl Mandell
Director, Broadcasting & Video Production
Philadelphia Union
Martin Otremsky Martin Otremsky
Director of Video Engineering,
Philadelphia Phillies

Video: UHD and HDR at the BBC – Where Are We Now, and Where Are We Going? –

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Has UHD been slow to roll out? Not so, we hear in this talk which explains the work to date in standardising, testing and broadcasting in UHD by the BBC and associated organisations such as the EBU.

Simon Thompson from BBC R&D points out that HD took decades to translate from an IBC demo to an on-air service, whereas UHD channels surfaced only two years after the first IBC demonstration of UHD video. UHD has had a number of updates from the initial resolution focused definition which created UHD-1, 2160p lines high and UHD-2 which is often called 8K. Later, HDR with Wide Colour Gamut (WCG) was added which allowed the image to much better replicate the brightnesses the eye is used to and almost all of the naturally-occurring colours; it turns out that HD TV (using REC.709 colour) can not reproduce many colours commonly seen at football matches.

In fact, the design brief for HDR UHD was specifically to keep images looking natural which would allow better control over the artistic effect. In terms of HDR, the aim was to have a greater range than the human eye for any one adpation state. The human eye can see an incredible range of brightnesses, but it does this by adapting to different brightness levels – for instance by changing the pupil size. When in a fixed state the eye can only access a subset of sensitivity without further adapting. The aim of HDR is to have the eye in one adaptation state due to the ambient brightness, then allow the TV to show any brightness the eye can then hold.

Simon explains the two HDR formats: Dolby’s PQ widely adopted by the film industry and the Hybrid Log-Gamma format which is usually favoured by broadcasters who show live programming. PQ, we hear from Simon, covers the whole range of the human visual system meaning that any PQ stream has the capability to describe images from 1 to 10,000 Nits. In order to make this work properly, the mix needs to know the average brightness level of the video which will not be available until the end of the recording. It also requires sending metadata and is dependent on the ambient light levels in the room.

Hybrid Log-Gamma, by contrast, works on the fly. It doesn’t attempt to send the whole range of human eye and no metadata needed. This lends itself well to delivering HDR for live productions. To learn more about the details of PQ and HLG, check out this video.

Simon outlines the extensive testing and productions done in UHD and looks at the workflows possible. The trick has been finding the best way to produce both an SDR and an HDR production at the same time. The latest version that Simon highlights had all the 70 cameras being racked in HDR by people looking at the SDR down-mix version. The aim here is to ensure that the SDR version looks perfect, as it still serves over 90% of the viewership. However, the aim is to move to a 100% HDR production with SDR being derived off the back of that without any active monitoring. The video ends with a look to the challenges yet to be overcome in UHD and HDR production.

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Speaker

Simon Thompson Simon Thompson
Senior R&D Engineer
BBC R&D

Video: ST-2110 – Measuring and Testing the Data, Control and Timing Planes

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

An informal chat touching on the newest work around SMPTE ST-2110 standards and related specifications in today’s video. The industry’s leading projects are now tracking the best practices in IT as much as the latest technology in IP because simply getting video working over the network isn’t enough. Broadcasters demand solutions which are secure from the ground up, easy to deploy and have nuanced options for deployment.

Andy Rayner from Nevion talks to Prin Boon from Phabrix to understand the latest trends. Between then, Andy and Prin account for a lot of activity in standards work within standards and industry bodies such as SMPTE, VSF and JT-NM to name a but a few, so whom better to hear from regarding the latest thinking and ongoing work.

Andy starts by outlining the context of SMPTE’s ST-2110 suite of standards which covers not only the standards within 2110, but also the NMOS specifications from AMWA as well as the timing standards (SMPTE 2059 and IEEE 1588). Prin and Andy both agree that the initial benefit of moving to IT networking was benefiting from the massive network switches which now delivering much higher switching density than SDI ever could or would, now the work of 2110 projects is also tracking IT, rather than simply IP. By benefiting from the best practices of the IT industry as a whole, the broadcast industry is getting a much better product. Andy makes the point that broadcast-uses have very much pushed fabric manufacturers to implement PTP and other network technologies in a much more mature and scalable way than was imagined before.

Link to video

The focus of conversation now moves to the data, control and timing plane. The data plane contains the media essences and all of the ST 21110 standards. Control is about the AMWA/NMOS specs such as the IS-0X specs as well as the security-focused BCP-003 and JT-NM TR-1001. Timing is about PTP and associated guidelines.

Prin explains that in-service test and measurement is there to give a feeling for the health of a system; how close to the edge is the system? This is about early alerting of engineering specialists and then enable deep faultfinding with hand-held 2110 analysers. Phabrix, owned by Leader, are one of a number of companies who are creating monitoring and measurement tools. In doing this Willem Vermost observed that little of the vendor data was aligned so couldn’t be compared. This has directly led to work between many vendors and broadcasters to standardise the reported measurement data in terms of how it’s measured and how it is named and is being standardised under 2110-25. This will cover latency, video timing, margin and RTP offset.

More new work discussed by the duo includes the recommended practice, RP 2059-15 which is related to the the ST 2059 standards which apply PTP to media streams. As PTP, also known as IEEE 1588 has been updated to version 2.1 as part of the 2019 update, this RP creates a unified framework to expose PTP data in a structured manner and relies on RFC 8575 which, itself, relies on the YANG data modeling language.

We also hear about work to ensure that NMOS can fully deal with SMPTE 2022-7 flows in all the cases where a receiver is expecting a single or dual feed. IS-08 corner cases have been addressed and an all-encompassing model to develop against has been created as a reference.

Pleasingly, as this video was released in December, we are treated to a live performance of a festive song on piano and trombone. Whilst this doesn’t progress the 2110 narrative, it is welcomed as a great excuse to have a mine pie.

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Speakers

Andy Rayner Andy Rayner
Chief Technologist,
Nevion
Prinyar Boon Prinyar Boon
Product Manager,
PHABRIX