Video: Reopening Film and TV Production in NYC

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones


Restarting productions and stepping up MCR staffing could be the difference between life and death if you get it wrong. What are the right precautions to take, what’s proportionate and can you get your staff and freelancers to follow the rules?

This SMPTE panel looks at the recommendations and rules generated by the bustling TV, film and advertising industry in New York. The cornerstone of the session is an overview of the guidelines called The Safe Way Forward which is a collaborative document being put together with negotiation with the unions to ensure there’s a widely agreed and understood rules to run safe productions with.

The Safe Way Forward is based on regular testing and zoning productions. Talent and crew which work closely with them such as sound, make-up, etc. are considered zone A. Often there are times when close contact and/or PPE are not practical so anyone who works in zone A is tested 3 times a week or more to catch any infection quickly. Other crew are considered in zone B and cannot come on set or in designated zone A locations. Zone B staff are tested once a week or more. Zone C is considered anyone else and/or outside of the studio.

The panel agrees that testing is a really important part of the safe working strategy using the example of the Miami Marlins who had 16 members of their team infected. Regular, thorough testing would have caught this earlier and helped reduce the impact of the initial infectious person.

Matt Miller makes the counterpoint that from the perspective of commercials production, testing just doesn’t cut it when your whole shoot is only a day and a half long. For the Association of Independent Commercial Producers, creating a safe environment is the focus of their guidelines which is already on its 5th edition. There are no ‘either/or’s, it’s about PPE and social distancing and</em frequent hand washing etc. Matt says it’s been very effective in maintaining this safety.

Short-term jobs are a source of concern for the panel when it comes to extras who may book themselves in for several different jobs over a week. How do we stop them from spreading the virus from production to production? The idea of a testing passport is under discussions, but this problem has not yet been resolved. It’s certainly possible that scripts will be altered to reduce extras, particularly if they have to be paid to come in ahead of their work to take a test.

Efficiencies are also a topic of discussion. Certainly one benefit of working at home is the ability to remotely collaborate without commuting/travelling and, depending on the type of work can be very effective. On the set, the panel anticipates an increased desire for monitoring. People in Zone B who are used to being on set will want to be able to see what’s happening which will drive increased demand on the network and electrical distribution. But with this more distributed monitoring, there may be more effective ways for people to work. Time will tell how much this will have an effect and where the balance is. Never will the DIT role be more important.

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Speakers

Dejan Georgevich Dejan Georgevich
National vice President,
IATSE
Andy Shipsides Andy Shipsides
Presient – North America,
ARRI Rental
Peter Abel Peter Abel
CEO & Co-Founder,
Abel CineTech
Alan Suna Alan Suna
CEO,
Silvercup Studios
Matt Miller Matt Miller
Presient & CEO,
AICP
Mary Rae Thewlis Mary Rae Thewlis
National Vice President,
DGA
Joseph Reidy Joseph Reidy
1st vice Chair, Easter AD/UPM Council
Co-chair, 1st AD Committee, DGA

Video: 5G QuickStart

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

The best way to cut through the 5G hype is to understand the technology itself. This video explains the acronyms, frequency use, OpenRAN sites, multipath reception, software-defined radio.

Joe Hess starts this talk at NANOG 75 by telling us what 5G isn’t before covering the basics. He talks about NFV, Network Function Virtualisation, which is the ability to move any network function such as firewalls any load balancers into software running on a virtual environment. The flexibility that this provides is significant. Not only does NFV reduce the cost of launching new services and allowing that to happen quicker, all because no new hardware appliances need to be purchased and installed, it is also key to enabling ‘Network slicing’ which is a critical element to making 5G work for the broadcast industry. When you have virtualised the network functions, provisioning a totally new, separate, network can be done via API allowing a broadcaster to have their own cut of the network bandwidth but also have the security of total segregation.

Joe also highlights some other important technologies such as CUPS, which no longer stands for the Common UNIX Printing System, but rather Control and User Plane Separation. Part of CUPS is the ability to use polar codes to represent control data in the same datastream as general traffic. This creates a more robust control channel than the general data without having to create a separate channel. He also discusses the meaning of ‘NR’ or ‘New Radio’ which is a radio protocol replacing UMTS used in 3G and 4G’s LTE. It has the ability to be used on frequencies up to 6GHz and also on 24GHz and above, includes improved OFDM performance, and also run on top of an LTE core.

Please note the audio glitches you hear are on the recording and not due to your system

Joe makes the point that the 5G can run on ‘any’ frequency from 700MHz up and takes a look at the details. He also points out that there’s a lot of information in the press about 5G rollouts including by Telegeography

We next look at cRAN, vRAN and oRAN. cRAN (Cloud Radio Access Network) involves centralising control typically in the cloud. vRAN, Virtual RAN, allows you to choose who receives service from each tower allowing you to share a stadium’s-worth of subscribers or, say the people in a traffic jam, amongst a number of cell towers, not just the one which is closest to them or gives them the best reception. OpenRAN, such as the one just launched in Reading, UK which allows interoperability with open source software and the use of software defined radio.

MIMO is the next topic covered. Joe explains this isn’t new, but it is an important part of 5G. MIMO stands for Mulitple In, Multiple Out which is the ability to use multiple antennae at both ends to deal with the multi-path reflections on the received signal. In the last part of the talk, Joe speaks about mapping 5G deployments, tools you can use to analyse 5G.

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Download the presentation
Speakers

Joe Hess Joe Hess
Hess Communications

Video: Is Too Much Choice No Choice At All? What Consumers Want In The Era Of Peak TV

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

The number of streaming services continues to expand are we going back to the future with too much choice, just like cable TV packages with a thousand channels? Discovery will launch a direct-to-consumer service imminently and ViacomCBS Nordics are launching a new SVOD service to global markets, just to cite two examples of new launches after Disney+ proved that with the right brand and content, it’s not too difficult quickly rack up tens of millions of subscribers globally.

This panel from Streaming Media Connect discusses navigating the world of multiple streaming services and finding what you want starting with a look at the programmes that US respondents to an annual survey value most.
They discuss the average number of streaming subscriptions today in different demographics and how each of them expects this to change in the future with some suggesting an average of around 3, some more so. This reveals the question of whether YouTube is AVOD or SVOD, one service or millions. People will come back to a service depending on ‘how deep and hot often [it’s] refreshed’.

Ali Hodjat from Intertrust, highlights a 16% increase in content DRM licence delivery during the pandemic. Keeping DRM licences delivery smooth is essential for low-latency streaming. There has been a COVID-related boost in viewing, so Matt Rivet raises the question of whether this will reduce again. Sherry Brennan suggests it will go down, but the market share shifts which have happened are likely to remain, sports watching excepted. The reason for this is that the pandemic is likely to have prompted people to try new things, and many will find these suit them.

It’s estimated that 17% of video traffic is streaming of pirated material. Though many torrents are legal, there has been an increase in torrent downloads during the lockdowns. Ali and Matt discuss the question of whether discovery is a barrier to people accessing video legally. For those that have many services, ‘choice paralysis’ is a thing and does hamper selecting something to watch, particularly when not alone. Whilst getting consensus across multiple people is always difficult, it’s made no shorter when there are 200 options across 3 services. The panel starts with the principle that it’s “too hard to search” and discusses recommendation engines and the difficulty of tracking who’s watching.

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Speakers

Sarah lyons Sarah Lyons
Senior Vice President, Product Experience
HBO MAX / WarnerMedia
Randa Minkarah Randa Minkarah
President, Chief Operating Officer & Co-Founder,
Resonance AI
Sherry Brennan Sherry Brennan
Senior Media Consultant
Ali Hodjat Ali Hodjat
Directory of Product Marketing
Intertrust
Matthew Rivet Moderator: Matthew Rivet
Director,
Altman Solon

Video: Audio Metadata over IP

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Next-Generation Audio is gradually becoming this generation’s audio as new technologies seep into the mainstream. Dolby Atmos is one example of a technology which is being added to more and more services and which goes way beyond stereo and even 5.1 surround sound. But these technologies don’t just rely on audio, they need data, too to allow the decoders to understand the sound so they can apply the needed processing. It’s essential that this data, called metadata, keeps in step with the audio and, indeed, that it gets there in the first place.

Dolby have long used metadata along with surround sound to maintain the context in which the recording was mastered. There’s no way for the receiver to know what maximum audio level the recording was mixed to without being told, for instance. With NGA, the metadata needed can be much more complex. With Dolby Atmos, for example, the audio objects need position information along with the mastering information needed for surround sound.

Kent Terry from Dolby laboratories joins us to discuss the methods, both current and future, that we can use to convey metadata from point to point in the broadcast chain. He starts by looking at the tried and trusted methods of carrying data within the audio of SDI. This is the way that Dolby E and Dolby D are carried, as data within what appears to be an AES 3 stream. There are two SMPTE standards for this in a sample-accurate fashion, ST 2109 and ST 2116.

SMPTE 2109 allows for metadata to be carried over an AES 3 channel using SMPTE ST 337, 337 being the standard which defines how to put compressed audio over AES 3 which would normally expect PCM audio data. This allows for any metadata at all to be carried. SMPTE ST 2116, similarly, defines metadata transport over AES3 but specifically for ITU-R BS.2125 and BS.2076 which define how to carry the Audio Definition Model.

The motivation for these standards is to enable live workflows which don’t have a great way of delivering live metadata. There are a few types of metadata which are worth considering. Static metadata, which doesn’t change during the programme such as the number of channels or the sample rate. Dynamic metadata such as spacial location and dialogue levels. And importantly optional metadata and required metadata, the latter being essential for the functioning of the technology.

Kent says that live productions are held back in their choice of NGA technologies by the limitations of metadata carriage and this is one reason that work is being done in the IP space to create similar standards for all-IP programme production.

For IP there are two approaches. The first is to define a way to send metadata separately to the AES67 audio which is found within SMPTE ST 2110-30, which is done with the new AES standard AES-X242. The other way being developed is using SMPTE 2110-41 which allows for any metadata (not solely ST 292) to be carried in a time-synchronised way with the other 2110 essences. Both of these methods, Kent explains are actively being developed and are open to input from users.

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Speaker

Kent Terry Kent Terry
Snr. Manager, Sound Technology, Office of the CTO,
Dolby Laboratories