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

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

Video: AV1/VVC Update

Posted on 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 Christian Feldmann
Codec Engineer,
Bitmovin

Video: Scalable IP Architectures for Live Production and Playout

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

For many building a good network for a 2110 or other media-over-IP standards is new and a bit scary. But if there’s one person who knows how to do it, it’s Arista’s Gerard Phillips who’s here to go through the basics and build up the network needed for a large and scalable network.

Scalability is the heart of this, because life does change – your company grows, technology pushes you from SD to HD to UHD etc. So you need to build scalability in from the beginning. Getting this right comes down to choosing the right hardware and having the right architecture.

Gerard looks at switch architecture and bandwidth both in the switch and of the network cables. He then looks towards ‘hub and spoke’ Vs monolithic switch design. What are the pros and cons to each and which is right for you?

SDN – Software Defined Networking – is also a key ingredient in such a network. This is where the routing decisions of the switch infrastructure is taken out of the switches because they have automatic and blinkered algorithms and takes it to a server which has a complete overview of the whole system. For a broadcaster who deals with critical signal chains – this is usually the best approach to give determinism and safety to the network.

PTP – Precision Time Protocol – provides the foundation of the 2110 standard and is therefore very important to studio installations being used to replace black and burst. What are the best ways to distribute this and how can you deal with redundancy?

These topics and more are all covered at this IP Showcase presentation from IBC 2018.

Watch now!

Speaker

Gerard Phillips Gerard Phillips
Systems Engineer,
Arista Networks

Video: Scalable Video Coding in HEVC & AV1

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

While it has never played a big role in practical applications, scalable video coding has been around since the times of MPEG 2, and might actually have some advantages over the multi-rate transmission often applied today. The purpose of scalable coding is to efficiently compress multiple different versions of the same video in one “scalable” bitstream. Actually this sounds like the perfect solution for VOD and streaming applications, but unfortunately it has some downsides and few vendors ever used it. In this talk, Chrstian will review the basic idea of scalable coding, how it is enabled in modern coding standards and the pros and cons of implementing the technology in streaming applications.

Speaker

Christian Feldmann Chrisitan Feldmann
Codec Engineer,
Bitmovin