BT.REC 709

Video: Maintaining Colour Spaces

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Getting colours right is tricky. Many of us get away without considering colour spaces both in our professional and personal life. But if you’ve ever wanted to print a logo which is exactly the right colour, you may have found out the hard way that the colour in your JPEG doesn’t always match the CMYK of the printer. Here, we’re talking, of course about colour in video. With SD’s 601 and HD’s 709 colour space, how do we keep colours correct?

Rec. ITU-R BT.601-7 also known as REC 601 is the colour space standardised for SD video, Rec. ITU-R T.709-6 also known as Rec. 709 is typically used for HD video. Now for anyone who wants to brush up on what a colour space is, check out this excellent talk from Vimeo’s Vittorio Giovara. A great communicator, we have a number of other talks from him.

In this talk starting 28 minutes into the Twitch feed, Matt Szatmary exposes a number of problems. The first is the inconsistent, and sometimes wrong, way that browsers interpret colours in videos. Second is that FFmpeg only maintains colour space information in certain circumstances and, lastly, he exposes the colour changes that can occur when you’re not careful about maintaining the ‘chain of custody’ of colour space information.

Matt starts by explaining that the ‘VUI’ information, the Video Usability Information, found in AVC and HEVC conveys colour space information among other things such as aspect ratio. This was new to AVC and are not used by the encoder but indicate to decoders things to consider during the decoder process. We then see a live demonstration of Matt using FFmpeg to move videos through different colour spaces and the immediate results in different browsers.

This is an illuminating talk for anyone who cares about actually displaying the correct colours and brightnesses, particularly given there are many processes based on FFmpeg. Matt demonstrates how to ensure FFmpeg is maintaining the correct information.

Watch now!
Download the scripts used in the video
Speakers

Matt Szatmary Matt Szatmary
Senior Video Encoding Engineer,
Mux

Video: SMPTE Technical Primers

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

The Broadcast Knowledge exists to help individuals up-skill whatever your starting point. Videos like this are far too rare giving an introduction to a large number of topics. For those starting out or who need to revise a topic, this really hits the mark particularly as there are many new topics.

John Mailhot takes the lead on SMPTE 2110 explaining that it’s built on separate media (essence) flows. He covers how synchronisation is maintained and also gives an overview of the many parts of the SMPTE ST 2110 suite. He talks in more detail about the audio and metadata parts of the standard suite.

Eric Gsell discusses digital archiving and the considerations which come with deciding what formats to use. He explains colour space, the CIE model and the colour spaces we use such as 709, 2100 and P3 before turning to file formats. With the advent of HDR video and displays which can show bright video, Eric takes some time to explain why this could represent a problem for visual health as we don’t fully understand how the displays and the eye interact with this type of material. He finishes off by explaining the different ways of measuring the light output of displays and their standardisation.

Yvonne Thomas talks about the cloud starting by explaining the different between platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and similar cloud terms. As cloud migrations are forecast to grow significantly, Yvonne looks at the drivers behind this and the benefits that it can bring when used in the right way. Using the cloud, Yvonne shows, can be an opportunity for improving workflows and adding more feedback and iterative refinement into your products and infrastructure.

Looking at video deployments in the cloud, Yvonne introduces video codecs AV1 and VVC both, in their own way, successors to HEVC/h.265 as well as the two transport protocols SRT and RIST which exist to reliably send video with low latency over lossy networks such as the internet. To learn more about these protocols, check out this popular talk on RIST by Merrick Ackermans and this SRT Overview.

Rounding off the primer is Linda Gedemer from Source Sound VR who introduces immersive audio, measuring sound output (SPL) from speakers and looking at the interesting problem of forward speakers in cinemas. The have long been behind the screen which has meant the screens have to be perforated to let the sound through which interferes with the sound itself. Now that cinema screens are changing to be solid screens, not completely dissimilar to large outdoor video displays, the speakers are having to move but now with them out of the line of sight, how can we keep the sound in the right place for the audience?

This video is a great summary of many of the key challenges in the industry and works well for beginners and those who just need to keep up.

Watch now!
Speakers

John Mailhot John Mailhot
Systems Architect for IP Convergence,
Imagine Communications
Eric Gsell Eric Gsell
Staff Engineer,
Dolby Laboratories
Linda Gedemer, PhD Linda Gedemer, PhD
Technical Director, VR Audio Evangelist
Source Sound VR
Yvonne Thomas Yvonne Thomas
Strategic Technologist
Digital TV Group

Video: Intro to 4K Video & HDR

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

With all the talk of IP, you’d be wrong to think SDI is dead. 12G for 4K is alive and well in many places, so there’s plenty of appetite to understand how it works and how to diagnose problems.

In this double-header, Steve Holmes from Tektronix takes us through the ins and outs of HDR and also SDI for HDR at the SMPTE SF section.

Steve starts with his eye on the SMPTE standards for UHD SDI video looking at video resolutions and seeing that a UHD picture can be made up of 4 HD pictures which gives rise to two well-known formats ‘Quad split’ and ‘2SI’ (2 Sample Interleave).

Colour is the next focus and a discussion on the different colour spaces that UHD is delivered with (spoiler: they’re all in use), what these look like on the vectorscope and look at the different primaries. Finishing up with a roundup and a look at interlink timing, there’s a short break before hitting the next topic…HDR

High Dynamic Range is an important technology which is still gaining adoption and is often provided in 4K programmes. Steve defines the two places HDR is important; in the acquisition and the display of the video then provides a handy lookup table of terms such as HDR, WCG, PQ, HDR10, DMCVT and more.

Steve gives us a primer on what HDR is in terms of brightness ‘NITS’, how these relate to real life and how we talk about it with respect to the displays. We then look at HDR on the waveform monitor and look at features of waveform monitors which allow engineers to visualise and check HDR such as false colour.

The topic of gamma, EOTFs and colour spaces comes up next and is well-explained building on what came earlier. Before the final demo and Q&A, Steve talks about different ways to grade pictures when working in HDR.

A great intro to the topics at hand – just like Steve’s last one: Uncompressed Video over IP & PTP Timing

Watch now!

Speakers

Steve Holmes Steve Holmes
Former Senior Applications Engineer,
Tektronix

Video: Colour

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

With the advent of digital video, the people in the middle of the broadcast chain have little do to with colour for the most part. Yet those in post production, acquisition and decoding/display are finding it life more and more difficult as we continue to expand colour gamut and deliver on new displays.

Google’s Steven Robertson takes us comprehensively though the challenges of colour from the fundamentals of sight to the intricacies of dealing with REC 601, 709, BT 2020, HDR, YUV transforms and all the mistakes people make in between.

An approachable talk which gives a great overview, raises good points and goes into detail where necessary.

An interesting point of view is that colour subsampling should die. After all, we’re now at a point where we could feed an encoded with 4:4:4 video and get it to compress the colour channels more than the luminance channel. Steven says that this would generate more accurate colour than by stripping it of a fixed amount of data like 4:2:2 subsampling does.

Given at Brightcove HQ as part of the San Francisco Video Tech meet-ups.

Watch now!

Speaker

Steven Robertson Steven Robertson
Software Engineer,
Google