Ed Calverley

Video: Is IP Really Better than SDI?

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

Is SDI so bad? With the industry as a whole avidly discussing and developing IP technology, all the talk of the benefits of IP can seem like a dismissal of SDI. SDI served the broadcast industry very well for decades, so what’s suddenly so wrong with it? Of course, SDI still has a place and even some benefits over IP. Whilst IP is definitely a great technology to take the industry forward, there’s nothing wrong with using SDI in the right place.

Ed Calverley from Q3Media takes an honest look at the pros and cons of SDI. Not afraid to explain where SDI fits better than IP, this is a very valuable video for anyone who has to choose technology for a small or medium project. Whilst many large projects, nowadays, are best done in IP, Ed looks at why that is and, perhaps more importantly, what’s tricky about making it work, highlighting the differences doing the same project in SDI.

This video is the next in IET Media’s series of educational videos and follows on nicely from Gerard Phillips’ talk on Network Design for uncompressed media. Here, Ed recaps the reasons SDI has been so successful and universally accepted in the broadcast industry as well as looking at SDI routing. This is essential to understand the differences when we move to IP in terms of benefits and compromises.

SDI is a unidirectional technology, something which makes it pleasantly simple, but at scale makes life difficult in terms of cabling. Not only is it unidirectional, but it can only really carry one video at a time. Before IP, this didn’t seem to be much of a restriction, but as densities have increased, cabling was often one limiting factor on the size of equipment – not unlike the reason 3.5mm audio jacks have started to disappear from some phones. Moreover, anyone who’s had to plan an expansion of an SDI router, adding a second one, has come across the vast complexity of doing so. Physically it can be very challenging, it will involve using tie-lines which come with a whole management overhead in and of themselves as well as taking up much valuable I/O which could have been used for new inputs and outputs, but are required for tying the routers together. Ed uses a number of animations to show how IP significantly improves media routing,

In the second part of the video, we start to look at the pros and cons of key topics including latency, routing behaviour, virtual routing, bandwidth management, UHD and PTP. With all this said, Ed concludes that IP is definitely the future for the industry, but on a project-by-project basis, we shouldn’t dismiss the advantages that do exist of SDI as it could well be the right option.

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Speakers

Ed Ed Calverley
Trainer & Consultant
Q3Media.co.uk
Russell Trafford-Jones Moderator: Russell Trafford-Jones
Exec Member, IET Media Technical Network
Editor, The Broadcast Knowledge
Manager, Services & Support, Techex

Video: Uncompressed IP Video Basics

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

To the uninitiated, it’s not obvious how to send video over IP, what things are important to think about and how close it is to an analogue/SDI signal. Fortunately, Ed Calverley has this excellent tutorial on the basics needed to understand uncompressed video across the board.

This presentation from the IBC 2018 IP Showcase examines the need for timing, a reminder of what ‘blanking’ is and how this is treated in the over-IP world. Discussion of blanking wouldn’t be complete without a discussion of ancillary data (VANC, HANC, DPI, Embedded audio etc.) Whilst blanking was essential in analogue video and is filled with data in SDI, there is a benefit in breaking the signal up into its component parts: video, audio and ancillary data – not least removing up to 30% of dead space; blanking takes bitrate!

Now that Ed’s established the key points of the video which need to be transported, how and where they exist, it’s time to look at how to actually get the data on the network. To do this Ed presents a very accessible explanation of IP discussing how we can split up any message into packets and how we add headers to the packets to ensure they go to the right place. This leads on to a discussion of UDP and TCP, both ways of launching traffic onto a network but with their own pros and cons.

This builds into an examination of subnets, routing and multicast. Whilst these sound fairly academic – and to be clear they can be – they are also essential to a well-founded understanding of the topic and are useful day-to-day when working with SMPTE ST 2110 and SMPTE ST 2022-6 systems. Both of these terms are also explained by Ed along with and comparison of SDI timing (usually black and burst, or tri-Level sync) and PTP timing which is used for IP systems. For more detail on PTP, have a look at this talk, or this one also from the IP Showcase

Wrapping up by talking about the important topic of packet timing called ‘traffic shaping’, we see how important it is to ensure that each packet is equally spaced to avoid problems with buffers on receiving equipment or even within the network itself.

Ed’s presentation style and animated slides work excellently together to make this talk very understandable to people coming in fresh to IP systems and, many of us should be willing to admit, a great reminder of the key basics for those who are already on the path. The slides are downloadable and annotated with extra information so they stand on their own as a reference. The only thing missing from the downloaded slides is Ed’s final video demonstrating traffic shaping in the form of planes land at Heathrow.

Watch now!

Speaker


Ed Calverley 		Ed Calverley
Trainer & Consultant,
Q3Media

Meeting: Further adventures in the world of IP: SMPTE2110 and NMOS

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones


Learn what the SMPTE 2110 standards are and how they affect the future of professional media over IP networks with our speakers David Atkins and Ed Calverley. Now at a bigger venue, David and Ed will highlight areas that need further work and possible approaches that could taken to further advance progress. As a pioneer in IP-based production, Suitcase TV will share its ongoing experiences, both good and bad, of using IP with broadcast signals and look at why it is worth the pain.

  • What has changed in the past 12 months?
  • What new opportunities can we as an industry take from the standards?
  • What new developments are now possible?

Ample time will be available for discussion so bring your experiences, questions and answers.

Date: 13th March 2018, 18:00 for ample refreshments 18:30 start. 20:45 close.
Location: Ipswich Waterfront Innovation Centre (IWIC), The Atrium, University of Suffolk, 19 Neptune Quay, IPSWICH, IP1 1QJ
Travel: From London Liverpool Street, there are multiple trains every hour. 16:40 departure is recommended to arrive at IWIC by 6pm. Full Travel info

Register now – registration ends soon.

Video: Time Compensated Remote Production in the all-IP world

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones


A look at the principles behind remote production and how to use technology to maximise production quality and financial savings.
Given at NAB2017, Ed Calverley looks at how the current standards work is enabling true end-to-end IP-based production and how standards such as SMPTE ST 2110 enable systems to interoperate in a much more flexible way than was possible with SDI. As an example, during the Euro 2016 soccer tournament, a time compensated 2-stage switching solution was frame accurately controlled over a limited-bandwidth link.
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