Video: Remote Production

Remote production is changing. Gone are the days when it meant leaving some of your team at base instead of sending them with the football OB. Now it can mean centralised remote production where, as Eurosport has recently shown, TV stations around Europe can remotely use equipment hosted in two private cloud locations. With the pandemic, it’s also started to mean distributed remote production, where the people are now no longer together. This follows the remote production industry’s trend of moving the data all into one place and then moving the processing to the media. This means public or private clouds now hold your files or, in the case of live production like Eurosport, the media and the processing lives there too. It’s up to you whether you then monitor that in centralised MCR-style locations using multiviewers or with many people at home.

This webinar hosted by EVS in association with the Broadcast Academy which is an organisation started by HBS with the aim of creating cosntency of live production throughout the industry by helping people build their skillsets ensuring the inclusion of minorities. With moderator James Stellpflug from EVS is Gordon Castle from Eurosport, Mediapro’s Emili Planas, producer & director John Watts and Adobe’s Frederic Rolland.

Gordon Castle starts and talks with the background of Eurosport’s move to a centralised all-IP infrastructure where they have adopted SMPTE ST 2110 and associated technologies putting all their equipment in two data centres in Europe to create a private cloud. This allows producers in Germany, Finland, Italy and at least 10 other markets to go to their office as normal, but produce a program using the same equipment pool that everyone else uses. This allows Eurosport to maximise their use of the equipment and reduce time lying idle. It’s this centralised remote production model which feeds into Gordon’s comment about wanting to produce more material at a higher quality. This is something that he feels has been achievable by the move to centralisation along with giving more flexibility for people on their location.

Much of the conversation revolved around the pandemic which has been the number one forcing factor in the rise of decentralised remote production seen over the last two years where the workforce is decentralised, often with the equipment centralised in a private or public cloud. The consensus in the panel is that the move to home working is often beneficial, but splitting up the team is a problem in the long term. A team that has worked together for a long time can survive on this is previously gained knowledge of how people work, their benefits and relationships forged in the heat of broadcast and over the dinner table. Bringing together a new team without close interpersonal contact raises the risk of transactional behaviour, not working as a team or simply not understanding how other people work. A strong point made is that an OB is like a sports team on the pitch. The players know where they are supposed to be, their role and what they are not supposed to do. They look out for each other and can predict what their teammates will want or will do. We see this behaviour all the time in galleries around the world as people produce live events, but the knowledge that rests on as well as the verbal and visual cues needed to make that work can be absent if the team has always worked remotely.

Economics plays a role in promoting remote production within companies. For Gordon, there’s a cost benefit in not having OBs on site although he does acknowledge that depending on the country and size of the OB there are times when an on-site presence is still cheaper. When you don’t have all staff on site, people are more available for other work meaning they can do multiple events a day, though John Watts cautions that two football matches are enough for one director if they want to keep their ‘edge’. The panel share a couple of examples about how they are keeping engagement between presenters despite not being in the same place, for instance, Eurosport’s The Cube.

On technical matters, the panel discusses the difficulty of ensuring connectivity to the home but is largely positive about the ability to maintain a working-from-home model for those who want it. There are certainly people whose home physically doesn’t accommodate work or whose surroundings with young family members, for instance, don’t match with the need to concentrate for several hours on a live production. These problems affect individuals and can be managed and discussed in small teams. For large events, the panel considers remote working much more difficult. The overhead for pulling together multiple, large teams of people working at home is high and whether this is realistic for events needing one hundred or more staff is a question yet to be answered.

As the video comes to a close, the panel also covers how software, one monolithic, is moving towards a federated ecosystem which allows broadcasters more flexibility and a greater opportunity to build a ‘best of breed’ system. It’s software that is unlocking the ability to work in the cloud and remotely, so it will be central to how the industry moves forward. They also cover remote editing, the use of AI/ML in the cloud to reduce repetitive tasks and the increased adoption of proxy files to protect high-quality content in the cloud but allow easy access and editing at home. 5G comes under discussion with much positivity about its lower latency and higher bandwidth for both contribution and distribution. And finally, there’s a discussion about the different ways of working preferred by younger members of the workforce who prefer computer screens to hardware surfaces.

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Speakers

Emili Planas Emili Planas
CTO and Operations Manager,
Mediapro
John Watts John Watts
Executive Producer, Director & Broadcast Academy Expert
Fred Rolland Fréderic Rolland
International Manager, Strategic Development, Video Business,
Adobe
Gordon Castle Gordon Castle
SVP Technology,
Eurosport
James Stellpflug Moderator: James Stellpflug
SVP Markets,
EVS

Video: Solving the 8K distribution Challenge

With the Tokyo Olympics less than 2 weeks away, 8K is back in focus. NHK have famously been key innovators and promoters of 8K for many years, have launched an 8K channel on satellite and will be broadcasting the games in 8K. That’s all very well, but is 8K a viable broadcast format for other public and commercial broadcasters? One problem for 8K is how to get it to people. Whilst there are plenty of bandwidth problems to contend with during production, all of that will be for nought if we can’t get it to the customer.

This panel, run by the 8K Association in conjunction with SMPTE, looks to new codecs to help reduce the burden on connectivity whether RF or networks. The feeling is that HEVC just can’t deliver practical bandwidths, so what are the options? The video starts with Bill Mandel from Samsung introducing the topics of HDR display using HDR10+, streaming with CMAF and bandwidth. Bill discusses future connectivity improvements which should come into play and then looks at codec options.

 

 

Bill and Stephan Wenger give their view on the codecs which were explained in detail in this SMPTE deep dive video so do take a look at the article for more context. AV1 is the first candidate for 8K distribution that many think of since it is known to have better compression than HEVC and is even seeing some hardware support in TVs and is being trialled by YouTube. However, the trailer is 50Mbps and therefore not suitable for many connections. Looking at better performance, MPEG’s EVC is a potential candidate which offers continued improvement over AV1 and a better licensing model than HEVC. Stephan’s view on codecs is that users really don’t care what the codec is, they just need the service to work. He points towards VVC, the direct successor to HEVC, as a way forward for 8K since it delivers 40 to 50% bandwidth reduction opening up the possibility of a 25Mbps video channel. Noa published MPEG standard, the market awaits patent information and vendor implementations.

Stephan talks about MPEG’s LCEVC standard which has similarities to Samsung’s Scalenet which Bill introduced. The idea is to encode at a lower resolution and use upscaling to get the desired resolution using AI/machine learning to make the scaling look good and, certainly in the case of LCEVC, a low-bandwidth stream of enhancement data which adds in key parts of video, such as edges, which would otherwise be lost. Stephan says that he awaits implementations in the market to see how well this works. Certainly, taking into account LCEVC’s ability to produce compression using less computation, it may be an important way to bring 8K to some devices and STBs.

The discussion is rounded off by Mickael Raulet, CTO of ATEME who talks us through an end-to-end test broadcast done using VVC. This was delivered by satellite to set top boxes and over streaming with a UHD channel at 15Mbps. His take-away from the experience is that VVC is a viable option for broadcasters and 8K and may be possible with using EVC’s main profile. The video finishes with a Q&A covering:

  • Codecs for live video
  • The pros and cons of scaling in codecs
  • Codec licensing
  • Multiple generational encoding degeneration

     
     

    Watch now!
    Speakers

    Bill Mandel Bill Mandel
    VP, Industry Relations,
    Samsung Research America
    Mickaël Raulet Mickaël Raulet
    CTO,
    ATEME
    Chris Chinnock
    Executive Director,
    8K Association
    Stephan Wenger Stephan Wenger
    Senior Director, IP & Standards,
    Tencent
  • Video: Comparison of EVC and VVC against HEVC and AV1

    AV1’s royalty-free status continues to be very appealing, but in raw compression is it losing ground now to the newer codecs such as VVC? EVC has also introduced a royalty-free model which could also detract from AV1’s appeal and certainly is an improvement over HEVC’s patent debacle. We have very much moved into an ecosystem of patents rather than the MPEG2/AVC ‘monoculture’ of the 90s within broadcast. What better way to get a feel for the codecs but to put them to the test?

    Dan Grois from Comcast has been looking at the new codecs VVC and EVC against AV1 and HEVC. VVC and EVC were both released last year and join LCEVC as the three most recent video codecs from MPEG (VVC was a collaboration between MPEG and ITU). In the same way, HEVC is known as H.265, VVC can be called H.266 and it draws its heritage from the HEVC too. EVC, on the other hand, is a new beast whose roots are absolutely shared with much of MPEG’s previous DCT-based codecs, but uniquely it has a mode that is totally royalty-free. Moreover, its high-performant mode which does include patented technology can be configured to exclude any individual patents that you don’t wish to use thus adding some confidence that businesses remain in control of their liabilities.

    Dan starts by outlining the main features of the four codecs discussing their partitioning methods and prediction capabilities which range from inter-picture, intra-picture and predicting chroma from the luma picture. Some of these techniques have been tackled in previous talks such as this one, also from Mile High Video and this EVC overview and, finally, this excellent deep dive from SMPTE in to all of the codecs discussed today plus LCEVC.

    Dan explains the testing he did which was based on the reference encoder models. These are encoders that implement all of the features of a codec but are not necessarily optimised for speed like a real-world implementation would be. Part of the work delivering real-world implementations is using sophisticated optimisations to get the maths done quickly and some is choosing which parts of the standard to implement. A reference encoder doesn’t skimp on implementation complexity, and there is seldom much time to optimise speed. However, they are well known and can be used to benchmark codecs against each other. AV1 was tested in two configurations since

    AV1 needs special treatment in this comparison. Dan explains that AV1 doesn’t have the same approach to GOPs as MPEG so it’s well known that fixing its QP will make it inefficient, however, this is what’s necessary for a fair comparison so, in addition to this, it’s also run in VBR mode which allows it to use its GOP structure to the full such as AV1’s invisible frames which carry data which can be referenced by other frames but which are never actually displayed.

    The videos tested range from 4K 10bit down to low resolution 8 bit. As expected VVC outperforms all other codecs. Against HEVC, it’s around 40% better though carrying with it a factor of 10 increase in encoding complexity. Note that these objective metrics tend to underrepresent subjective metrics by 5-10%. EVC consistently achieved 25 to 30% improvements over HEVC with only 4.5x the encoder complexity. As expected AV1’s fixed QP mode underperformed and increased data rate on anything which wasn’t UHD material but when run in VBR mode managed 20% over HEVC with only a 3x increase in complexity.

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    Speaker

    Dan Grois Dan Grois
    Principal Researcher,
    Comcast

    Video: MPEG-5 Essential Video Coding (EVC) Standard

    Learning from the patent miss-steps of HEVC, MPEG have released MPEG-5 EVC which brings bitrate savings, faster encoding and clearer licencing terms including a royalty-free implementation. The hope being that with more control over exposure to patent risk, companies large and small will adopt EVC as they improve and launch streaming services now and in the future.

    At Mile High Video 2020, Kiho Choi introduced the MPEG 5 Essential Video Coding. Naturally, the motivation to produce a new codec was partly based on the continued need to reduce video bitrates. With estimates of the video traffic share on the internet, both now and in the future all hovering between 75% and 90% any reduction in bitrate will have a wide benefit, best exemplified by Netflix and Facebook’s decision to reduce the bitrate at the top of their ABR ladder during the pandemic which impacted the quality available to viewers. The unspoken point of this talk is that if the top rung used EVC, viewers wouldn’t notice a drop in quality.

    The most important point about EVC, which is in contrast to the MPEG/ISO co-defined standard form last year, VVC, is that it provides businesses a lot of control over their exposure to patent royalties. It’s no secret that much HEVC adoption has been hampered by the risk that large users could be approached for licencing fees. Whilst it has made its way into Apple devices, which is no minimal success, big players like ESPN won’t have anything to do with it. EVC tackles this problem in two ways. One is to have a baseline profile which provides bitrate savings over its predecessors but uses a combination of technologies which are either old enough to not be eligible for royalty payments or that have been validated as free to use. Companies should, therefore, be able to use this level of codec without any reasonable concern over legal exposure. Moreover, the main profile which does use patentable technologies allows for each individual part of the profile to be switched off meaning anyone encoding EVC has control, assuming the vendor makes this possible, over which technologies they are using and hence their exposure to risk. Kiho points out that this business-requirements-first approach is new and in contrast to many codecs.

    Kiho highlights a number of the individual tools within both the baseline and main codecs which provide the bitrate savings before showing us the results of the objective and subjective testing. Within the EVC docs, the testing methodology is spelt out to allow EVC to be compared against predecessors AVC and HEVC. The baseline codec shows an improvement of 38% against 1080p60 material and 35% for UHD material compared to AVC doing the same tasks yet it achieves a quicker encoder (less compute needed) and the decode is approximately the same. The main profile, being more efficient is compared against HEVC which is, itself, around 50% more efficient than AVC. Against HEVC, Kiho says, EVC main profile produces an improvement of around 30% encoding gain for UHD footage and 25% for 1080p60 footage. Encoding is close to 5x longer and decoder is around 1.5x longer than HEVC.

    Kiho finishes by summarising subjective testing of SDR and HDR videos which show that, in contrast to the objective savings which are calculated by computers, in practice perceived quality is higher and enables a higher bitrate reduction, a phenomenon which has been seen in other codec comparisons such LCEVC. SDR results show a 50% encoding gain for 4K and 30% for 1080p60 against AVC. Against HEVC, the main profile is able to deliver 50% coding gains for 4K content and 40% for 1080p60. For HDR, the main profile provides an approximately 35% encoding gain for both 1080p60 and 4k.

    Watch now!
    Speakers

    Kiho Choi Kiho Choi
    Senior Engineer & Technical Lead for Multimedia Standards at Samsung Electronics
    Lead Editor of MPEG5 Part 1 Essential Video Coding