Grass Valley

Video: Case Study FIS Ski World Championship

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

There’s a lot to learn when it comes to implementing video over IP, so it’s healthy to stand back from the details and see a working system in use to understand how the theory becomes reality. There’s been a clear change in the tone of conversation at the IP Showcase over the years as we’ve shifted from ‘trust us, this could work’ to ‘this is what it looks like!’ That’s not to say there’s not plenty to be done, but this talk about an uncompressed 2110 remote production workflow is great example of how the benefits of IP are being realised by broadcasters.
Robert Erickson is with Grass Valley specialising in sports such as the FIS Alpine World Ski Championships which were in the city of Åre in Sweden some 600km from Stockholm where Sweden’s public broadcaster SVT is based. With 80 cameras at the championships to be remotely controlled over an uncompressed network, this was no small project. Robert explains the two locations were linked by a backbone of two 100Gbps circuits.

The principle behind SVT’s project was to implement a system which could be redeployed, wouldn’t alter the viewers’ experience and would reduce staff and equipment on site. Interestingly the director wanted to be on-site meaning that the production was then split between much of the staff being in Stockholm, which of course was where most of the equipment was, and Åre. The cameras were natively IP, so no converters were needed in the field.

Centralisation was the name of the game, based in Stockholm, producing an end-to-end IP chain. Network switching was provided by Arista which aggregated the feeds of the cameras and brought them to Stockholm where the CCUs were located. Robert highlights the benefits of this approach which include the use of COTS switches, scalability and indifference as to the circuits in use. We then have a look inside the DirectIP connection which is a 10gig ‘pipe’ carrying 2022-6 camera and return feeds along with control and talkback, replicating the functionality of a SMPTE fibre in IP.

To finish up, Robert talks about the return visions, including multivewers, which were sent back to Åre. A Nimbra setup was used to take advantage of a lower-bandwidth circuit using JPEG 2000 to send the vision back. In addition, it carried the data to connect the vision mixer/switcher at Åre with the switch at Stockholm. This was the only point at which noticeable latency was introduced to the tune of around 4 frames.

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Speakers

Robert Erickson Robert Erickson
Strategic Account Manager Sports and Venues,
Grass Valley

Video: The Good and the Ugly – IP Studio Production Case Study

Posted on by Adam K

What’s implementing SMPTE ST-2110 like in real life? How would you design your network and what were the problems? In this case study Ammar Latif from Cisco Systems presents the architecture, best practices and lessons learned they gleaned in this live IP broadcast production facility project designed for a major US broadcaster. Based on SMPTE ST-2110 standard, it spanned five studios and two control rooms. The central part of this project was a dual Spine-Leaf IP fabric with bandwidth equivalent of a 10,000 x 10,000 HD SDI router with a fully non-blocking multicast architecture. The routing system was based on Grass Valley Convergent broadcast controller and a Cisco DCNM media controller.

As the project was commissioned in 2018, the AMWA IS-04 and IS-05 specifications providing an inter-operable mechanism for routing media around SMPTE 2110 network were not yet available. Multicast flow subscription was based on a combination of IGMP (Internet Group Management Protocol) and PIM (Protocol Independent Multicast) protocols. While PIM is very efficient and mature, it lacks the ability to use bandwidth as a parameter when setting up a flow path. Ammar explains how Non-Blocking Multicast (NBM) developed by Cisco brings bandwidth awareness to PIM by signalling a type of data (video, audio or metadata).

The talk continues by discussing PTP distribution & monitoring, SMPTE 2022-7 seamless protection switching and remote site production. Ammar also lets us see how the user interfaces on the Cisco DCNM media controller were designed which include a visualisation of multicast flow, network topology and link saturation of ports.

You can find the slides here.

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Speaker

Ammar Latif
Principal Architect,
Cisco Systems

Video: Panel Discussion: Hardware is Dead!?

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

The broadcast industry is still producing many new hardware-based products with FPGAs and encoding ASICs still ruling the roost for many companies when it comes to fitting video products into small, power efficient spaces. But the battle continues as software-based products continue to ramp up, server-based products continue to improve and the need to be able to virtualise or place functions into the cloud drives the desire for software-based solutions.

We all know that hardware isn’t dead and that the interest of the topic is where we are today, what is possible and why people are choosing this route and that’s what Broadcast Solutions’ panel discusses in this video. Often called COTS – commercial off-the shelf – hardware, the idea is that you can buy the same server that any other industry does and run your broadcast-related functions on it. When it’s in the cloud, you’re not even selecting the hardware as much as saying how many CPUs and other resources you’d like.

The first comments made come from Marcel Koustaal from Grass Valley who feels that the industry doesn’t entirely appreciate the value software as it’s less tangible than hardware but Pierre Mestrez from Simplylive makes the point that creating products quickly in a modular way is an important part of that company’s success. Zero Density makes the point that they can work quickly as they can build their software on top of other software, Unreal Engine, for example.

Troubleshooting changes for those who run of the systems, we hear from Laurent Petit from EVS. It takes a different set of thinking and processes compared to the idea of swapping a card. The transition to IP, adds Marcel, creates a training opportunity where the technology and the workflows are changing at the same time.

Kuban Altan compares the ability with audio to be processed in real time, easily, by CPUs, by consumer laptops with the future of video processing. Whilst now it’s not so easy to process video with CPUs at the moment, this will change over the coming decade as CPUs improve significantly. Moreover, Kuban looks towards a day where IO is reduced between devices and rather stays within the same CPU/GPU.

The move to software is a global trend, states Laurent, partly because of the imperative to work quickly and efficiently in our small industry whereby we can benefit by building on software developed for similar uses in other industries. The move will take time, however explains Marcel, and will take longer than bringing online the technology itself.

The video ends with a discussion of how clearly hardware-bound devices such as cameras can still embrace software in order, in the future, to create lighter, more flexible cameras which will improve the range of what you can do with each camera and, ultimately, enhance the creative options available to programme makers.

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Speakers

Kuban Altan Kuban Altan
Vice President Research and Development,
Zero Density
Marcel Koutstaal Marcel Koutstaal
Senior Vice President and General Manager of Camera Product Group,
Grass Valley
Pierre Mestrez Pierre Mestrez
VP Pre-Sales & Channel Partners,
Simplylive
Laurent Petit Laurent Petit
SVP Product,
EVS

Video: BBC Cardiff Central Square – Update

Posted on by Russell Trafford-Jones

It’s being closely watched throughout the industry, a long-in-the-making project to deploy SMPTE ST 2110 throughout a fully green-field development. Its failure would be a big setback for the push to a completely network-based broadcast workflow.

The BBC Cardiff Central Square project is nearing completion now and is a great example of the early-adopter approach to bringing cutting-edge, complex, large-scale projects to market. They chose a single principle vendor so that they could work closely in partnership at a time when the market for ST 2110 was very sparse. This gave them leverage over the product roadmap and allowed to the for the tight integration which would be required to bring this project to market.

Nowadays, the market for ST 2110 products continues to mature and whilst it has still quite a way to go, it has also come a long way in the past four years. Companies embarking similar projects now have a better choice of products and some may now feel they can start to pick ‘best of breed’ rather than taking the BBC approach. Whichever approach is taken there is still a lot to be gained by following and learning from the mistakes and successes of others. Fortunately, Mark Patrick, Lead Architect on the project is here to provide an update on the project.

Mark starts by giving and overview of the project, its scale and its aims. He presents the opportunities and challenges it presents and the key achievements and milestones passed to date.

Live IP has benefits and risks. Mark takes some time to explain the benefits of the flexibility and increasingly lower cost of the infrastructure and weighs them agains the the risks which include the continually developing standards and skills challenges

The progress overview names Grass Vally as the main vendor, control via BNCS having being designed and virtualised, ST 2110 network topology deployed and now the final commissioning and acceptance testing is in progress.

The media topology for the system uses an principal of an A and a B network plus a separate control network. It’s fundamentally a leaf and spine network and Mark shows how this links in to both the Grass Valley equipment but also the audio equipment via Dante and AES67. Mark takes some time to discuss the separate networks they’ve deployed for the audio part of the project, driven by compatibility issues but also within the constraints of this project, it was better to separate the networks rather than address the changes necessary to force them together.

PTP timing is discussed with a nod to the fact that PTP design can be difficult and that it can be expensive too. NMOS issues are also actively being worked on and remains an outstanding issue in terms of getting enough vendors to support it, but also having compatible systems once an implementation is deployed. This has driven the BBC to use NMOS in a more limited way than desired and creating fall-back systems.

From this we can deduce, if it wasn’t already understood, that interoperability testing is a vital aspect of the project, but Mark explains that formalised testing (i.e. IT-style automated) is really important in creating a uniform way of ensuring problems have been fully addressed and there are no regressions. ST 2110 systems are complex and fault finding can be similarly complex and time consuming.

Mark leaves us by explaining what keeps him awake at night which includes items such as lack of available test equipment, lack of single-stream UHD support and NMOS which leads him to a few comments on ST 2110 readiness such as the need for vendors to put much more effort into configuration and management tools.

Anyone with an interest in IP in broadcast will be very grateful at Mark’s, and the BBC’s, willingness to share the project’s successes and challenges in such a constructive way.

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Speaker

Mark Patrick Mark Patrick
Lead Architect,
BBC Major Projects Infrastructure