Video: Remote Production in Real Life

Remote production is in heightened demand at the moment, but the trend has been ongoing for several years. For each small advance in technology, it becomes practical for another event to go remote. Remote production solutions have to be extremely flexible as a remote production workflow for one copmany won’t work for the next This is why the move to remote has been gradual over the last decade.

In this video, Dirk Skyora from Lawo gives three examples of remote production projects stretching back as far as 2016 to the present day in this RAVENNA webinar with evangelist Andreas Hildebrand.

The first case study is remote production for Belgian second division football. Working with Belgian telco Proximus along with Videohouse & NEP, LAWO setup remote production for stadia kitted out with 6 cameras and 2 commentary positions. With only 1 gigabit connectivity to the stadiums, they opted to use JPEG 2000 encoding at 100 Mbps for both the cameras out of the stadia but also the two return feeds back in for the commentators.

The project called for two simultaneous matches feeding into an existing gallery/PCR. Deployment was swift with flightcases deployed remotely and a double set of equipment being installed into the fixed PCR. Overall latency was around 2.5 frames one-way, so the camera viewfinders were about 5 frames adrift once transport and en/decoding delay were accounted for.

The main challenges were with the MPLS network into the stadia which would spontanously reroute and be loaded with unrelated traffic at around 21:00. Although there was packet loss, none was noticable on the 100Mbps J2K feeds. Latency for the commentators was a problem so some local mixing was needed and lastly PTP wasn’t possible over the network. Timing was, therefore, derived from the return video feed into the stadium which had come from the PTP-locked gallery. Locally this incoming timing was used to lock a locally generated PTP signal.

The next case study is inter-country links for the European Council connecting the Luxembourg and Brussels buildings for the European Council. The project was to move all production to a single tech control room in Brussells and relied on two 10GbE links between the buildings going through an Arista 7280 carrying 18 videos in one direction and two in return. Although initially reluctant to compress, the Council realised after testing that VC2 which offers around 4x compression would work well and deliver no noticable latency (approx 20ms end to end). Thanks to using VC2, the 10Gig links saw low usage from the project and the Council were able to migrate other business activities onto the link. PTP was generated in Brussels and Luxembourg re-generated their PTP from the Brussels signal, to be distributed locally. Overall latency was 1 frame.

Lastly, Dirk outlines the work done for the Belgium Daily News which had been bought out by DPG Media. This buy-out prompted a move from Brussels to Antwerp where a new building opened. However, all of the techinical equipmennt was already in Brussels. This led to the decision to remote control everything in Brussels from Antwerp. The production staff moved to Antwerp, causing some issues with the disconnect between production and technical, but also due to personnel relocating and getting used to new facilities.

The two locations were connected with a 400GbE, redundant infrastructure using IP<->SDI gateways. Latency was 1 frame and, again, PTP on one site was created from the incoming PTP from the other.

The video finishes with a detailed Q&A.

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Speakers

Dirk Sykora Dirk Sykora
Technical Sales Manager,
Lawo
Andreas Hildebrand Andreas Hildebrand
RAVENNA Evangelist,
ALC NetworX

Video: Talk 2110

Is the industry successfully delivering what we need with SMPTE’s ST 2110 suite of standards? What are the benefits of IP and how can we tackle the difficulties?

In this panel from Broadcast Solutions’ Innovation Day, we hear from 5 vendors understanding their perspectives and plans for the future. Claus Pfeifer from Sony say they have now 60 sites up and running in IP. Lawo’s Phil Myers follows up saying “People know they have to go IP, it’s a matter of when they go IP.”

Whilst this is a positive start, the panel moves on to talking briefly about difficulties implementing SMPTE ST 2110. Jan Eveleens from Riedel points out many of the issues will go as we are waiting for technology to catch up regarding CPUs and bandwidth. We no longer have the same processing issues we used to for audio. Similarly with video, technology will improve and remove many of the challenges. Phil Myers feels that cloud implementation issues are not a large problem at the moment as he sees a move to bring equipment into private clouds rather than public. This way they are doing ‘remote production for buildings’.

After each vendor outlined their future plans for IP, Zoltan highlighted that IP allows NDI to co-exist with ST 2110. Many may want to use 2110 for high end sports, for others NDI fits well. Then panel felt that a concerning area of IP is the worry of how to fix problems. The knowledge level is different from country to country. So vendors not only need to work on education about IP, both for NDI and 2110, but they need to do this in a focussed way for the different markets.

As the panel comes towards the end, Claus feels that the industry started to talk too early about pure technology. “Did not discuss enough about the business benefits.” he explains such as remote production and more efficient use of equipment – avoiding ‘sleeping Capex’. Installing IP makes a lot of sense for large-scale systems. Recently broadcasters have been working at a scale requiring much more than 1024 squared routers roughly where SDI routers top out. But also, these large systems tend to have a life of over 10 years. Faced with SDI development, particularly in routers, is slowing down or stopping, for these long-lived systems it makes much more sense to use IP.

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Speakers

Jan Eveleens Jan Eveleens
Director Business Development Video Solutions,
Riedel
Joachim Kuhnen Joachim Kuhnen
Strategic Solution Manager EMEA
Imagine Communications
Zoltan Matula Zoltan Matula
Regional Sales Manager Central Europe,
Newtek
Phil Myers Phil Myers
Chief Technology Officer, Chair of the Advisory Board,
Lawo
Claus Pfeifer Claus Pfeifer
Head of Connected Content Acquisition – Media Solutions,
Sony
David Davies David Davies
Moderator

Video: ST 2110 – From Theory to Reality

Delivering an all-IP truck is no mean feat. tpc explains what they learnt, what went well and how they succeeded in delivering a truck which takes no longer to fire up than a traditional SDI truck.

A common question among people considering a move to IP is ‘do I need to?’ and ‘how can I get ready?’. Here at The Broadcast Knowledge we always say ‘find a small project, get it working, learn what goes wrong and then plan the one you really wanted to do.’ The Swiss broadcasting service provider ‘Technology and Production Centre’, known as ‘tpc’, has done just that.

tpc is currently working on the Metechno project – a large, all-IP news, sports and technology centre for Swiss radio and television. In order to acquire necessary experience with the SMPTE ST 2110 standard, tpc designed the UHD1 OB van ahead of time which has been used in TV production for 6 months now. In this video, Andreas Lattmann shares the vision of the Metechno Project and, critically, his experiences related to the design and use of the truck.

The UHD1 is a 24-camera OB van with all IP core based on Arista switches with non-blocking architecture. It is the equivalent of an 184-square UHD SDI system however, it can be expanded by adding additional line cards to network switches. The truck is format agnostic, supporting both HD and UHD formats in HDR and SDR. IP gateways are incorporated for SDI equipment.

The SMPTE ST 2110 specification separates video and audio into discrete essence streams which boosts efficiency and flexibility, but we hear in this talk that more attention to latency (lip-sync) is required compared to SDI systems. Andreas talks about the flexibility this truck provides with up-/down-conversion, colour-correction for any video plus how IP has enabled full flexibility in what can be routed to the multiviewer screens.

Andreas spends some time discussing redundancy and how IP enables full redundancy – an improvement over many SDI infrastructures and how SMPTE’s ST 2022-7 standard makes this possible.

The main GUI is based on a Lawo VSM control system which aims to deliver a familiar experience for operators who used to work in the SDI domain. Network training has been provided for all operators because troubleshooting has changed significantly with the introduction of essences over IP. This is not least because NMOS IS-04 and 05 standards were not mature enough during the design of the truck, so all IP connections had to be managed manually. With more than 50 thousand IP addresses in this system, AMWA’s NMOS IS-04 which manages discovery and registration and IS-05 which manages the setup and take-down of connections would have helped significantly in the lean management of the truck.

Lattmann emphasizes the importance of using open standards like SMPTE ST 2110 instead of proprietary solutions. That allows you to choose the best components and not rely on a single manufacturer.

The learning’s the Andreas presents us involve difficulties with PTP, IP training, the benefits of flexibility. From a video point of view, Andreas presents his experiences with HDR->SDR workflows, focussing in HDR and UHD.

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Speaker

Andreas Lattmann Andreas Lattmann
CTO, Head of Planning & Projects
tpc Switzerland AG

Video: Designing and Utilising SMPTE 2110 for Broadcast: Opportunities and Challenges

A meeting of experienced minds here at the Pittsburgh SMPTE section talking about the opportunities and challenges of ST-2110. Phil Myers from Lawo talks optimistically about the challenges that can and often have been solved in implementing 2110 whether that be network infrastructure or timing, giving a good primer on the whole topic as he starts the session.

Hugo Gaggioni from Sony, talks about NMOS, explaining what AMWA does and the difference between their IS-04,05 and 06 specifications.

Karl Kuhn from Tektronix then discusses packet pacing, PTP and network architectures. He then looks at how to monitor PTP and see it is working well.

With the panel session at the end, joined by Dan Turk from NEP, there is a free-ranging discussion covering some of the following topics:

  • Control of IP networks
  • The limits of IP
  • Multicast traffic
  • Network Architecture
  • True non-blocking switches
  • Break-even points of IP systems
  • Split essences & dropping blanking
  • Network planning for UHD
  • Handling loss of network on PTP implementations
    plus much more!

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Speakers

Phil Myers Phil Myers
Senior Director, IP Systems,
Lawo
Karl Kuhn Karl Kuhn
Senior Field Video Applications Engineer,
Tektronix
Hugo Gaggioni Hugo Gaggioni
CTO, Broadcast and Production Systems Division
Sony
Dan Turk Dan Turk
Chief Engineer, Mobile Units
NEP