SMPTE Archives – The Broadcast Knowledge

Videos: Standards – What are they and how are they changing?

Posted on 23rd July 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Standards in media go back to the early days of cinema standardising the sprocket holes in rolls of film with the intent of making it easier for the US Army to distribute training films. This standardisation work marked the beginning of SMPTE, though the acronym lacked a T at the time since television hadn’t yet been invented. There is a famous XKCD comic that mocks standards or at least standards that promise to replace all that went before. This underlines why it’s more important what standards don’t say than what they do. Giving the market room to evolve, advance and innovate is a vital aspect of good standards.

The broadcast industry is emerging from a time of great stability thanks to a number of standards that have been around for ages. SDI is a decades-old technology that is ubiquitous in the industry. Likewise, H.264 has become the only codec to use unless you have a specific use case for HEVC, AV1, VP9 etc. thanks to its almost universal presence in devices. Black and burst is now being replaced by PTP in IP installations. This is novel, despite PTP’s upcoming twentieth birthday, because it doesn’t matter if PTP is four decades old, its launch in the broadcast sector is recent, support will be low.

This panel from SMPTE Hollywood features two members of SMPTE deeply involved with standardisation within the industry: Bruce Devlin, Standards Vice President and Thomas Bause Mason Director of Standards Development. . They are joined by IP specialist JiNan Glasgow George and moderator Maureen O’Rourke from Disney.

In a sometimes frank discussion, we hear about the attempt by standards bodies to try and keep up with the shift form hardware to software within the whole industry, the use of patents within standards, how standards bodies are financed and the cost of standards, software versus hardware patents, standardisation of AI models, ensuring standards are realistic & useful with plugfests, the difference between standards bodies such as ANSI, ISO, SMPTE etc.,

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Speaker

	Thomas Bause Mason Director of Standards Development, SMPTE
	Bruce Devlin Standards Vice-President, SMPTE
	JiNan Glasgow George Patent Attorney, Neo IP
	Maureen O’Rourke Technical Lead Quality Control Officer, The Walt Disney Company

Video: Production Metadata Workflows & Standards for Media & Entertainment

Posted on 25th June 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Metadata has long been understood as important, particularly by archivists. But it’s only in recent years that a renewed focus has been put on metadata. As the large broadcasters and media houses have expanded and as streaming has become a bigger and bigger proportion of output, it’s become increasingly clear that a coherent, already-executed metadata strategy is essential. Recently, A+E had 5 weeks to transfer much of their inventory to Discovery+ which was achieved largely thanks to a cloud-to-cloud transfer and ingest workflow which not only checked the integrity of the media but also ensured metadata was correctly transferred.

In this video from SMPTE New York, we hear from WarnerMedia’s Yonah Levenson and Dave Satin about metadata and workflows. Yonah starts by defining the different types of metadata: Descriptive (e.g. time of day), Technical (e.g. File size, Compression), Administrative (e.g. Who created, last modified, location), Usage (e.g. when last used. how many times, Structural (e.g. Page numbers. Scene numbers), Preservation (e.g. location of file, checksum, retention policy) and Rights (e.g. Licensing, Permissions, Contracts, who signed off on rights).

Yonah gives examples on all of the above and then discusses standards and best practices for metadata such as starting with a spreadsheet, ensuring you get the right governance from the start, writing every decision down and getting a whole range of people involved to ensure your metadata plan is going to suit the company as a whole and not just your part of it.

Dave Satin takes the floor next and shows how the logical technical blocks of the video workflow interact with external software and services. On top of this, he then overlays the people needed to run these functions as well as the problems that generally come up. His over-archine point being that complex supply chains cause complex problems. He continues to highlight metadata pain points and which workflow problems they give rise to.

Dave finishes on a very compelling iceberg graphic showing much of the required functions in metadata lie below the surface of obvious requirements. The trick is to identify and adopt them into your workflows before crashing.

Yonah returns to the stage to introduce the Language Metadata Table, also known as LMT. First started in 2017, it’s grown to describing 239 languages with a further 150 on the way. Speaking earlier this year, Yonah explained “People speak different languages…you don’t know what they’re saying and we have this problem in the industry where there really hasn’t been a definitive, unified standard of language codes.” LMT addresses this problem and works for Audio, Visual (subs, narratives, Sign language), Content Licensing
Rights, Acquisition, Distribution content, Localisation preferences.

This is ongoing work between MESA and SMPTE to get this standardised. The working group will meet again soon.

The session closes with a long Q&A session which includes a discussion of camera-originated metadata, maximising metadata, when to start collecting metadata (when money starts being spent), use of metadata to tag ‘sprites’ used in films so the sprite can be localised to national sensitivities/cultural norms, finding ‘homes’ for metadata such as standards like AXF, logging regional restrictions on archive news footage, differences in camera-collected metadata, the importance of having the right metadata during obituaries, metadata conservation for archives intended for 150 years in the future.

Watch now!
Speakers

	Will Kreth Meta Data Systems & Simply.TV DDEX WG co-chair
	Yonah Levenson Manager, Metadata Strategy & Taxonomy Governance, WarnerMedia / HBOMax
	James Snyder Library of Congress and SMPTE board member
	Dave Satin Digital Imaging Technician, HDR & 4K expert

Video: Live Media Production – The Ultimate End Game

Posted on 18th June 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

A lot of our time on this website is devoted to understanding the changes we are going through now, but we don’t adopt technology for the sake of it. Where’s this leading and what work is going on now to forge our path? Whilst SMPTE ST 2110 and the associated specifications aren’t yet a mature technology in that sense SDI, we’re past the early adopter phase and we can see which of the industry’s needs aren’t yet met.

Andy Rayner from Nevion is here to help us navigate the current technology space and understand the future he and Nevion envision. The beginning of the video shows the big change in process from the workflows of the 90s where the TV station moved to sports events to now where we bring the event to the broadcaster in the form of a light connectivity truck turning up and deploying cameras at the event leaving most people either at home or back at base doing the production there. Andy has been involved in a number of implementations enabling this such as at Discovery’s Eurosport where the media processing is done in two locations separate from the production rooms around Europe.

Generalising around the Discovery case study, Andy shows a vision of how many companys will evolve their workflows which includes using 5G, public and private clouds as appropriate and including control surfaces being at home. To get there, Andy lays out the work within AMWA and SMPTE creating the specifications and standards that we need. He then shows how the increasing use of IT in live production, the already IT-based NLE workflows are able to integrate much better.

Looking to the future, Andy explains the work ongoing to specify a standard way of getting video into and out of the cloud including specifying a way of carrying 2110 on the WAN, helping RIST and formalising the use of JPEG XS. Andy anticipates a more standardised future where a best of breed system is possible down to individual logical components like ‘video keyer’ and ‘logo insertion’ could be done by separate software but which seamlessly integrate. Lastly, Andy promises us that work is underway to improve timing within 2110 and 2110-associated workflows.

Watch now!
Speaker

Andy Rayner
Chief Technologist
Nevion

Video: A Review of the IP Live Core Implementation in BBC Cymru Wales

Posted on 11th June 2021 by Russell Trafford-Jones

Whenever there’s a step change in technology, we need early adopters and moving to SMPTE’s ST 2110 is no exception. Not only do early adopters help show that the path ahead is good, but they often do a lot to beat down the bushes and make the path easier to pass for all that follow. For larger companies whose tech refresh or building move comes at a time when the industry is facing a major technology change, there comes a time when whilst the ground may not be firm ahead, the company can’t justify investing in technology that would soon be out of date or in technology which won’t support the needs of the company in several years’ time. This is just the situation that BBC Cymru Wales found themselves in when it was time to move out of their old property into a purpose-built national HQ in the heart of Cardiff.

In this video from the IP Showcase, Mark Patrick and Dan Ashcroft guide us through ‘whys’ and the ‘hows’ of the relocation project. It’s important to remember that this project was long in the making with the decision on location taking place in 2014 with the technology decisions taking place in 2016 and 2017. The project took an open approach to the IP/SDI question and asked for RFP responses to include a fully-SDI and a fully-IP option. It was clear during the selection process that IP was the way to go not because the solution was cheaper in the short term, but because it was much more future-proof and the costs would come down over time giving a much better total cost of ownership. Don’t forget that the initial costs of HD video equipment were much higher than those now. For more on the pros and cons of SDI, watch ‘Is IP really better than SDI?‘ by Ed Calverly.

Mark and Dan talk through the thinking for the IP choice and their decision to pick a vendor who would be their partner in the project. The theory being that given the standards were still very young, it would be important to work closely to ensure success. In addition to Grass Valley equipment, they chose a Cisco network with Cisco SDN control and operational control by BNCS. The talk references architectures we’ve featured on The Broadcast Knowledge before with Arista’s Gerard Phillips discussing the dual-network spine-leaf architecture chosen and noting the difficulty they had incorporating the Dante network into the 2110 infrastructure and their choice of a third network purely for control traffic.

We often hear about the importance of PTP in a SMPTE ST 2110 network for live production because it is vital to keep all the essences in sync. For more information about the basics of ST 2110 check out this talk by Wes Simpson. PTP is both simple and complex so Mark explains how they’ve approached distributing PTP ensuring that the separate networks, amber and blue, can share PTP grandmasters for resilience.

Other topics covered in the talk include