SMPTE Archives – Page 4 of 27 – The Broadcast Knowledge

My content producers and broadcasters have been forced into the cloud. Some have chosen remote controlling their on-prem kit but many have found that the cloud has brought them benefits beyond simply keeping their existing workflows working during the pandemic.

This video from SMPTE’s New York section looks at how people moved production to the cloud and how they intend to keep it there. The first talk from WarnerMedia’s Greg Anderson discussing the engineering skills needed to be up to the task concluding that there are more areas of knowledge in play than one engineer can bring to the table from the foundational elements such as security, virtulisation nad networking, to DevOps skills like continuous integration and development (CI/CD), Active Directory and databases.

The good news is that whichever of the 3 levels of engineer that Greg introduces, from beginner to expert, the entry points are pretty easy to access to start your journey and upskilling. Within the company, Greg says that leaders can help accelerate the transition to cloud by allowing teams a development/PoC account which provides a ‘modest’ allowance each month for experimentation, learning and prooving ideas. Not only does that give engineers good exposure to cloud skills, but it gives managers experience in modelling, monitoring and analysing costs.

Greg finishes by talking through their work with implementing a cloud workflow for HBO MAX which is currently on a private cloud and on the way to being in the public cloud. The current system provides for 300 concurrent users doing Edit, Design, Engineering and QC workflows with asset management and ingest. They are looking to the public cloud to consolidate real estate and standardise the tech stack amongst many other drivers outlined by Greg.

Scott Bounds Architect at Microsoft Azure talks about content creation in the cloud. The objectives for Azure is to allow worldwide collaboration, speed up the time to market, allow scaling of content creation and bring improvements in security, reliability and access of data.

This starts for many by using hybrid workflows rather than a full switch to the cloud. After all, Scott says that rough cut editing, motion graphics and VFX are all fairly easy to implement in the cloud whereas colour grading, online and finishing are still best for most companies if they stay on-prem. Scott talks about implementing workstations in the cloud allowing GPU-powered workstations to be used using the remote KVM technology PCoIP to connect in. This type of workflow can be automated using Azure scripting and Terraform.

John Whitehead is part of the New York Times’ Multimedia Infrastructure Engineering team which have recently moved their live production to the cloud. Much of the output of the NYT is live events programming such as covering press conferences. John introduces their internet-centric microservices architecture which was already being worked on before the pandemic started.

The standard workflow was to have a stream coming into MCR which would then get routed to an Elemental encoder for sending into the cloud and distributed with Fastly. To be production-friendly they had created some simple-to-use web frontends for routing. For full-time remote production, John explains they wanted to improve their production quality by adding a vision mixer, graphics and closed captions. John details the solution they chose which comprised cloud-first solutions rather than running windows in the cloud.

The NYT was pushed into the cloud by Covid, but it was felt to be low risk and something they were considering doing anyway. The pandemic forced them to consider that perhaps the technologies they were waiting for had already arrived and ended up saving on Capex and received immediate returns on their investment.

Finishing up the presentations is Anshul Kapoor from Google Cloud who presents market analysis on the current state of cloud adoption and the market conditions. He says that one manifestation of the current crisis is that new live-events content is reduced if not postponed which is making people look to their archives. Some people have not yet done their archiving process, whilst some already have a digital archive. Google and other cloud providers can offer vast scale in order to process and manage archives but also machine learning in order to process, make sense and make searchable all the content.

The video ends with an extensive Q&A with the presenters.

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Speakers

	Greg Anderson Senior Systems Engineer, WarnerMedia
	Scott Bounds Media Cloud Architect, Microsoft
	John Whitehead Senior Engineer, Multimedia Infrastructure Engineering, New York Times
	Anshul Kapoor Business Development, Google Cloud

Dealing with professional audio, it’s difficult to escape AES67 particularly as it’s embedded within the SMPTE ST 2110-30 standard. Now, with remote workflows prevalent, moving AES67 over the internet/WAN is needed more and more. This talk brings the good news that it’s certainly possible, but not without some challenges.

Speaking at the SMPTE technical conference, Nicolas Sturmel from Merging Technologies outlines the work being done within the AES SC-02-12M working group to define the best ways of working to enable easy use of AES67 on the WAn. He starts by outlining the fact that AES67 was written to expect short links on a private network that you can completely control which causes problems when using the WAN/internet with long-distance links on which your bandwidth or choice of protocols can be limited.

To start with, Nicolas urges anyone to check they actually need AES67 over the WAN to start with. Only if you need precise timing (for lip-sync for example) with PCM quality and low latencies from 250ms down to as a little as 5 milliseconds do you really need AES67 instead of using other protocols such as ACIP, he explains. The problem being that any ping on the internet, even to something fairly close, can easily take 16 to 40ms for the round trip. This means you’re guaranteed 8ms of delay, but any one packet could be as late as 20ms known as the Packet Delay Variation (PDV).

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Not only do we need to find a way to transmit AES67, but also PTP. The Precise Time Protocol has ways of coping for jitter and delay, but these don’t work well on WAN links whether the delay in one direction may be different to the delay for a packet in the other direction. PTP also isn’t built to deal with the higher delay and jitter involved. PTP over WAN can be done and is a way to deliver a service but using a GPS receiver at each location is a much better solution only hampered by cost and one’s ability to see enough of the sky.

The internet can lose packets. Given a few hours, the internet will nearly always lose packets. To get around this problem, Nicolas looks at using FEC whereby you are constantly sending redundant data. FEC can send up to around 25% extra data so that if any is lost, the extra information sent can be leveraged to determine the lost values and reconstruct the stream. Whilst this is a solid approach, computing the FEC adds delay and the extra data being constantly sent adds a fixed uplift on your bandwidth need. For circuits that have very few issues, this can seem wasteful but having a fixed percentage can also be advantageous for circuits where a predictable bitrate is much more important. Nicolas also highlights that RIST, SRT or ST 2022-7 are other methods that can also work well. He talks about these longer in his talk with Andreas Hildrebrand

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Speaker

Nicolas Sturmel
Product Manager, Senior Technologist,
Merging Technologies

Our final look back at the most viewed articles of 2020 is a very prescient topic, that of live IP production. As we all know, this has very much come into focus during the pandemic. Those that already had an IP infrastructure found managing it remotely easier than those that needed to get in and move SDI cables when they needed to provision new video links. Moreover putting together live remote workflows is all the easier with video IP and traditionally the decision on whether to use SMPTE 2110 has been a case of whether you need to be in the cloud or not.

This article and video brought together Will Waters, an NDI expert from VizRT, Marc Risby from UK SI Boxer and Willem Vermost who was with the EBU. The conversation, pre-pandemic, focused on how to choose the video-over-IP technology which was best for you and really tried to find the ways in which broadcasters could benefit from both at the same time.

The Broadcast Knowledge Editor, Russell Trafford-Jones also moderated a SMPTE Webcast with VizRT going into the detail of NDI and how it can be deployed in the cloud.

Another important advance in 2020 was AWS’s release of CDI which is an implementation of SMPTE 2110 with enough proprietary adaptations to make it work within AWS. You can hear more about it in this video with David Griggs.

Click here to watch ‘Where can SMPTE 2110 and NDI co-exist?’

In the penultimate look back at the top articles of 2020, we recognise the continued focus on new codecs. Let’s not shy away from saying 2020 was generous giving us VVC, LCEVC and EVC from MPEG. AV1 was actually delivered in 2018 with an update (Errata 1) in 2019. However, the industry has avidly tracked the improved speeds of the encoder and decoder implementations.
Lastly, no codec discussion has much relevance without comparing to AV1, HEVC and VP9.

So with all these codecs spinning around it’s no surprise that one of the top views of 2020 was a video entitled “VVC, EVC, LCEVC, WTF? – An update on the next hot codecs from MPEG”. This video was from 2019 and since these have all been published now, this extensive roundup from SMPTE is a much better resource to understand these codecs in detail and in context with their predecessors.

Click here to read the article and watch the video.

The article explains many of the features of the new codecs: both how they work and also why there are three. Afterall, if VVC is so good, why release EVC? We learn that they optimise for different features such as computation, bitrate and patent licensing among other aspects.

Speakers