In Broadcast - March 2014 - 60

I N T E R N A T I O N A L

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 29 - MARCH 2014

N E W S

InFOCUS

4K & Beyond
4K, the catch-all term for what is essentially 3840x2160 UHD-1
in the broadcast world, has reached cruising speed in 2014...

By Monica Heck
Contributing Editor

T

60

his year it's all about 4K. The
Winter Olympics in Sochi, the
World Cup and the Superbowl so
far are lining up to receive their 4K
medals and the new NAB 4K zone
is likely to draw crowds.
The rise of 4K started in earnest
last year, when scattered showers
of 4K products hit the broadcast
market. By early autumn, the likes
of Sky Sports were scrambling to
become the ﬁrst to complete a live
4K transmission.
Primarily driven by screen
manufacturers, 4K was picked up by
camera manufacturers and following
the publishing of the HEVC video
compression format in early 2013,
manufacturers scrambled to make
announcements which opened up
the doors of 4K delivery.
There have been gaps in the
broadcast production chain between
acquisition and delivery, however,
which have prevented the creation
of a workﬂow that can handle the
volume and speed of true 4K.
"I still think there are gaps but I
believe 4K end-to-end will happen,
certainly by the end of this calendar
year," said Kerry Wheeles, CTO of
Networking at Harris Broadcast.
"Announcements at NAB will
plug those gaps and there will
be some infrastructures built-out
over the summer."

FOR-A's full 4K variable
frame rate camera

Live 4K Acquisition
Despite some early 4K
announcements in the acquisition
space from Red, Canon's EOS-1D
C, Sony's F55, Blackmagic Design's
4K production camera and Vision
Research's Phantom Flex4K, there
is still a perception that the range
of 4K broadcast cameras is limited.
At IBC2013, Sony launched the
PXW-Z100, a ﬁxed-lens professional
4K handheld XDCAM camcorder
and in January this year unveiled the
Handycam AX100E, dubbed "the

smallest 4K consumer camcorder"
alongside a complete 4K live
production suite.
"Last summer we trialled 4K
live production on our PMW-F55
cameras at the Confederations
Cup in Brazil and we're returning
to Brazil this year to shoot the ﬁnal
of the 2014 FIFA World Cup in 4K,"
said Norbert Paquet, European
Product Marketing Manager at Sony,
who says the company has been
involved in 4K since the launch of
its ﬂagship digital cinema camera,
the F65. Sony also pitched its XAVC
recording format against RAW for
the compression of 4K data.
On the super slow motion front,
FOR-A's FT-ONE 4K camera,
which can record up to 900 fps,
has been in demand since its
2012 debut for a number of sports
productions, including football, auto
racing, boxing, several Red Bull
competitions and the games in Sochi.

Producing In 4K
To support live 4K productions,
EVS has just updated its 4K XT3
production server, which was
launched last year and has been
used during sporting events by
broadcast rental company Video
Equipment Rentals for 4K zooming.
In January, the XT3 was updated
to support up to three channels
of 4K on a single server and add
extra bandwidth. The company says
existing XT3 users can perform a
simple upgrade to access the
functionality.
Grass Valley has offered 4K
capabilities on its EDIUS editing
solution since 2012 and says it has
already previewed 8K support on
the platform. And hot off the press,
Cinedeck announced the MX4K
recorder for the simultaneous
capture and creation of edit-ready
deliverables in 4K. It features
two channels of 4K YUV10 30fps

Grass Valley's EDIUS Pro
7 supports 4K editing

Sony's PXW-Z100 4K camera

recording from UHD sources,
including the Sony F55 camera,
while simultaneously creating
edit-ready HD master and proxy
deliverables, plus streamable
H.264s. Cinedeck MX4K also downconverts the 4K camera feeds in
real-time for on-set HD monitoring.
For post-production, the Matrox
Mojito 4K video monitoring card,
for use with Adobe Creative Cloud
video editing tools on Windows
platforms, lets users see 'every pixel
of every 4K frame' in real-time and
delivers projects in full 4K using the
Sony XAVC codec.
Quantel offers the Pablo Rio
colour correction and finishing
system in 4K, which in fact handles
6K real-time and has even been
demo-ed at 8K, according to the
company. Quantel has also just
launched Genetic Engineering 2,
which enables up to four Pablo Rio
systems to work simultaneously at
real-time 4K on shared storage.

Transporting 4K
Fibre transport is an absolute
necessity for 4K, according to
Frank Jachetta, president of
MultiDyne. The company offers the
SilverBack-4K camera-mounted
ﬁbre transport solution and allows a
software upgrade to be performed
by existing SilverBack users to
access the 4K functionality.
In the same vein, Miranda's

CopperHead 3404K cameramountable transceiver uses two
strands of fibre optic cable to
carry all bi-directional 4K UHDTV
production signals from camera to
truck or control room.
Fibre is also key to 4K networking
on the infrastructure side of the
broadcast workﬂow. To manage the
processing and compression of 4K
signals, Harris Broadcast runs ﬁbre
DAs in its Selenio platform, which
offers four to one mux and demux to
deliver a 4K signal on a single fibre.
Anticipating a 4K future, Snell has
made an optional 4K functionality
available as standard on its IQ
modular ﬁbre products, Kahuna
360 production switcher and Sirius
routing switcher. "We are selling
quite a lot of production switchers
because users can choose to turn
on 4K functionality at a later date,"
said Robert Rowe, CTO of Snell.
At Harris Broadcast, the Platinum
routers were 3gig pioneers,
according to Wheeles who says
they are all set for 4K alongside
some of the company's multiviewers,
such as the SX.
Miranda's NVISION 8500 hybrid
router meanwhile handles 4K
UHDTV links using SMPTE RP168-compliant, quad-link 3Gbps
switching. Miranda also offers
4K-enabled, hybrid audio/video
CONTINUED ON PAGE 61

Cinedeck's MX multi-format, multi-channel, monitor and playback system for
digital, ﬁle-based production

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