In Broadcast - October 2014 - 80


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

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 36 - OCTOBER 2014

N E W S

InTEST

Evolution Or Revolution?
By Paul Robinson
CTO, Tektronix Video Product Line

T

80

here is a lot of discussion at the
moment about the enormous
technological changes that will
impact the broadcast industry
over the next few years. Some
changes such as 4K/UHDTV could
be regarded as an evolution, but
others such as a transition to an
All IP live production workﬂow are
regarded by many as a revolutionary
change that will demand entirely
new skillsets and infrastructure.
Such a revolution can also enable
fundamental changes to the
production workﬂow that will in turn
support new business models and
services.
What is clear is that these changes
will impact all aspects of the
broadcast chain including content
producers, broadcasters, content
providers, video service providers
and equipment manufacturers.
4K can be accommodated in
live production environments
using existing 3G infrastructure
with a quad link arrangement, an
evolutionary approach. However, the
much higher data rates associated
with the potential longer term
adoption of high frame rate (HFR)
and high dynamic range (HDR) 4K/
UHD will require entirely new video
infrastructure.
To deliver new higher resolution
formats such as 4K and UHDTV
to viewers at acceptable bitrates
ideally requires the adoption of a
more efﬁcient CODEC than H.264/

AVC. This is leading to the adoption
of H.265/HEVC which can offer up
to 50% bitrate savings versus H.264
for equivalent video quality.
At the same time as the industry
is starting to adopt 4K and HEVC,
there is also the drive to take
advantage of broadly available IT
infrastructure and interfaces such as
IP and Ethernet for baseband video
distribution. Such infrastructure
has additional workﬂow beneﬁts
beyond the often cited attraction
of using Commercial Of The
Shelf (COTS) equipment. Indeed,
when considering the use of such
equipment, it must be taken into
consideration that all network
elements must be capable of
handling constant high bitrate data
with minimal latency and jitter.
New workflows such as
downstream live production
create the requirement to provide
live camera feeds to remote
production facilities which can
be a signiﬁcant distance from the
venue. Transporting uncompressed
video over large distances presents
a challenge, as SDI transport over
coax was only ever envisaged
as practical over comparatively
short distances. The adoption of
SMPTE 2022 along with the use
of a precision time protocol (PTP)
grandmaster (which provides
genlock functionality equivalent
to that delivered by a sync pulse
generator in SDI networks) offers a

Tektronix 4K WFM8300 is set for the revolution

viable methodology for transporting
live baseband video from venues to
remote production facilities over IP
infrastructure.
These combined challenges will
impact everything from altered
production values to handle
shooting content in 4K/UHD; new
live production workﬂows to handle
downstream production, as well as
uncompressed (or in the future
lightly compressed) video over
IP; all the way to new encoders,
transcoders and consumer premise
equipment to handle 4K/UHD at
manageable data rates.
Although these technology
changes appear to be "new" and the
availability of 4K sensors and display
panels has accelerated the drive
towards 4K/UHD implementation,
4K has been around, at least in
demonstration form for almost 10
years. Indeed when developing the
WFM & WVR8000 series waveform
monitors the internal architecture
was implemented to handle 4K
data rates, which has allowed us
to deliver 4K/UHD support as an
existing product upgrade, rather than
requiring a completely new product.

Analysis Tools
Likewise encoder, transcoder and
decoder developers need analysis
tools to enable development of
new products to support HEVC.
The architecture of our H.264/
AVC analyser was designed
from the outset to handle future
codec upgrades as they became
standardised. This enabled us to
implement HEVC/H.265 support as
an existing product upgrade, rather
than as a new dedicated HEVC only
analyser product.
Again, although the concept of

carrying uncompressed video over
IP is perceived as being very new,
and perhaps revolutionary, the
precedent for the broad adoption of
IT infrastructure for live production
facilities has in fact been in place
for many years. IT infrastructure
began to be adopted more than
ten years ago for compressed
video distribution. IT infrastructure
is also in industry-wide use as the
distribution and control component
for ﬁle-based workﬂows. In both
these cases, Tektronix provided
technology support for early
adopters; with TS over IP test
equipment as well as the ﬁrst ﬁlebased QC tool on the market.
As such, Tektronix was involved
with the earliest adopters of
compressed video over IP and ﬁlebased QC and we continue to be
closely engaged with these latest
developments with baseband video
over IP. For example, at IBC, Tektronix
partnered with the BBC and Cisco
as part of an all IP live production
technology demonstration hosted
by the EBU. The demonstration
was synchronised by a Tektronixdeveloped prototype hybrid Sync
Pulse Generator / PTP Grandmaster
clock generator.
We are at the beginning of a
long-term transition to IT-based
infrastructure and those involved
in the production and facility side
of video have little experience with
the new technology, but conversely
are extremely experienced using
SDI and all the issues associated
with its use.
This coupled with a huge
investment in existing technology
and workflows implies that the
transition will take place gradually,
making it likely that hybrid SDI/IT
infrastructure will be in place for
some years. Such live production
f a c i l i t i e s w i l l re q u i re m e n t
equipment that is able to operate
seamlessly and reliably in such a
hybrid environment.
The companies best placed to
provide equipment that meets those
requirements are those who have
experience both of the challenges
of the live production environment,
as well as extensive experience of
the challenges associated with the
distribution of video over IP networks.
Although the adoption of IT
infrastructure may make it difﬁcult
for some equipment manufacturers
to successfully make the transition,
those with experience of both live
video and IP are well placed to help
enable a change which will provide
broadcasters with new business
models and their viewers with
new services.
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dir/?first=Phillip&last=Izzard&search=Go https://twitter.com/inbroadcast http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpzEatLsHdE&feature=youtube_gdata_player https://www.facebook.com/InBroadcast http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/inbroadcast/id468652679?mt=8 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.branded.inbroadcast&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwyLDEsImNvbS5icmFuZGVkLmluYnJvYWRjYXN0Il0. http://WWW.INBROADCAST.COM http://www.tek.com/datasheet/wfm8300-8200/wfm8300-%E2%80%A2-wfm8200-datasheet
In Broadcast - October 2014

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of In Broadcast - October 2014
