Monday 29 February 2016

'Ex Machina's Sara Bennett first woman VFX supervisor to win Oscar

Screen Daily
Bennett is only the third woman nominated in the category, also won by Suzanne Benson in 1986; UK VFX highlighted at awards.
On a night in which British talent dominated the field for best VFX Oscar, Sara Bennett, co-founder of UK studio Milk, became the first female VFX supervisor to win the award.
Along with artists from Double Negative, Andrew Whitehurst, Paul Norris and Mark Ardington, Bennett won for Alex Garland’s stylish sci-fi Ex Machina.
She is only the third woman to receive a nomination in the famously male-heavy category, which VFX artist Suzanne Benson won for Aliens (1986).
Bennett said: “I am beyond excited!! We are thrilled and honoured to be recognised by The Academy for our work on Ex-Machina. It was a privilege to work with Alex Garland, to bring his incredible vision to life, alongside Andrew Whitehurst and the Dneg team. I would love to see more women in prominent creative roles in our Industry – I was a little shocked to find out I was the third ever female VFX Oscar nominee.”

“I am extremely proud of her and the whole team on the project but ashamed that many parts of the film industry, including VFX, have been so male dominated,” said Will Cohen, Milk co-founder and MD.
“It is tragic that she is only the second female to win and the first VFX supervisor to win. I can certainly see the balance being addressed with more women coming in at entry level, but there is a lot more work to be done.”
Bennett’s principal role on the film was to lead a team of 28 to create a CG brain for the AI robot Ava.
“The win is a testiment to the film’s sophisticated storytelling in which visual effects blend into virtually every frame, as opposed to being more overtly VFX-driven,” said Cohen.
It was a sterling night for UK VFX which claimed four of the five nominated houses. MPC and Framestore (assisted by Soho’s The Senate) were nominated for The Martian,Cinesite teams in London and Montreal completed 138 shots for The Revenant; and Star Wars: The Force Awakens, was supervised by British artists stationed at ILM London.
The win means that UK shops have taken home five of the previous nine VFX Oscars. The trail was blazed by Framestore, on The Golden Compass (2007), continued with Dneg for Inception (2010), Framestore (Gravity 2014) and Interstellar (2015, Dneg).

Friday 26 February 2016

Light entertainment feels the squeeze


Broadcast 
There's a perfect storm brewing which may leave many producers of light entertainment shows no other option than to relocate, albeit temporarilty, far outside the M25. The likely blitzing of The Fountain Studios for property development only compounds the lack of suitable large studio space for TV in and around the capital.
“[The situation] is a function of the property industry not the TV industry,” says Fountain MD Mariana Spater. “We haven't failed, but we cannot compete with land prices.”
Fountain owners Avesco Group haves sold the Wembley-based stalwart to developers Quintain for £16 million. Although the deal stipulates that Fountain can lease back the premises for up to five years, this can be terminated at six months’ notice, effectively paving the way for closure.
If rumours of ITV's sale of its south bank building (formerly The London Studios) are realised there will be a major production reshuffle on the cards.
“With penthouse apartments on the river going for £80m a shot, any studio would have to get in an awful lot of shows to get anywhere near that kind of revenue,” Spater adds ruefully.
The squeeze will particularly impact large scale shows like The X Factor and Britain's Got Talent, both long term live finals residents at Fountain. With LE audience-hosting spectaculars trending upwards in terms of room, the demand for laser-levelled stages a minimum 12,000 sq ft is at a premium.
However, BBC Studios & Post Production (S&PP) has done the math and reckons that by the end of 2017, broadcasters will be able to call on more studio space - even with Fountain out of the picture.
“We think there will be a net increase in space,” says commerical manager Meryl McLaren. “There is an element of panic from those worried about short term homes for shows, but over the next 2-3 years we don't think there will be a major shortage.”
The calculation bets on the revamped TV Centre (part of a £1 billion mixed use overhaul of the site) due online from April 2017 with three studios (variously 3500, 8000 and 10250 sq ft) albeit reduced from TVC's previous eight. 
BBC S&PP also plans to continue to lease assets from Elstree, after consultation with clients. Strictly Come Dancing, for example, is likely to remain in situ at George Lucas 2 (a stage also used for The Voice and A League of Their Own), while the BBC's presence will be maintained at one or more of Elstree's 11800 sq ft Studio D (home to Eastenders and ITV Studios' It's Not Rocket Science) and stages 8 and 9 (both 7500 sq ft.
Both Elstree MD Roger Morris and BBC S&PP are pitching for business, like Hungry Bear's Play to the Whistle, should they be forced from Wembley.
“Studio D is perfect for Fountain-sized studio shows,” says McLaren. 
“We are always talking to clients [like Syco],” says Morris, noting that George Lucas 2 “is bigger by 3000 sq ft than Fountain's” although overcoming the clash with Strictly of Saturday evening schedules may rule out The X Factor.
Pinewood is equally capable of stepping in. Its stages already accommodate The Voice and Dancing On Ice (and shows like Red Dwarf, Four Rooms) and from June another five sound stages will open, the largest at 40,000 sq ft, though lacking TX and gallery facilities.
A trio of new studios is also due to open this year at Leavesden but that hasn't stopped other complexes being sounded out about availability.
“We are getting a lot of requests from shiny floor shows,” reveals Charlie Fremantle, MD at Hayes' West London Film Studios. “We've looked at the possibilty of converting a stage into one suitable for live entertainment but the return on the investment is tricky to judge and it's not something that we plan to do at the moment. That said, we're keen to get other types of work in here and if LE show approached us we would jump at the chance and make it happen.” 
Daybreak Productions' feature length drama, Churchill’s Secret recently shot there while ITV 8-parter The Halcyon has just moved in. “More and more productions are asking for 15000 sq ft or more of space – which we can cater for with stages 5 (7100 sq ft) and 6 (9400 sq ft) next to each other,” adds Fremantle.
Wimbledon Film and TV Studios is also open for dry hire of 7500 and 8000 sq ft spaces with a street set to boot. Similarly suitable for sitcom, indie features and drama, the site is not equipped for audience shows.
“Although there is a feeling that studio space is hard to come by we are not fully booked and I doubt any one else is either,” says Sarah Eccles of The Collective which manages the studios on behalf of owners Marjan TV.
As TV producers look to fill up Pinewood and Elstree, 3 Mills Studios anticipates a domino effect as more drama – like NBC's The Royals - comes its way.
We considered investing in a TV stage but the volume of TV drama and feature work makes that more viable for us,” says studio head Tom Avison. “We are positioning ourselves in terms of high end TV and expect a knock-on in requests from producers unable to accommodate at Pinewood.” 
Look further afield, Bristol-based The Bottle Yard's eight stages are also fit for drama rather than the shiny floor market. Although the studio just added a 5000 sq. ft green-screen, site director Fiona Francombe doesn't envisage enlarging further. “We wouldn't want to grow any more and be confident of maintaining our excellent level of service,” she says. 
With Poldark series two just wrapped and the Deal or No Deal set under dust sheets for the mid-term, the studio is hopeful of recommissions for Trollied and Disney-ABC's Galavant.
In the longer term, more dedicated TV space is coming on stream. By April 2018 Hammersmith's Riverside Studios, closed since 2014, will be back in action with three stages, the largest of which is 6500 sq.ft with gallery suite.
Morris says Elstree plan “the ultimate designer studio” with gallery, transmission capability, integral dressing rooms and wardrobe and a “fantastic” lighting grid. The 21000 sq. ft stage is under construction until 2017.
Hertsmere Borough Council stepped in to save Elstree from redevelopment twenty years ago. The council wouldn't feel forced to capitalise on land prices by selling it for redevelopment, would it?
“We have to be able to earn money to pay our way but we deliver great revenue for Hertsmere and have almost trebled our contribution since 2008,” says Morris. “Our expansion is part of a long term strategy we have agreed with them.”
Pinewood has also put TV at the core of its £200m expansion but with shareholders, notably MediaCityUK owners Peel Group, considering a sale there must be some question over its future. Pinewood calls the process a “strategic review” and points out that unique planning permissions mean the site can only be used for film and TV. 
One canny solution to the issue is simply to make more efficient use of stages. After all, when a space is empty it is not generating income. The BBC places great store by its abilty to turnaround double the number of shows (3-4) per week at Elstree and plans to ramp that up to seven a week thanks to new infrastructure it is currently specifying for TVC.
“I can't see anybody being without a home, so long as productions are flexible in terms of dates,” says Mclaren.

Thursday 25 February 2016

High Dynamic Range: Stepping Out of the Shadows


Broadcast Tech p46 

HDR promises to take footage to a whole other level, capturing TV images that offer unprecedented detail and texture even in the shadows.


The Man in the High Castle
Amazon Studios' alternate history of a Nazi-run United States was shot and post produced 5K on Red Dragons.

From the get-go having the show look very theatrical was important to Amazon,” explains Thor Roos, senior colourist at Deluxe-owned Encore Vancouver. “They wanted to give this 1960s universe a realistic feel.”

Roos says good original photography will deliver the best results in HDR but that the effect will reveal subtitles in everything from set design to costume. “You can see more detail in 4K but HDR takes this to a whole other level. You can see detail in neon lights in the background, spectacular highlights in windows or stained glass. HDR really shines in those moments.”

HDR can be applied after a project's grade or, in some cases, before colour correction but, with Encore supervising editor James Cowan, Roos opted to grade the UHD HDR alongside a HDR rec.709 version.

We had a lot of creative discussion about how to approach it,” says Cowan. “Should we grade HDR first and make the rec.709 version match that or vice versa? We decided that rec.709 was the hero path because ninety-nine percent of people will be looking at that. That said, we colour corrected both deliverables side by side. We'd take scenes and shots, evaluate them both, see which grade looked best and select that.”

Amazon dictated that the production use OpenEXR, an open source HDR file format originally developed by ILM. Roos monitored the HDR path on Sony's BVM-X300 and checked regular plasmas for rec.709 with Resolve used for conform, colour, titles and versioning.

Cowan estimates that the process added a third more time in the grading suite with knock-on costs to storage and GPUs to power realtime compute performance.

Lacking on-set monitoring, series DPs Gonzalo Amat and James Hawkinson could only view HDR in post but as they saw more graded rushes they began making adjustments on set for exposure and lighting.

A scene in the first episode depicts several characters on a bridge at dawn watching the sun rise. “HDR made the sunrise look beautiful while allowing us to see the actor's faces rather than being silhouetted, which is the effect you would get with SDR,” describes Roos.



Marco Polo
Hired to work as colour scientist for season 2 of ten part Netflix drama Marco Polo, Dado Valentic, founder and chief colourist, Mytherapy, developed a pipeline that enabled cinematographer Vanja Cernjul to precisely control the HDR on location in Hungary, Slovakia and Malaysia.

Rushes were shot on Sony F55, the same as season 1. “In order to acquire HDR you don't need to change the camera or way of shooting provided you have sufficient bit depth to extract the dynamic range from the raw material,” Valentic advises.

With no on-set monitors yet available for displaying HDR, Valentic devised a means for Cernjul to know he was capturing enough information from an SDR display. It's a proprietary process which Valentic won't reveal but it meant Cernjul was able to shoot normally, confident that the editorial team could unwrap the images and create an HDR image from them.

The workflow turned a Digital Imaging Technician (who oversees on-set data capture) into an on set colourist helping the DP to adjust the image,” he explains.

Having validated the look on Dolby Vision monitors before shooting, the on-set colour metadata was ingested and tracked through Avid, and graded and conformed on Da Vinci Resolve, retooled to function in HDR by Blackmagic Design. A BVM-X300 monitor was used for viewing although Valentic would like monitors that can sustain even greater than 1000 nits of brightness.

We're not just conforming picture and sound but also conforming colour,” says Valentic. This allowed Deluxe New York colorist Martin Zeichner to finish the grade in HDR and SDR in parallel by monitoring both outputs.

He admits to making many mistakes with HDR in the beginning. “I behaved like a child with a new toy,” he says. “I'm fortunate to have worked on a project of this size in order to learn the pitfalls – what works and what doesn't. There will be a period when everyone is excited by what is technically possible with the image rather than with what the emotional and creative content of the storytelling requires.”

A scene in Marco Polo features an actress against the backdrop of a rain storm walking from outside into a dark room. “You would not normally be able to cover this and see all the detail in the shadows or on her face but in HDR this is a revelation,” relates Valentic. “DPs will no longer have to compromise by having to select which part of the image they want us to see.”



Good Girls Revolt
Amazon episodic newsroom drama Good Girls Revolt was shot on Red Dragon with the post route from dailies to editing kept in rec.709.

The recommended practice is to start with the HDR version and extract from it a regular HD rec.709 pass but the practical reality of TV is that the majority of storytelling and viewership is in rec.709,” says Pankaj Bajpai, senior colourist, Encore Hollywood. “So we devised the aesthetics of the show in rec.709 and then did the HDR.”

Since HDR opens up a new creative palette to producers, DPs and directors, Bajpai feels it's the job of the colourist to marry their needs with the current restrictions on viewing technology. “Achieving that balance is a huge aspect of how we manage the HDR and SDR versions,” he says.

HDR is at its most dramatic in content with high contrast between light and dark scenes, in explosions or on metallic objects offering opportunities for light reflections. Science-fiction or big budget action movies are obvious beneficiaries. Less so are low key dialogue-heavy sequences.

I found that if you have a scene in a living room with two people talking on a couch illuminated by a lamp then, in the HDR version, the lamp will appear very bright and actually start to compete for the viewer's attention with the actor's performance,” says Bajpai. “We tried to keep the basic aesthetic of the show as approved in rec.709. There isn't one scene that stands out dramatically differently in the HDR pass but what you experience in HDR is greater texture and depth in the shadows and midtones.”

Examples in 1969-set Good Girls Revolt are the definition of the sky reflected in the glass windows of New York skyscrapers and hotel lobby chandeliers and marble which appear “as if you can touch them.”




Wednesday 24 February 2016

NFL: TV Has Flatlined, Online Is the Future

Streaming Media

The NFL looks to a post-TV future as it builds a digital portfolio of superior viewing options that will soon be worth over $1 billion per year.

The NFL is creating a digitally-delivered fan experience that will be “superior” to its own TV presentation, and will soon be worth over $1 billion a year, according to the NFL executive in charge.
“There are a wealth of opportunities to create a superior product online which will make NFL digital far more potent than TV,” said Shannon Rutherford, director of digital media video operations for the NFL, delivering the Streaming Forum 2016 second-day keynote address. “We have 360-degree immersive video and virtual reality. We can personalize it. We can create our own content, and we can distribute through multiple digital channels including social media.”
By contrast, he noted that TV was a one-way communication with viewing figures trending downwards, a growth in cord-cutters, and an ageing audience.
With broadcast deals locked up with Fox, CBS, and NBC until 2022, the NFL has begun dabbling in live streaming. Notably, it sold rights worth around $20 million to Yahoo to live stream an in-season game from London last season.
All bets are off post 2022, with Rutherford hinting that OTT will form a central part of NFL strategy. “Digital rights expansion is crucial to the NFL's long-term success,” he said.
Until then, the league has to find other ways to reach fans on OTT and mobile devices. These includes NFL mobile apps; premium subscription service Game Pass, which permits live streaming of all games internationally; and social media. In 2014, the NFL debuted four online original programs. It increased that to ten shows in 2015.
“TV viewing has flatlined in the U.S. since 2010, while digital consumption has gone through the roof,” Rutherford said. “Younger audiences are more engaged. All of this puts a lot of pressure on ad revenue, and make digital more attractive to reach key demographics. The question is what does the NFL do about it?”
One result is NFL Now, a digital-only fan destination presented as a TV-like linear lean-back experience with on-demand game highlights, studio shows, and talent-led analysis. Ironically, creating this with high production values makes the NFL reliant on broadcast kit such as video switchers, routers, and orchestration hubs.
“We are using a traditional broadcast mentality to create a linear experience using the same gear as broadcast itself, but delivering it digitally and adding interactivity,” Rutherford said.
The digital team takes the same live linear feed as broadcast, turning clips into highlights in as close to real-time as it can get.
“NFL is like a news organization in that our highlights are perishable,” Rutherford said. “It's not going to be evergreen content, so the primary use case is for fans who want to see what happened that day. The faster we can get it out the more opportunities we have to maximize revenue.”
The NFL needs to hit several essential marks when delivering live content, Rutherford believes.
“You have to have 100 percent uptime while the game is playing. The stream should be smooth with no more than a one percent buffer, and the time to enter the stream should be less than a second.”
Rutherford added, “Success often means money, so for us that means a revenue over a billion dollars per year from digital delivery.”
Attaining that means ensuring that digital ad inventory is always completely fulfilled, he said.
If the NFL intends to control the creation and distribution of its own content, it has some way to go to match current TV deals worth at least $3 billion a year (for 2013 to 2022) it cut with U.S. broadcasters.
“Our product will become a daily habit for our fans," Rutherford said in closing.

Slashing the cost of content delivery

TVB Europe
It turns out that there are quite a few things you can do with a media processing platform and one of them is to slash the cost of distributing video over the internet.
Telestream has just launched what VP international sales George Boath (pictured) describes as a “radical new piece of technology” which can “dramatically reduce the cost of delivering content OTT.
“When you put your movie or programme on multi-screen you pay a CDN for every bit you deliver to every set of eyeballs,” he explains. “The more popular it is, the more it costs you, and the better the quality the more it costs you.
“We know that the largest CDN – Akamai – makes a billion dollars a year just from video delivery. Clearly someone is paying a lot of money to get content to viewers. Telestream’s Vantage ABR Optimize will enable people to make up to 30-40 per cent savings on delivery costs without reducing the quality to the viewer.”
That’s a bold claim and Telestream is not the first company to make it. Boath explains how it is done.
“Whether you want to watch on iPlayer or ITV Player, for example, your player takes the highest bitrate provided according to the bandwidth you have got. That’s Adapative Bit Rate working. But all video is not consistent. Some element of every piece of content will be very simple visually and easy to encode. We can achieve the same quality as the highest bitrate but at a lower bitrate by examining every frame and modifying the file delivery.”
So a file with 10Mbps quality can be delivered by ABR Optimize at 2Mbps to 5Mbps data rates because certain scenes leading to a 30-40 per cent reduction in payload translated directly into a reduction in cost.
What’s more, Telestream says there’s no need for any change in the player.
“Other solutions to this goal have required proprietary players but that swapping out millions of players in the world’s iPads is virtually an impossible task and we are not implementing it.”
Baoth also says the technology will allow the network infrastructure to carry more subscribers and more viewers. “So in situations where customers own the network infrastructure they can serve more viewers.”
Telestream describes Vantage, its flagship processor, as a workflow automation platform with transcoding at its heart. The company has found new ways it can use this and recently announced a blizzard of additional services addressing several parts of the content production process.
“We just released a pretty significat update package to Vantage so it was perfect timing for this show,” says Boath.
“Whether you are a producer and your problem is getting a large amount of content off camera to the edit quite quickly, or you are trying to produce a finished edit out to DPP deliverables for broadcast quickly and accurately, or you want to insert subtitles into content, or automate publishing to multiple social media sites – we have a solution for it.”
Boath says Telestream – which is still privately owned – doesn’t wish to focus on just growing its business selling transcoding which in any case “has a finite limit” but to offer a similar set of services on different computer platforms. It has solutions for the cloud and on-premises and is teasing a number of further developments to be unleashed in April.
“Our starting point is an expertise in transcoding and an understanding of file formats and infrastructure systems,” he says. “We realise that this core function is connected to many different tasks and that as processing speeds increase we are able to move into many different parts of content production.”

ITV: Engineering a TV-Like Streaming Experience

Streaming Media

Live streaming is an integral part of the viewer's journey with ITV, and we have made it seamless with catch-up and VOD,” said Tom Griffiths, director of broadcast and distribution technology for ITV, during his keynote address at the 2016 Streaming Forum in London.


However, with the increasing demand for live streamed content comes the challenge of meeting viewers' heightened expectations of quality, he warned.
“The days of tolerating buffering are going,” Griffiths said. “People expect it to be on, and on instantly, and to match the quality of linear TV. They are looking for a positive experience.”
Griffiths also outlined a number of problems affecting ITV's ability—and that of organizations like it—to delivery a TV-like experience through streaming.

ITV Hub

ITV Hub, launched last November, is the broadcaster's front-end showcase for VOD content and live channel streaming.
Since then, live streaming of ITV channels accounts for 30 percent of traffic on its PC and mobile platforms, rising to 50 percent during major live events (such as the Rugby World Cup 2015). “That is an incredible result based on where we were two years ago,” Griffiths said.
It was important for ITV to meet expectations reliably and consistently, he added. “On top of that, in a highly competitive market, we needed the ability to update and change the consumer proposition without a lengthy re-engineering of the ecosystem.”
Consumers only view two types of content, Griffiths asserted: Either a live event stream/linear channel which they watch by appointment, or on-demand content.
“Viewers will use the platform most suitable for them—whether that's an iPad or TV. Streaming is merely a transport mechanism, like DTH and DTT. Our job is to make delivery invisible to the viewer's experience.”
ITV's broader strategy has three objectives, Griffiths explained: maximizing revenue from both the free-to-view and VOD business, growing its international content sales, and growing its global pay and distribution business.
“Our pay and distribution business has traditionally been based on VOD deals, but increasingly customers want to include live channels in their TV anywhere solutions,” he said. “We found that really hard to do before because of the way our previous solution was architected.”
The strategy is underpinned by an ongoing technology modernization program which is principally intended to simplify the end-to-end processes for ITV's content supply chain.
“To scale successfully you can't take disparate systems for VOD and for broadcast,” Griffiths said. “They need to be brought together into a unified chain in order to deliver efficiencies, scale, and flexibility.”
Feeding into this is a need to tie in core business systems, such as airtime scheduling and ad sales, fit for multi-platform distribution in multiple territories.
“We needed to get our streaming infrastructure right to deliver the consumer propositions we were looking for,” he said.

Re-Engineering in Detail

The re-engineering of the broadcaster's streaming infrastructure has led to siting linear playout and streaming ingest and outgest in two separate data centers (run by Ericsson). This released ITV from a single-site architecture with limited resilience and no disaster recovery. 
In addition, ITV refreshed its encoding platform, making it more scalable for multiple renditions and multiple partners (Telestream Vantage is its dominant transcoding platform).
Mezzanine streams rather than final format renditions are taken out of the encoders, from which ITV produces HD and SD variants. In turn, this is transcoded as multicast IP.
“It was key for us to separate encoder and transcode functions to remove bottlenecks and for processing higher volumes,” Griffiths said. “We recommend separating the streaming encoding process from the creation of the final platform rendition in order to achieve greater flexibility and scale.”
The whole set-up is an on-premises solution which Griffiths admitted may raise some eyebrows. “We might have moved to at least partially a cloud-based solution, but our assessment was that for a service that is 24/7/365 the economics of putting it in the cloud didn't work. Particularly since we are having to deliver native HD SDI to the cloud. That's not to say we wont change. We might move to a hybrid in future or move everything to the cloud. Next time we do a playout refresh a cloud environment may make sense."
Issues still presenting a challenge included the ability to scale the network to accommodate traffic growth.
“As numbers rise, our network architecture and the way we carry traffic as unicast over the network is not sustainable,” Griffiths said. “Viewers' QoS demands are only going to increase. Pressure on the network is something we are all having to address to deliver live streams as consistently and reliably as TV.”
Another problem is end-to-end service management. “If you are going to deliver QoS to the consumer you have to understand what is happening. It is not good enough to monitor the network—we we have to monitor everything from the the point of origin to final delivery, and to act on those things quickly. If we don't, people are less likely to consume services.”
ITV is currently only using one CDN, but will deploy a more wide-scale monitoring system and better analytics to learn whether or not a single CDN is the right solution or if moving to multiple CDNs is a better option. One advantage of a single route is scale and consistent approach, he said.
Another challenge, Griffiths noted, is ensuring ubiquitous broadband and mobile reach, which he reckoned was only just over 80 percent of coverage in the U.K.
Then there are content rights, typically solved by blanking on streaming platforms, but a sources of “great irritance” to ITV viewers when a linear channel is not available as an OTT stream.
“We've work to do with rights holders. DRM is a solution but not a panacea for them.”
Griffiths said the broadcaster is planning a possible implementation of HEVC and MPEG-DASH, and is prepping for 4K/UHD.
“As far as possible, try and forward plan,” Griffiths recommended. “This market is changing extremely fast, so we have to build flexibility into our solutions going forwards.” 

Monday 22 February 2016

Whisper Films and Presteigne Broadcast take chequered flag for C4 F1 coverage

Sports Video Group 
The handing of Channel 4’s £30 million three year presentation contract for Formula One to a rookie sports producer raised eyebrows when it should have acknowledged the Grand Prix pedigree of the winning team. Whisper Films’ MD and co-founder is Sunil Patel who produced the BBC’s F1 coverage before launching Whisper in 2010. Fellow co-founders are race driver turned pundit David Coulthard and BT Sport presenter Jake Humphrey, who made his name presenting F1 for the BBC.
They have cannily surrounded themselves with even more sports experience. Mark Cole was lured away from running Match of the Day last year to become Whisper’s head of TV, a move which helped the indie win a package of NFL highlights for BBC2, while former BBC F1 editor Mark Wilkin recently joined, an appointment credited with helping Whisper win the C4 bid.
Even more importantly, Whisper is relying on the proven staff and systems of Presteigne Broadcast to equip it for Melborne on March 20, the first of 10 Grand Prix to be aired on C4.
“Whisper were keen to make sure it was business as usual while moving forward a step in technology and delivery,” said Presteigne head of technology, David O’Carroll.
The facilities are built into two lightweight pods for air freight. One houses the majority of the MCR equipment: Evertz EQX router, Ross Tritium 3 ME vision switcher, Lawo MC2 mixing desk, Riedel Artist talkback matrix and monitors. The other pod contains the post production kit including three XT3 EVS machines and three IP Directors, Editshare shared storage and four Adobe Premiere suites replacing Final Cut. The EVS network and the edit suits sit around the EditShare shared storage with a QNAP NAS for additional storage. Riedel’s MediorNet provides wider site connectivity at each venue.
Presentation capacity is increased at each circuit. Whereas previously there were three radio cams, now there is provision for four to accommodate an expanded number of on-air talent upped from four to seven.
“This also enables Whisper to move around much more freely, for example, placing a couple of cameras at either end of the paddock or pitlane and throwing presentation between them or whereever the story is,” said O’Carroll.
Enabling this is coverage from a bespoke RF network with which Presteigne covers each F1 site. This is a large Wisycom in-ear monitoring (IEM) and radio mic system with receive nodes for Cobham RF video transmitters and an IP over RF mesh to feed mobile devices like iPads. The latter function gives production staff and presenters a reverse vision view and internet connectivity for on-the-fly research.
The RF cams are standard PDW F800s with addition of a Sony F5 for feature work. The XDCAM record discs of the PDW F800s come in handy since Whisper on behalf of Channel 4 (as with all rights holders) is required to deliver any footage it captures on site to the FOM should the sports broadcaster demand it.
“Theoretically we should transfer all our rushes to FOM (Formula One Management) at the end of each race, but in practice we don’t need to do this,” said O’Carroll. “The idea is that should any rights holder get a scoop then the footage can be shared in a pool.”
Remote production on the horizon
The change of production partner didn’t impact Presteigne too much since they were embarked on a close season schedule in any case. The pods travelled back to Prestigene’s HQ as planned for maintainence ready for shipping to Australia.
“Typically we send about 15 people to each GP: an engineering manager, rigger, couple of RF guys, two sound operators, a vision mixer and three camera ops,” explained O’Carroll. “They arrive on a Monday [before race weekend], ready for Thursday morning. That’s a rehearsal day and a test with FOM.
FOM runs a very tight ship and the set-up is deliberately formulaic across the world. The unilateral presentation interfaces with the FOM host in the outside broadcast compound. From the Technical Operations Centre, Presteigne will pick up about 24 main programme feeds (ie/ clean feed, onboard cam feeds) although coverage is strictly timed. Broadcasters need to pick up the host feed five minutes prior to race start and only leave it after the trophy presentation and podium interviews.
IP is being introduced across the industry to cut down weight of transport but the F1 pods are already a very slimline system; “there’s no excess weight,” he said.
“The next natural step is to remote the edits. This wouldn’t reduce the infrastructure on site since we’d still need ingest kit there, but by using something like a Mercury server (a VoIP platform from Trilogy Broadcast) in the pods and remotely editing from London would save sending a number of editors around the world.”
He added, “Connectivity is good from most circuits so there’s no reason we couldn’t push it and direct the broadcast from London. All of our systems are IP capable so we could remote a lot without actually swapping out a great deal of kit.”
In addition to the two tech pods, Presteigne builds a production gallery in a portacabin at each circuit. The same set up, nothing larger, travels across Europe and includes Silverstone albeit on trucks not cargo planes.
Motor sport would lend itself to coverage in 4K or virtual reality, neither of which are on FOM’s radar at least for this season. Its host output is 1080p 50i and will doubtless change up a gear when rights holders (like fellow rights holder Sky) demand it.
“In principal we could supply 4K in the pods with some minor alterations,” said O’Carroll. “What is more challenging is the reliance on RF acorss the site. There’s not a viable 4K link that would allow us to acquire 4K. That said, we can upconvert 50p from the camera which would look pretty good, if not true 4K.”

Saturday 20 February 2016

Taking IP to the Wire: NewTek's Boss Talks Tough on Transport

Streaming Media 

Standardizing an industry move to video-over-IP is generating considerable confusion, but NewTek claims its approach is the only one focused on IP's real-world capabilities. 


Much of the debate surrounding the move from video-over-SDI to IP has been framed around 4K/UHD—that for 4K to work economically, IP infrastructure is a prerequisite. NewTek has a different take: It wants to move the industry from what it sees as the relatively narrow focus on 4K and other technical specs toward applications which genuinely take advantage of internet connectivity.

“Contrary to popular belief, IP is not a cheap way of communicating digital data,” says NewTek president and CTO Dr. Andrew Cross. “The major benefit of IP is that it can connect any device with every other in the world. You can pipe it around, you can write applications and do things that were never thought of before. Crucially,the link is bi-directional. Where SDI signals flow downstream from a camera to, say, a monitor, with a true bidirectional IP link you have intelligence about the device it is connecting to. This is a rarely acknowledged but fundamental part of the change the industry is going through.”
The concept has been familiarized at the BBC as object-based broadcasting, and Cross hints at working with the broadcaster on tests in this area. The idea is that any element of the signal—video, graphics, audio—can be split into its constituent elements and reconfigured at the receiver according to individual preference and environmental context.
“4K or HDR, HFR, 8K or virtual Reality streaming... these are just technical specs, compelling and important certainly, but not in themselves anywhere near as revolutionary as the pipes they run on,” Cross says. “IP changes everything for the industry, and we think the focus should be on this bigger picture.”
There are a number of competing protocols for packaging video and audio over IP networks of which NewTek's is one. Most are vendor-specific, yet have the backing of multiple parties. Some vendors support more than one candidate. All claim to be standards-based and all tout their open credentials. But no scheme has has been fully ratified by any international standards body and the degree of openness is frankly "open" to interpretation.
Last September, NewTek launched NMI (Network Device Interface). While all the protocols are attempting to tackle video-over-IP in live production, Cross believes that NewTek's approach differs markedly.
“We are not against any of the other [protocols],” he says. “We work closely with them and we've reached out to them and we're working on collaboration to the degree that we can, but we do believe our approach and mindset is different.”

The Protocol Soup

Before exploring Cross's argument, it's worth recapping the other protocols for video-over-IP.
Most take the unidirectional SMPTE standard 2022-6 as their starting point. They include Sony's Networked Media Interface (NMI) and The TICO Alliance, led by IntoPix, a chief difference being the promotion of their own licensed codecs at the heart of an IP live production system.
AIMS (Alliance for IP Media Solutions) is an industry grouping of which Grass Valley, Imagine Communications, Lawo, SAM, and Nevion are founder members, lobbying to use the AES67 and Video Services Forum-devised TR03 which splits the video, audio, and metadata into separate paths.
A different tack comes from Evertz, which promotes ASPEN (Adaptive Sample Picture Encapsulation), a protocol that works with media over MPEG transport streams.
“These are all being created by companies at the higher end of broadcast using more traditional equipment,” Cross contends. “What they are looking to do is take workflows they have today and make them work with IP. They look at IP and see it as SDI, as a more traditional video transport, and within certain markets that makes sense. Yet, this form of video-over-IP requires strong timing requirements that have to align packets on a network with raster scans of an image extremely accurately.
“If you believe, as we do, that the world is headed toward the use of general purpose computer systems, then you must realize that you can't achieve nanosecond or millisecond accuracy for timing on the network. For instance, in TR03, you need ten microsecond timing accuracy for each scan line of video. There's just no way that a computer system without customized hardware is ever going to be able to achieve that.
“One of the promises of IP technology is that we can do away with hardware, like capture cards, yet with all these other video-over-IP concepts you will end up hanging a lot of these off specialized hardware off the network.”
The approach is valid, Cross says, but only for the big beasts of broadcasting. In contrast, NewTek's target is the up-and-coming video generation of niche live sports streamers, corporate communicators, and start-up video innovators.
“If you look at almost any other industry it's going to be the small companies with cool ideas; they're going to revolutionize this industry,” Cross says. “We want to enable the cool ideas by removing any license fee and expensive infrastructure which will inhibit the industry and stifle innovation.”

An Interoperable Plea

NewTek wants to make its technology work alongside others in the industry so it can implement an NDI interface with SMPTE 2022-6. It is offered as a royalty-free SDK. NewTek is part of AMWA, and Cross says the company talks regularly with members of AIMS and SMPTE. Nonetheless, the company has not gone so far as to back another initiative.
“We are fully prepared to do our part to enable interoperability,” Cross insists. “We are the first [of the rival standards] to state that we will put efforts into interoperability. Neither AIMS or Evertz have said that.
“Our goal is not to build an insulated garden to keep others out. In fact, quite the reverse,” he adds. “We're making it very easy for people to build products that work over IP. In many ways, I don't see what we're doing is counter in any way to the existing standards.”
There are two ways to become an industry standard—either work through a standards body or work to achieve mass adoption. In the absence of standards—which are grinding their way too slowly for many through bodies like SMPTE—the competing protocols are trying to amass as many backers as they can.
NewTek can call on PlayBox Technology, Vizrt, Teradek, Wasp3D, AJA, Deltacast, ChyronHego, and Matrox, with solutions from JVC, LiveU, Panasonic, Sienna, and Wowza forthcoming. Several of these—AJA, ChryonHego, and Matrox among them—support other initiatives, as well.

More than One Standard

“IP is already standardized on transport,” Cross says. “This is, in fact, allowing a lot of different companies to innovate protocols on top of it, and we will see a small number of them become the de facto standard.”
Cross argues that the history of the internet has shown that that more than one standard is possible. In data storage, for example, there is JSON and XML. Another example is TCP/IP and UDP.
“You do need international standards, but for that to work you need mass adoption,” Cross contends. “Thousands of standards have been taken to bodies like SMPTE; some survive the evolutionary process, most wither away. We are focused on making a technology for users that solves a real world problem.”
Cross continues: “In the past, the industry has been burned because if a facility made a decision about a standard and bet on the wrong one you would end up with huge sunk cost with no way out. To a degree IP has overcome that since IP cabling or network doesn't need to change. So I don't believe [the multiplicity or lack of standards] will be as much of an issue this time around.”

The Achilles Heel: Compression 


A key issue which puts the various standards at odds is their view on compression. Both AIMS and ASPEN are notionally uncompressed while IntoPix and Sony NMI promote their own codec, especially for carrying 4K. Pretty much everyone acknowledges that a form of mezzanine compression is needed to put 4K (and certainly UHD HDR) over a 10GigE pipe with different schemes, including the royalty-free VC2, being preferred.
NewTek NMI is compressed at what Cross calls baseband quality, similar to ProRes or DNXHD. “Most everyone will come to the same conclusion,” Cross says. “If you want to transport uncompressed around then SDI is going to be better than IP.”
The company describes its encoding algorithm as resolution and frame-rate independent, supporting 4K (and beyond) along with 16 channels (and more) of floating-point audio.
“When corporate enterprises want to broadcast to their employees you can't assume they are going to be ripping out their wiring. You have to assume it will be based on 1 GigE, so you need a system to work with that. This gives you huge gains; for example, the ability to share multiple streams of video over a GigE LAN.”
This may not be sufficient for premium pay TV sportscasters like ESPN or Sky as they look to revamp facilities for UHD, but it's compelling for a large portion of the future video industry.
NewTek can back its arguments up by pointing to over a decade of its technology shipped with video-over-IP capability.
“In that time we've learned and improved what we've done. For years, we’ve had the ability to take video from a Vizrt virtual set system, for example, and send it over IP into a NewTek TriCaster. We have probably about 100,000-plus systems in the market today that can already talk these protocols.”

Thursday 18 February 2016

UK Media Remains the One to Watch

IBC
The main players in the hotly contested UK media scene continue to roll the dice. Sky's inevitable move into UHD this summer is almost a sideshow compared to the emphasis the company has put on mobile and streaming services and technologies. In its most significant revamp in a decade the broadcaster is unleashing a number of products and initiatives to combat the OTT threat from Amazon and Netflix and to ward off UK pay-TV rivals BT Group and Virgin Media.
Chiefly, they include Sky Q, the much anticipated new set top box which (in its premium Silver version) permits users to watch TV on multiple screens around the home and on two tablets at the same time. Sky calls it Fluid Viewing and will be augmented later this year with the ability to watch recorded or live shows synced to a mobile device outside the home.
This has necessitated the renegotiation by Sky of contracts with its major rights holders including with HBO and Showtime in a new multi-year deal for license to its entire content library exclusively across Sky's territories, in UK, Germany, Austria and Italy. As important, it means Amazon and Netflix can't get access to programming like the new Twin Peaks series. That feat was only possible because of Sky’s scale and continuing growth claimed Sky's Chief Strategy Officer, Mai Fyfield, in The Telegraph. However, agreement has not been reached with Sky's main content partner, the BBC.
Unlike Virgin Media and BT, Sky has declined to give Netflix a place on its platform.
Other new Sky products include an upgraded Now TV service, coming later this year, as a means of offering a selection of Sky's programming to consumers who don't want a pay TV subscription. Fyfield suggests that offering entry level packages to Sky entertainment has helped the broadcast grow its customers over the past year (adding 205,000 in the 6 months to December 2015), in contrast to the heavyweight subs demanded by pay TV operators in the US which have faced a year of continued cord cutting.
This year, possibly as early as the spring, Sky will launch a mobile service carried over the O2 UK network. This will give it the quad play of home phone, mobile, TV and broadband services for bundling into a single package (Sky already has an on demand mobile TV service, Sky Go, with more than 6 million customers).
Doing this will pitch Sky head to head in the UK market with the existing quad play of Virgin Media, and Talk Talk and now BT Group, following its acquisition of mobile services operator EE for £12.5 billion from Deutsche Telekom and Orange.
While the BT/EE move reduces the number of mobile players in the UK to five, a mooted takeover by CK Hutchison's Three of Telefonica's O2 UK could see the market cut further.
The £10.25 billion (€13.5 billion) bid is opposed by British regulator Ofcom, which argues that four rival mobile operators are required to protect consumers. It is urging European authorities to block it.
BT meanwhile announced it had netted 97,000 new customers to its BT Sport service – pulled in by exclusive Champions League games – although it will take a long time for its 1.4 million total subscribers to compete with anything like that of Sky's 12.3 million UK retail customers (Sky also has over 4 million in both Germany and Italy).
Further good news for BT was its award of a £100 million seven year deal to provide the BBC with broadband infrastructure. Operated by BT’s global media services operation, BT Media and Broadcast, the network will link all the BBC’s UK sites, including 21 broadcast centres and local radio stations, and carry its entire video, audio, data, telephone and broadband services.
The BBC says that the technology will have the capacity to allow it to more easily trial UHD and 360-degree video. Meanwhile, BT and Sky continue to trial virtual reality, with BT trialling an immersive experience at the NBA Global Games at the O2 arena in January with further VR tests planned.

Wednesday 17 February 2016

AV Focus Scandinavia: A Time for Design

AV Magazine 

Design-conscious and well educated, Scandinavians have high expectations of AV. But don't be at all surprised if they take their time when coming to a decision.


“Scandinavians often raise the bar when it’s a matter of quality and creative design work,” observes Daniel Ruden, GLP’s sales manager in the Nordic region.

“Design is the watchword,” echoes Mads Norskov, sales director at Imago Sonas. “The installation must look good. The demand for minimalistic installation is big.”
Clear-Com’s regional sales manager Christian Eberlein reckons the population in Scandinavia is, on average, better educated than in many other parts of the world “resulting in some very large high-tech installations.” One such involved the company’s connectivity solution, LQ, for a rocket launch site application in Norway.
There are cultural sensibilities toward AV business which apply across the region. For example, there is a tendency for lengthy and thorough decision making. “Scandinavians usually have a very pragmatic way of dealing with AV needs,” says Karl Kahlau, executive director at Powersoft. “One can sometimes argue with the length of time it takes to actually follow through with decisions, and the complexity of such investigations, but at the end of the day most decisions are well thought through. Technology, performance and reliability are factors high on their lists of desires.”
Trond Solvold, Dataton’s sales manager, also notes a tradition of communal decision making which applies to both creative and product development. “In my experience there’s a strong principle of standing by what you say here,” he adds. “This honesty, or transparency, is sometimes misconstrued as naivety.”
While manufacturing economies of scale may make Scandinavia as a whole the most logistically efficient addressable market, it would be inadvisable to lump the countries together from a marketing or sales perspective.
“Viewed from abroad, you will find a lot of similarities and when talking to partners in Sweden and Norway, I see we succeed with a lot of the same things,” says Norskov. “But we are still different, and a lot of companies have failed when they treat Scandinavia as one region. You need to have local presence.”
Solvold agrees on this point. “When it comes to doing business in Scandinavia, a lot of foreign companies make the mistake of seeing the region as a single market,” he says.
Geographically, the market is almost four times the size of the UK, but with just over a third of the population, so it stands to reason that you can’t treat it as one homogeneous zone. “And although the languages are similar, they are not the same. Ask the average Swede how much spoken Danish they understand!” he adds. “The Danes are well known as tough negotiators. Swedes are strong on consensus which can make the decision-making process longer and more time-consuming. In Norway, it has previously been easier to get acceptance for prices, probably because the Norwegian economy has been strong for so long. By being aware of the differences, half the battle is won.”
Separate trade shows
A well-planned and executed event, or an exhibition with a great narrative, will always go down well across Scandinavia, says Solvold, but there are slight variations on this theme. The Danish, he says, are traditionally very strong on creative design and visual thinking; Norwegians are quick to weigh up and incorporate new trends; Swedes have a very open attitude to new technologies and ideas.
These national differences are represented in separate trade shows and seminars focused on local application needs such as LLB Oslo, LLB Stockholm or Monitor Expo Copenhagen.
“The existence of these events gives the opportunity to really spend time with clients, rather than just a few minutes on the show floor,” says Sovold. “It also reflects a tough economic situation: instead of investing a lump sum in a single international show, clients want to spread the investment over the year and bring a more relevant, directed message to different regions.”
As always, investment is attracted to capital cities and the corporate, or industrial, capitals. Scandinavian countries are financially strong enough “to support solution investments to match high expectations,” says Kahlau. “With a smaller population than other regions in Europe it can sometimes be a challenge to motivate high investments, but overall AV solutions are on a par with larger countries such as Germany and the UK.”
Climate effect
It may seem obvious, but it is worth noting that the bitter climate in northern Europe can be  a restraining factor on outdoor cultural and audio visual experiences.
“Scandinavians tend to flourish during the short summer months, when it comes to outside touring and theatrical activities,” says Kahlau.
In Sweden, interest rates are low and the economy is stable, but by contrast oil-export reliant Norway is under pressure as the collapse in gas and oil prices impacts all business investments.
“Whereas we greatly benefited from high oil prices, we now see recession,” notes Serge Philippo, Crestron’s regional director for the Nordics, Russia and East Europe. “Norway’s currency is at its lowest for 23 years.”
The ‘Euro versus no Euro’ debate continues to be a discussion, with Finland (in wider Scandinavia) the only country fully adopting the Euro as local currency. “The approach taken by Denmark and Norway, investing in currency stability, seems to be a well-balanced decision, creating a good source of employment and investment,” notes Eberlein.
The Swedish government has embarked on a 10-year road and rail infrastructure spending plan in place worth around €68 billion. The €1.8bn European Spallation Source will be one of the world’s largest science and technology facilities when built at Lund (in the south of Sweden). Kista Science City in Stockholm is already a leading ICT cluster. Businesses in the Swedish capital can also benefit from leasing superfast fibre optic network, Stokab.
“Gothenburg is a hotspot for AV as it has a lot of heavy industry (notably automation),” observes Solvold. “Malmo and Lund are part of the thriving Oresund region (which includes Copenhagen). And let’s not forget Dataton’s own home region, east Sweden, which has become a centre for visualisation technologies.”
SANDVIK COROMANT
Sandvik Coromant’s new global meeting place in Sandviken, Sweden covers 4,500m² and is one of the world’s largest centres for productivity, application, machining and research in manufacturing. Designed and installed by Visuell Design, the project encompasses a video wall, cinema, education rooms, boardrooms, focus points, productivity pods, machine cameras and 80in touch screens.
The infrastructure uses two Crestron 128 x 128 Digital Media switchers and a control system to deliver digital signage control and distribution. Crestron Fusion RV monitors and manages boardrooms and VC rooms and, using Crestron’s Fusion EM, facility managers can analyse energy consumption, control lights, and set actions for when a room is occupied and adjust the heating or cooling.

SUPERNOVAS FOR SYDOSTDANMARK MUSEUM
Recent exhibitions at the Museum Sydostdanmark in the Danish town of Koge have presented physical and visual challenges. Local SI AV-Huset worked with dnp Denmark to specify an 80in dnp Supernova STS and similarly sized dnp Supernova Blade, equipped with 08-85 screen material for a second exhibition. “We wanted to captivate the audience with size and content, and felt projection was more pleasing to the eye than LCD,” explains exhibition designer, Carl-Henrik Hansen.
The Gifts From The Past exhibition recounts the history of the Koge area of Denmark. “The low-ceilinged space demanded ultra-short throw projection from below,” says AV-Huset’s Jens Ravn. The Gunpowder Brothers’ show tells the story of the 1710 Battle of Koge Bay, between Swedish and Danish fleets, via iPads and audio clips. Both displays operate with Panasonic projectors.