Gallic Flare: Spotlight on K5600

British Cinematographer

HMI lights remain the go-to source on everyon'e truck, but changing production demands press DPs, gaffers and best boys to request ever more practical tools that can deliver that same continuous flicker-free daylight output in lighter weight and more flexible form factors.

https://britishcinematographer.co.uk/spotlight-k5600/

Achieving this balance has been Marc Galerne's goal. “When we began the company 22 years ago we asked ourselves what would lighting needs be like in 20 years time,” the co-founder of K5600 explained. “We could see even then, with the start of cable TV, if not yet the Internet, that there would be a greater demand for more pictures, but that this would be accompanied by lower budgets and shorter production times. With that understanding we began to design all of our units around the concept of lightweight, compactness and versatility.”

Optics and lighting design runs in Galerne's DNA. His father Jean was a director at LTM, the HMI lighting pioneer at which both Marc and brother Gilles learned their trade before branching out as a family in 1992 to form K5600 (the brand nods to the Kelvin 5600 colour temperature that emulates daylight).

Sadly, Jean Galerne was stricken with cancer in 1993 and never saw his company’s success and in 2012 Gilles, who ran the US side of the business, also passed away leaving Marc to carry on the tradition from headquarters in Bouafle (north west of Paris) and Burbank.

The first products from the manufacturer were the Joker 200 and 400 Pars, which featured a specular parabolic reflector and set of lenses and found favour on TV drama and among news crews.

The Galernes followed that with the Bug-Lite, a 400-Watt daylight HMI system which gained popularity in use on booms and for steadicam shots. Before long, K5600 had combined the designs of both products into the Joker-Bug which quickly become the fixture of choice on location for TV drama like CSI, Casualty and 24 and motion pictures from Defiance in the thick of the Lithuanian forest to Skyfall, World War Z, Gravity and chosen by Haris Zambarloukos on the forthcoming Cinderella.

“The aim was always to provide the same firepower and toolset that cinematographers were used to working with but in smaller, more lightweight, more versatile forms and without any compromise on quality,” says Galerne.

A range of accessories complement the Joker-Bug and Alpha (Fresnel) line including Lightbanks, Lanterns and Big Eyes which will turn any Joker-Bug system into a giant focusable Fresnel beauty light.

Another accessory, Softubes, change the narrow concentrated beam of the Par without lens into a linear soft light source, making them ideal for use in confined spaces - hidden behind pillars or inside vehicles to accentuate a window effect.

“They are compact, have great light output, have proved to be reliable and of excellent quality construction and even the sound department likes them, as they are silent!” testified Jaz Castleton, lead DP on Casualty, which in 2010 selected a range of Joker Bugs with soft tubes and Big Eye attachments as part of a package of 60+ K5600 fixtures deployed at the BBC's long running drama's studio base in Cardiff.

“The compactness of the Alphas is a real asset in trucks and on sets,” commends Jose Luis Rodriguez, chief electrician on Woody Allen's Vicky, Cristina, Barcelona. “Without the Fresnel lens the spread is amazing, around 160° with a very even field and a single sharp shadow. The ability to work both 18K and 4K pointing straight down is a major asset where we are requested to work faster and never say: 'this is not possible'.”

Rodrigo Prieto AMC ASC (Brokeback Mountain, The Wolf Of Wall Street) selected Alpha 4 and Alpha 18s for Pedro Almodovar's Broken Embraces: “If weight and size were the only advantages of the Alphas it would have been enough for me, considering the number of stairs we used on this film... but this range of lights has another feature – the possibility of using them straight down. I could light whole scenes with the Alphas suspended, while benefiting from the quality of the sharp shadows and a very large and even spread.”

DP Rachel Morrison (Fruitvale Station) is a huge fan of the 800-watt Joker Bug with a bug-a-beam adapter in a Leko housing: "Altogether, it packs a mean daylight punch in a controllable spot form that can be plugged into household power or run off a marine cell battery.”

The latest innovation from K5600 is the Evolution kit, a special package consisting of a new Alpha 200W and a Joker Bug 200 Evolution head. This two-light kit is targeted at film schools or any situation where a choice of accessories is possible with both lights.

There is a sea change in lighting requirements impacting the TV industry in particular as new technologies like LED make advances. Broadly speaking though, lighting requirements haven't changed. For outdoors shoots you need daylight-balanced instruments, which is where HMI comes into its own.

“I'm not against LED technology per se, except that it doesn't fit the philosophy of our product range,” says Galerne. “For studio work matters are different, but for locations then HMI has a good future.”

It's rare, he says, for any kind of production to use only one set of technologies, so technicians and cinematographers will always want gear that permits interoperability with a variety of sources for accurate skin tone.

“We hear a lot comparisons between a 200W LED as matching the output of 800W HMI. This is just bad marketing and false information. In our own tests we compared a 200W LED unit to an Alpha 200W Fresnel using the same spread and beam angle. And even then, the Fresnel was more output considering that the LED light needed diffusion to avoid multiple shadows and some Minus Green gel which cuts down light levels by at least a stop.”

As digital cinema cameras finally live up to their promise of using less light without loss of image quality, they are more sensitive than ever to colour rendering or poor quality white light which can be emitted from light sources which are not Full Colour Spectrum.

“In truth there is really only one important piece of information and this is the ability to output the full spectrum,” says Galerne. “Compromise on lighting is just not an option.”

IP Live Comes To Market

CSI

The tipping point for IP live investment has been reached but will interoperability hamper adoption?

http://www.csimagazine.com/Digital-Editions/csi_DigitalEdition_September2015.pdf p40

IP networks were never intended for video. The brittle, time-sensitive nature of video does not play well with the proven but lossy nature of IP – even less so on shared and unmanaged networks like the internet. The varying delay and constant packet loss of the internet play havoc with every video stream traversing it unprotected.

Despite this, the industry is entering a time where IP will be the video transport technology of choice. “With the introduction of multiscreen and personalised content there is a need for more agile and flexible workflows,” affirms media transport solutions provider, Net Insight. “This is driving the adoption of file-based technologies, as well as flexible transport solutions.”

As bitrates increase and equipment prices drop, IP-based communication technologies are pushing more and more dedicated communication systems into retirement.

“There is not a new camera or production solution on the market today that does not support IP,” informs Net Insight. “New and modernised studios are often completely based on IP, and file-based workflows naturally use IP to move files from point A to B.”

Potential production of resolutions up to 8K (or beyond!) require bandwidths previously unheard of and remote production further pushes the need for speed. The ability to scale networks without a glass ceiling and without spending huge capex on replacement kit is arguably the most compelling business argument for the move to IP.

To get there however, broadcasters do have to make a decision to rip and replace existing copper wire cabling. The cost and benefits are about to reach a tipping point but just because COTS is tried and trusted in almost every other industry, the broadcast community has reservations about getting it right. This is especially pertinent of live production and there are differences of opinion in the industry about whether IP live is ready for primetime.

“The great bright future is out there but as an industry we can't tell them how it works with 100 percent confidence,” says Tim Felstead, head of product marketing, Quantel Snell. “In a live environment, when you have adverts to get to air, people's jobs and reputations are on the line. You have to prove to broadcast engineers that when a director says 'Go to Camera 4 now' that it will happen.”

Mark Hilton, VP Infrastructure Products at Grass Valley, agrees that there's an element of hyperbole about IP but that “it is coming on quicker than we all thought. and we're seeing proof of concepts being commissioned.”

With its own brand of IP-enabled products from camera, production switchers, servers and gateways to convert SDI to IP just launching, Hilton believes small scale IP live production is possible just around the corner.

Imagine Communications is even more bullish. “Live IP has been possible for years. It is not about IP, it is about whether or not broadcasters should look at operational changes,” says Brick Eksten, vp, product strategy.

IC points to the reference site it is building in New York with Disney/ABC which includes full live production switching over COTS. Other first movers include Pac-12 Networks – the broadcast arm of the conference of 12 west coast universities – which uses T-VIPS and Nevion links to transmit talkback, telemetry and telemetric data to and from sports venues as far as 2500 km away, apparently with less than a second delay. ESPN's Digital Center 2 opened last year built around a J2K–based Evertz EXE-X2 IP routing core with pockets of baseband workflows. It is capable of routing more than 6,000 HD 1080p streams and as much as 9 TeraBits per second.

“From a master control operational perspective - hitting buttons on a panel – should I, as a broadcaster or engineer, expect any difference from SDI to switching video over IP or running video processing over software?” poses Eksten. “The answer is no. Imagine is all about transparency with IP. We are saying that the interaction feels the same as it did when audio/video was run over SDI.”

Quantel's Felstead is not so sure. “It is much more difficult to see what is going on in IP. The control systems don't exist [but being developed]. Where SDI routers were very reliable with straightforward verification of what was happening, IP systems are more opaque. This creates a lack of confidence.”

Quantel Snell's research indicates that 27 of industry stakeholders believe IP routers will replace SDI within a decade. “While [Quantel Snell] support 2022 we don't believe it is the right way to go long term,” says Felstead. “The industry isn't able to transpose IP into a live environment today.”

At face value the Imagine and Quantel Snell stance appear at odds but in fact they are voicing very similar concerns. SMPTE 2022-6 is the first incarnation of realtime video over IP and deemed solid enough to get the industry moving. It is the standard on which most manufacturer's starter IP kit is based.

However, 2022 emulates the way base-band is used and does not have the capability to send multiple data streams on the same wire. If you want to freely mix and match different cameras or audio tracks, a prime advantage that IP offers, then a new standard is required. This could be SMPTE 2022-8/9/10 which the standard's body is working on. The Video Services Forum, which has focussed on J2K, has another and there will likely be demonstrations of both next year.

The move to 4K complicates matters further. In a live environment do we need fully pristine uncompressed 4K? Or will a mezzanine format be good enough? Some form of compression will have to be good enough in the early stages of 4K over IP since current 10 GbE connections do not have the capacity to carry it uncompressed.

Codec contenders include IntoPix' Tico alliance backed by Grass Valley; J2K; VC2 (backed by Quantel) and Sony's Low Latency Video Codec. London-based V-Nova claims its codec can deliver 4K picture quality at half current rates (just 7-8Mbps) with hints that this could be applied to production.

“One of the great big wins of IP infrastructure is leveraging the cost savings by using commodified IT kit,” says Felstead. “To do that we need to be able to ensure interoperability, but there is no standard common between enough manufacturers to ensure this.”

Quantel flags that economics of multiple proprietary codecs would negate much of IP's supposed cost-savings. “When you compare the efficiency of SDI routers and IT routers in handling different encoding standards and you add up the core devices and peripheral devices you come to the conclusion that the driver is going to be the edge devices,” says Felstead. Vendors like Quantel Snell are hedging their bets, incorporating a variety of IP standards into switching and routing gear. “If we have lots of pieces from different manufacturers and every link has a encode and decode stage with a royalty fee it will run counter to the very principal of COTS driving infrastructure costs down.”

Hilton's concern is that some technologies require different types of hardware; “The Sony LLVC needs to be designed into the hardware, J2K has quite a long latency right now and is fairly computationally intensive and Tico, while optimised for this light compression, is not a good enough standard yet.”

Sony played a major role in developing the original SDI as a universal interface is trying to do the same with its own IP connection. It has the support of a number of manufacturers but is unlikely to receive the blessing of rivals like Panasonic.

“For a real successful implementation of IP it's very important that one standard is accepted and adopted to allow interoperability between systems just as SDI currently provides,” says Peter IJkhout, CTO, VidiGo. “At present, several organizations or companies are developing competing protocols and we have to wait and see how this will progress.

“Adoption will depend on acceptance of compression in the production chain as well as unavoidable longer latency compared to traditional SDI,” he stresses. “Without a well-designed protocol that can be shared seamlessly between vendors and equipment there will be reluctance to invest in IP as SDI replacement.”

Ericsson Broadcast & Media Services, CTO Steve Plunkett, is more conciliatory. “The proprietary implementations prove the technical viability of IP as a transport medium,” he says. “They are providing real world experience that in turn feeds into a general body of knowledge of professional media over IP and they offer short term solutions to organisations who need to implement now. However, they are not viable in the long term. The industry needs scale to reduce costs and that will not be achieved with closed vendor specific solutions.”

According to Imagine's Eksten the major broadcast kit players are talking 2022 interop mainly about their own equipment. By contrast, “We are targeting expansion of our universe of 2022 interop with other companies, which is a huge step forward required by the industry.”

In any case, the issue may soon be redundant. With technologies of 40GbE and 100GbE already out of the labs (and in place at Disney/ABC) the velocity of advance in IT should iron out temporary capacity restrictions though not necessarily cost.

“SDI routers are based on a price per port while IP is typically on amount of bandwidth,” explains Felstead. “If you put video over IP unconstrained in bandwidth you may have a problem cost-wise. If you use uncompressed SD 200Mbps you've got less of a problem but if you use HD, 3G or 4K bandwidth consumption quickly becomes an issue.”

More significantly for some is the human factor. IP requites not just a change in technology but a change in the way people do things. “The required network systems for 4K over IP are complex and expensive,” says IJkhout. “Traditional engineers at broadcasters are very video oriented and it will take time, and being honest often different people, to make the transition into IP engineering.”

“If you've been working in SDI for 30 years and all of a sudden it's based on servers this requires different skills sets,” says Adam Cox, head of broadcast equipment, Futuresource Consulting. “You can retrain them, but they will still think like engineers. The lack of skillsets are a big barrier to IP live.”

Quantel's pitch is don't hold off on IP plant infrastructure but do so with the confidence that the investment is going to be used for the lifecycle of the equipment and won't block you out of future standards. “We've engineered IP interfaces into live SDI product like Kahuna and Sirius so we can offer an immediate hybrid approach,” says Felstead.

IP has already swept through contribution and distribution and will inevitably become the defacto signal route for live. The opportunities are simply too compelling.

“Competition from internet and cable is intense on broadcasters which have incredible opportunities to interject advertising into their programming,” argues Eksten. “That is not the case in broadcast but it can be and needs to be.

“IP mean not having to capex a bunch of equipment every time you want to launch a channel but by using virtualised networks and compute resource to spin-up a channel in hours rather than month. And then it turn off again as needs be.

“When you start to see 2022 capability in pure software, the ability to scale and change network routers to adapt to new business parameters is just phenomenal.”

Keys to the Kingdom

AV Magazine

There's a lot of potential for AV in Qatar as its development is driven by preparations for the World Cup 2022. http://www.avinteractive.com/features/market-sectors/keys-to-the-kingdom-27-08-2015/

The richest country on earth is spending heavily on AV but don’t expect to make a quick buck and be prepared for the long haul.

Regardless of whether the FIFA World Cup does wind up in Qatar, the country is intent on reinventing its international profile with a series of massive infrastructure projects.

To be sure, the kicker for many of them is its hosting of soccer’s circus in 2022, but the richest nation on earth will not let its ambitious plans crumble into the desert.

“There is high potential in the AV business in Qatar, a high demand and growth rate essentially driven by the government in preparation for the WC 2022,” says Riedel’s local manager Ahmed Magd.

Peter Owen, Middle East sales manager at L-Acoustics (which installed Kudo in the auditorium of the Qatar National Convention Center last year) agrees there are a wide variety of projects in the country. Many of them are led by government departments, but there are a number of private projects too.

“Qatar is doing a lot of development as they are keen to show the professional side of their country,” he says. “I’m seeing many Dubai-based companies opening offices in Doha due to  the growth in Qatar.”

Comparisons are inevitable between the more traditional Qatar and its noisy neighbour which has its own showcase to build for World Expo 2020.

“The markets are very different,” reports Vincent Phillippo, director for Crestron Middle East. “Dubai has already finished many developments. The market in Qatar is slower and can better be compared to Abu Dhabi. Qatar is more open to work with the latest technologies compared to Dubai.”

According to Stephen Harvey, managing director, LM Productions, the business culture is more mature in Dubai than Qatar. He points out that it can be expensive to do business there.

“The ongoing business costs are high and there is a lot of red tape. It’s not an area you step into lightly. A lot of companies which come to Qatar thinking they are going to make quick money have been disappointed and left again. You have to be in for the long term. But then that was the same in Dubai if you go back a few years and much the same in other parts of the Gulf.

“Most projects are offered via tenders so be prepared for large tender bonds which can take a long time to be returned, quite complex terms and conditions and very long payment terms,” he says. “Government payment terms tend to be particularly long so any company must have good cash flow and be able to absorb these kind of costs.”

Owen sees both Dubai and Qatar driving an increase in vertical markets over the coming years. “The opportunities are numerous,” he declares. “We’re seeing a lot of movement in the sports market, of course, but the country as a whole is developing and this is driving growth over various markets… growth that will continue to accelerate as 2022 approaches.”

Qatar sits on top of a massive oil field which has given its 280,000 nationals a GDP of $100,000 per head. The petroleum industry, which accounts for 70 per cent of government revenue and 85 per cent of exports, has attracted another 1.5 million expatriates to base themselves there.

The country is spending more than £200bn ($312bn) on a building bonanza ahead of the World Cup. This includes nine new stadiums and renovations of three, with the 12 venues divided among seven cities including Al-Daayen, Al-Khor, Al-Rayyan Doha and Umm Slal. After the tournament there is a plan to dismantle parts of the stadiums and send them to developing countries.

“There is a great deal of spend on making Doha a very advanced transportation hub with Doha airport one of the largest in the world,” says Eleuterio Fernandes, Middle East and Africa sales director at Exterity.

Qatar’s Hamad International Airport, which cost $15.5bn , is now open with an initial capacity of 30 million passengers a year. Exterity’s IPTV solution is installed there, just as it is at other regional airports in Jebel Ali, Muscat and Riyadh.

“The Doha airport install is our largest VoD solution worldwide,” says Fernandes. “We have twenty one VoD servers running tutorials for all users including HR, cabin crew, IT and marketing. It’s also duplicated for full redundancy with two identical systems on each side of the airport.”

In Fernandes’ opinion Qatari clients want a complete integration for all AV solutions. “They are okay with solutions that do the minimum but for a large project they want state of the art,” he says. “Hospitality is also a good business, with existing hotels swapping out their coaxial for IPTV. There are a lot of opportunities in new property which will really ramp up demand for new technology from 2016.”

Smart City Lusail

The World Cup final is scheduled to be held at the 86,000 seat Lusail Iconic Stadium which is under construction in the yet to be built city of Lusail. This is an entire planned community on the Persian Gulf costing some $45bn.

The 38 square mile metropolis plans two golf courses, 22 hotels, a theme park, a lagoon, and two marinas. There will eventually be enough housing to accommodate 450,000 people – nearly 200,000 more than the number of native citizens living in the country.

The project is being funded by the government through property company Qatari Diar which describes Lusail as a “self-contained and comprehensively planned city signifying Qatar’s progress on a grand scale.”

Because it is being constructed from scratch in a country where money is seemingly no object, Lusail will be one of the world’s first entirely ‘smart’ cities. Among its attributes will be building and waste management sensors, street sensors for traffic control plus CCTV linked to a central command hub designed for citizen safety and greener energy consumption. Residents will be able to move around via water taxi or light-rail system, both of which will run on green energy.

Other Smart City projects in the UAE region including Dubai’s Masdar City and another four in Saudi Arabia will contribute to doubling the Gulf’s spend on government-related AV technology by next year, according to InfoComm.

“Technology will be the foundation for Smart Cities, from securing smart grids, to control technology, and environmental sustainability,” said David Lim, project director, InfoComm Asia. “No two Smart Cities are alike. Each one requires world-class customised control systems that can evolve to meet the needs of professional AV applications.”

Setting up in business

The keys to the kingdom are not dissimilar to unlocking other foreign markets. It pays to spend time curating relationships and working with a local partner.

“Having a high profile sponsor will help your business but be prepared to lose money in the early stages and be prepared for competition,” warns Harvey. “It will cost a lot more than you think to set-up a business in Qatar. Be active in your communications and have good staff.”

Crestron’s Phillippo says: “Only if a dealer has a local presence can you get involved. For most projects it’s required to be present in Qatar for several years.”

“Find a strong local partner,” stresses Owen. “One whom you trust, shares a similar business philosophy and who brings an intimate knowledge of the local culture as well as good contacts with the various local government ministries.

“Beyond the relationship, Qataris are looking for the best products, they want brands they can trust to have the same quality they are putting into their property development.”

Kuwait

Compared to the rest of the UAE the Kuwaiti market is “relatively small and very much a price oriented market” says Riedel. It is also less dynamic than much of the UAE. One of its largest annual events is the Hala festival each February which features cultural activities and attracts 8,000 tourists.

“Kuwait is now a stable market and I expect it to show growth in the upcoming years, but for the moment it’s still a little calm,” says Owen; while Phillippo acknowledges there are a few very large projects in Kuwait: “The market is slower than others when it comes to decisions.

Exterity entered the Middle East in 2006 based in Kuwait, an approach that has paid off handsomely as it claims to have a 85 per cent of IPTV market share in the country.

“There is little AV in hospitality but a lot in oil and gas and also education,” says Fernandes. “The government wants to create a landmark in education and has several large scale projects.” Among them a campus-wide IPTV install at Kuwait University.

Qatar at Milan Expo

LM Productions was commissioned to create spectacular scenes within the Oman and Qatar pavilions at the Milan Expo.

Working with the Qatar National Pavilion Committee, Paradigm & Partners and City Neon Bahrain, LM created a virtual reality underwater landscape of the Arabian Sea where visitors feel they are walking through artificial coral reefs and interacting with marine life around them. The installation illuminates a project taking place in Qatari waters to restore ailing coral reefs lost to decades of aggressive coastal work and marine pollution.

At the entrance to the Qatar pavilion two short throw Optoma W316ST projectors were used to create virtual hostesses (a mother and child) greeting guests. Visitors can flick through a virtual holographic book thanks to another projection. As the guests are guided through the pavilion, three different sized video globes explain how Qatar manages its food imports and food security via a projection from three short throw X306STs.

Outside Broadcast

Broadcast 

Growing demand for Ultra HD in live sport is driving change in OB technology, from IP delivery to remote production, writes Adrian Pennington http://www.broadcastnow.co.uk/features/outside-broadcast/5092386.article?blocktitle=Features&contentID=42957

ITN Productions has emerged as a significant new player in UK sports production, shaking up an industry dominated by IMG and Sunset+Vine. Having won the contract to produce Football League coverage for Channel 5, it set about reimagining the traditional outside broadcast model.

“Instead of shuffling trucks up and down the country, we wanted to explore new opportunities,” says ITN chief technology officer Bevan Gibson. “We looked very seriously at whether we could do production in 4K down-rezed to HD with pan and scan or fixed cameras, and we looked at remote operation and remote production.”

Gibson concluded that neither route was quite ready for a production team taking its first leap into the big league.

“We have been packaging clips of EPL matches for mobile and online platforms of News International titles since 2013, but the Football League contract takes our involvement to the next level,” he says. “So in the first year, our workflow is conservative. We want to make sure the first few months are nailed before pushing boundaries.”

With Sunset+Vine’s match presentation, ITN has developed a system that will allow it to record up to 36 matches for editing while the games are still being played.

However, the multicamera coverage remains conventional, with trucks supplied by Video Europe posted at stadia. From there, proxy files are sent via dark fibre to ITN’s London headquarters.

“We are looking to work with partners to do more of this remotely and to significantly reduce the kit we move around,” says Gibson.

Remote production
The ambition is to base all production, including camera control and direction, at Gray’s Inn Road. Gibson says: “If we can deliver remote production in a reliable and cost-effective way, then one benefit for the Football League is that we could produce more multi-camera coverage from more stadiums, rather than the single-camera coverage of the majority of the week’s 36 games.”

A typical objection to remote OB has been the idea that producers need to ‘smell the grass’ – that is, to get as close to the action as possible so they can deliver a better editorial product.

“We’ve explored this with production teams to see whether they can provide coverage that is as good 150 miles away as they can from the venue car park,” says Gibson. “I was expecting it to be a big upheaval, but it’s perhaps more psychological than anything. After a couple of games, we think a production team are quite comfortable being at an HQ that doesn’t have wheels on it.”

He adds: “You still need riggers to install the camera hardware and a cut-down crew to make a basic cut at the stadium if connectivity goes down, but the benefits are there and we will be looking to exploit them.”

Gibson acknowledges that trucks are still required at tier-one events such as Wimbledon, the FA Cup Final and the London Marathon.

“If a broadcaster has spent several million pounds on rights [both BT Sport and Sky are paying £6.5m per EPL game], then spending a fraction more on a traditional OB is not going to make much difference,” he observes. “For the foreseeable future, remote production is more applicable to sports and events that are not yet as commercially successful.”

OB suppliers are still building large trucks to cater for premium live event coverage and Gibson’s view is shared by one of its major players.

“It depends on how essential the sport is and what the penalty is for missing things,” says Richard Yeowart, who runs OB stalwart Arena: “For top-tier events like Champions League, if you miss a goal the football body levies a huge fine on the broadcaster. That applies to varying degrees in all sports. Where broadcasters are paying significantly for rights, they are not yet willing to trust remote technology.

That said, there is a halfway house in which ISO feeds of EVS clips are fed down the line to be turned around offsite into highlights montages.

“I’m not sure that camera operation and live directing will move away, purely because producers may have to respond to the match situation,” says Yeowart. “They are too cautious about making that jump.”

Outside broadcaster CTV has tested remote production, believing that it has a place in future live events. It, too, has some caveats.

“Until manufacturers can agree on a standard protocol [AVB or SMPTE- 2022 for routing uncompressed signals in a IP environment] then the industry is in a hiatus,” says technical director Hamish Greig. “The other element is network management of the bandwidth, which requires some new skill sets in our engineering team.”

The transition to IP and to 4K/Ultra HD are almost running in parallel, but there is a lag, causing some delay in commissioning 4K-ready vehicles.

BT pushed the button on a 4K live Ultra HD channel knowing that it has the distribution network to stream it to the home. But it was aware that the technology was not ready for live IP production at HD, let alone 4K.

It commissioned Timeline to build a 4K truck ready for 2 August with four circuits of HD-SDI. Timeline managing director Daniel McDonnell says any new truck it builds will “almost certainly” be IP based.

Yeowart adds: “Ultra HD is a natural progression or us – it would be crazy to build another HD truck now.” Nonetheless, Arena has put back the launch of OBX, its latest triple-expanding truck, until early 2016.

“We’ve allowed the date to slide so we can incorporate IP,” he explains.

“It makes no sense to build a truck with coax cable when IP is so close to market. We’re bullish that we’ll have an IP truck. Not all the routing will be IP, but we will have the ability to upgrade.”

The truck will be capable of processing at least 20 4K UHD cameras operating at 50 frames a second with an upgrade path to 100 frames a second.

4K UHD investments 

Arena doesn’t have a specific contract for its new 4K facility, which is costing £6.5 million, so the truck is fully capable of working in HD.

“We’ve chosen not to rush this out and to avoid having to field two trucks for one job in the longer term,” says Yeowart. “We’re trying to make this a very powerful truck that does everything an existing HD does but capable of delivering a 4K feed alongside.”

Customers are beginning to talk about the possibilities of 4K, says Megahertz chief technology officer Steve Burgess. The systems integrator and OB provider demonstrated a fully 4K truck at IBC last year and recently upgraded a couple of vehicles from HD to 4K “in a relatively simple way” for a customer.

“Customers face some very difficult decisions,” he says. “There is a solution available now, but everyone knows that interconnection by 4 x 3G-SDI coax cables is not the way forward. It is a case of assessing the benefits of being first in the market versus the costs of implementing what must be considered an interim and slightly compromised solution.”

CTV has had a 4K-ready vehicle on the road since the summer, although it was used in HD mode for Sky’s Ashes cricket coverage.

The Euro Media Group (EMG), of which CTV is a subsidiary, plans to replace all 400 of its cameras with 4K over the next four years. It has a request for proposal out to manufacturers including Grass Valley, Sony and Hitachi, and is conducting tests into 4K production.

NEP Visions runs a number of 4K-ready trucks, which have lacked the missing piece of a true 4K camera chain. As it gears up to launch its next scanner (currently with chassis built), the company’s commercial and technical projects director, Brian Clark, still has questions over kit.

“A 4 x SDI path might be practical as an intermediate step but we’re looking at how to manipulate signals around a truck in 4K over IP,” says Clark.

“One issue is how you treat audio. There is the opportunity to deliver a new audio format into the home alongside Ultra HD, so our equipment decisions are dependent on broadcaster plans and on developments at standards bodies like SMPTE.”

HDR tests
OB suppliers have also been tasked by clients, including BT and Sky, to investigate ways of bringing high dynamic range (HDR) and wider colour to the screen. Ultra HD TVs are coming to market capable of displaying HDR, which brings a more vibrant colour palette and greater contrast in the shadow and highlight areas of a picture.

Tests are focused on trying to find the most efficient way to work with rec.709 (the TV colour spec that BT Sport is deploying) and rec.2020 or DCI-P3 (the new wider colour spaces defined for 4K/Ultra HD). NEP has one such test under way with Sony and the National Theatre

“Translating the information from camera to transmission is not straightforward,” says Clark. “If you adjust the rec.709 space at source it has a direct impact on the rec.2020 space when displayed, and vice versa. The aim is to find a means of delivering the best Ultra HD HDR and 1080p HDR image so that we are not altering the signal twice.”

CTV’s Grieg adds: “HDR would deliver enhanced production for football and cricket because it would provide detail into shots with high contrast shadows and pictures from night time games. Any good engineer will know how to tune gammas and clip levels for HDR, so the process should be straightforward. It has to be plug and play, though, which is a limitation of current HDR workflows.”

ACQUISITION TRAIL

• The NEP Group has been looking to expand away from its mobile unit business. It has snapped up Ireland’s Screen Scene Group, Swedish OB firm Mediatec Group, and Netherlandsbased Consolidated Media Industries, which includes DutchView, a provider of remote production systems and studios, and postproduction, transcode and ingest outfit Infostrada.
• CTVowner Euro Media has several arms covering studios, postproduction, transmission and mobile units, adding RF service supplier Broadcast RF in May. “It is difficult to grow an OB company focused purely on outside broadcasting, so adding associate businesses like Broadcast RF makes sense,” says CTV managing director Barry Johnstone. “Media management of content services is a key growth area for us.”

2015/16 SPORTING HIGHLIGHTS

All of this activity is taking place before the hectic summer of 2016, another landmark year for live sport.

But for this year, CTV, Visions and Telegenic still have the Rugby World Cup in England (and Cardiff) for host ITV.

Arena is taking the lion’s share of ITV’s presentation facilities, fielding 16 trucks including technical and rigging units and crew transport to cover 13 stadiums and 48 fixtures over 46 days.

2016, though, is Olympic year. Arena, NEP Visions and EMG will be sending trucks and crew to Rio. Arena and EMG also have facilities ordered for the Uefa European Championships in France.

CTV’s biggest event next year is The Open, but it will be sending kit and crew (not trucks) to cover the Ryder Cup in Minnesota next September. There’s also the Queen’s 90th birthday at Windsor Castle in May to consider, although tenders had not been put out at the time of writing.

G Force: 5G's Potential is Up in the Air

IBC

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Where the 2G global mobile phone network was about voice, 3G about data with some video and 4G, in the words of operator EE ‘a media distribution network’, then 5G is the mother of them all. It promises to interconnect billions of devices and deliver an array of services that are currently science fiction.

Eager to maintain its status as the most connected society in the world, the South Korean's are pumping $1.5 billion into a 5G network it will switch on in just two years time. 

The UAE won't be far behind and aims to lead the Middle East in the technology after the country's telecom operator, Etisalat struck a pact with Ericsson to develop a 5G strategy. Dubai would like 5G up and running in time for its host of World Expo 2020.

Despite this relative proximity, what 5G means in practice is very much up in the air. A prerequisite is 4G but beyond that the detail is hazy, except that it is potentially so powerful there may be no need for another upgrade – another 'G'.

Initial work has started on 5G standards under the operator consortium Next Generation Mobile Networks (NGMN). The NGMN has provided a consolidated operator view of 5G in its whitepaper and created several technical groups to flesh out the vision outlined in it. The NGMN will act as a feeder body for its requirements to the ITU Radiocommunications Sector (ITU-R) and third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) initially, and other consortia (e.g. TMF, IEEE) as the need to do work in these are identified. 

Initial deployments of 5G-based solutions are expected around 2020, with trials in the 2018-2019 timeframe. Ericsson expects to showcase some 5G-based scenarios during the summer and winter Olympics during this period. Not coincidentally South Korean city PyeongChang hosts the 2018 Games and Tokyo has the winter games, which is already set to showcase achievements in 8K broadcasting.

According to the UK's Digital TV Group, the 5G process is gaining a global momentum and receives a strong political support and funding from governments and the European Commission. 

The ITU is developing a set of requirements for IMT-2020 and will provide additional spectrum at the WRC conference in 2019. 

“This would enable the first 5G-compliant equipment to be available around 2020,” says George Robertson, Principal IP Engineer of DTG and co-chair of the Mobile Video Alliance. 

At the Mobile World Congress in March, Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf said the biggest challenge the industry faces with 5G is the extreme number of use cases.

According to Ericsson, 5G is not simply a next generation mobile technology upgrade (like the transition from 2G-3G-4G) “but an enabler for a whole range of scenarios affecting multiple industries from media and transportation to automotive, industrial, security and so on.” 

EE is about to begin 5G trials of its own. Matt Stagg, EE's Principal Strategist, and a mentor for the 5GIC project at Surrey University, says “Bandwidth is not limited but 5G may yield a perception of limitless bandwidth because you will always have enough for your purpose. This could be the connected car, remote surgery or holographic projection. 5G is not a new air interface. It is best understood as an ecosystem which a lot of people, not just mobile operators, are exploring.”

To make those concepts possible, the attributes of a 5G standard will likely include ultra-reliability and ultra-resiliency, GB throughputs and latency as low as 1 millisecond. 

“It means unicast with peak data of more than 10Gb/s, a more consistent user data rate of 100Mb/s at the cell edge and it means a massive increase of network capacity by moving to higher frequency ranges,” explains Dr Helmut Schink, Head of Telco standards at Nokia Networks.

The focus of 5G delivery is on edge computing, a transformation of the current architecture of the internet. It means transferring processing nearer to the application into local cells and away from centralising data in data centres or on cloud servers. This will free up the network which may otherwise be blocked by the sheer amount of traffic passing over it.

“We will see some big changes in content delivery from the cell side itself because it makes economic sense, it doesn't use backhaul, will lower latency and frees up other parts of the network,” says Stagg.

One area 5G is not expected to address is broadcast. That's because the capabilities for mobile and video broadcasting are already possible with LTE Broadcast and will be further enhanced by the evolution of LTE in the next few years. 

“Standards are being developed by 3GPP for LTE-based services for either unicast or broadcast distribution of TV programs,” states Ericsson. “5G is not essential for such services. Higher frequency spectrum bands in 5G and new radio beam forming technologies are expected to offer ultra-dense deployments at GB throughputs for applications that require such capabilities.”

Nokia's Schink agrees that “multicast and broadcast is not a key focus of 5G.”

According to Robertson at the DTG, the expected capabilities of 5G technology would “certainly be sufficient for the delivery of linear broadcasting to mobile devices” but it remains to be seen to what extent and when they will be deployed in the real networks.

“From the perspective of both the public service media and the commercial providers 5G will need to be assessed in a similar way as other delivery platforms,” he says. “That is, not only on the basis of its technical capabilities, but also reach, costs, market potential, and gatekeeping issues.”

For all the excitement, 5G is not likely to be a mainstream service until 2025.

IBC Sheds Light on High Dynamic Range

IBC

The digital cinema conference sessions at IBC are dominated by discussion of High Dynamic Range (HDR), a means of augmenting the picture quality of content shown theatrically and in the home.

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“The HDR revolution has shaken a lot of folk in the industry to be aware of the fidelity of their image,” says Dominic Glynn, Senior Scientist, Pixar. “It's a wake up call for those skating a fine line of efficiencies and short cuts to better protect their imagery throughout the pipeline if they want to leverage HDR into distribution.”

While it has long been possible to record the full dynamic range from light onto film stock, and more recently on digital image sensors, what has not been possible is a way of preserving that information through to final display. 

A number of techniques and technologies have now aligned to enable this. At the display end this includes HDR-enabled Ultra HD TV sets which can decode and present higher brightness imagery. These will pour into shops at Christmas. Laser projectors deliver the necessary uplift in luminance for cinemas.

“For most of the past thirty years in CGI and VFX it was only possible to display a limited range of light values for images,” says Rick Sayre who worked with Glynn to create the HDR finish for ‘Inside Out’. “By convention we picked 1.0 for the brightest value we could make, and accepted that 0.0 wasn’t really black. Now, with the new high dynamic range displays, we can begin to talk about images as a photographer would - in terms of contrast, mid greys and tonal structure. Not only VFX elements and light probes, but finally the images the audience will see can move beyond that 0 to 1 range.”

Unlike the current migration to 4K and Ultra HD, the addition of HDR does not incur a huge knock-on cost in data handling. “Improving the pixel has a much lower incremental cost than making more of them,” he observes. “More pixels cost more to render but better pixels require more care.”

However, just a handful of cinemas worldwide have the necessary equipment to showcase HDR. It is an expensive proposition for exhibitors who have only just finalised migration to digital projectors. For the time being, laser-projected HDR will be the preserve of flagship auditoria known in the trade as Premium Large Format.

“Our hope is that HDR is a broadly proliferated platform,” says Glynn. “We recognise the economics involved and that right now this is bleeding edge. HDR speaks to premium exhibition.”

HDR for the home though is another matter. Hollywood studios are packaging catalogue and new titles (like ‘The Lego Movie’) with an HDR sheen.

Outside broadcaster tech teams are busy testing ways of transmitting HDR from the lens to the screen where HDR would lift the picture quality of sunlit or shadowed sports from football to cricket. HDR can also render visibly better HD picture too.

But there are issues which the IBC sessions will help thrash out. The main one is the lack of a standard formulation for the format. How bright should the whites be?  How dark should the blacks be? Is additional training for colourists required? How much will HDR-enabled production kit (monitors, projectors, grading pipelines) cost?

It will also add complexity to mastering. Potentially separate HDR and SDR (normal or standard dynamic range) versions, and even individual masters for proprietary HDR formats from Dolby, Imax or Technicolor may be necessary. There is pressure on all sides to limit the number of source masters, one for TV and one DCI-compliant. 

It is notable that BBC R&D is being honoured by IBC for a novel solution to the delivery and display of Ultra HD and HDR video for their technical paper “A display independent high dynamic range television system.”

HDR may “open up a window into a world we put so much time effort and love into,” for ILM's Image Pipeline Lead, Jeroen Schulte, yet the full creative implications have to be explored.

"We don't know yet what it means to light for HDR,” suggests Sayre. “You can show the audience [detail they wouldn't have seen before]. The question is whether you should, in terms of the story. We need to beware of gimmicks.”

“It's a high impact return for creatives,” asserts Glynn. “It affords a visceral yet subconscious feel for an audience. You don't need to read a white paper to understand that HDR enables higher quality filmmaking.”

Rick Sayre, Dominic Glynn and Jeroen Schulte give the IBC Big Screen keynote: ‘Extending the creative palette - Vision from Pixar and ILM.’

Note also three sessions on HDR: From zero to infinity which feature expert contributions from Curtis Clarke, and executives from Imax, Barco, Dolby, Sony Pictures and more.

Andrew Cotton and Tim Borer, authors of the BBC R&D paper will present it at 14:00 on Friday 11 September and receive their award at the IBC Awards on Sunday 13 September.