Slashdot Mirror
100GbE To Slash the Cost of Producing Live Television
New submitter danversj writes "I'm a Television Outside Broadcast Engineer who wants to use more IT and Computer Science-based approaches to make my job easier. Today, live-produced TV is still largely a circuit-switched system. But technologies such as 100 Gigabit Ethernet and Audio Video Bridging hold the promise of removing kilometres of cable and thousands of connectors from a typical broadcast TV installation. 100GbE is still horrendously expensive today — but broadcast TV gear has always been horrendously expensive. 100GbE only needs to come down in price just a bit — i.e. by following the same price curve as for 10GbE or 1GbE — before it becomes the cheaper way to distribute multiple uncompressed 1080p signals around a television facility. This paper was written for and presented at the SMPTE Australia conference in 2011. It was subsequently published in Content and Technology magazine in February 2012. C&T uses issuu.com to publish online so the paper has been re-published on my company's website to make it more technically accessible (not Flash-based)."
Well that's a failure of imagination. I'll admit technically speaking it often is *somewhat* compressed, - eg. 422 Subsampled chroma at least. But there is a massive difference between a delivery codec and a signal you're still working with. To start with H264 and their ilk are computationally expensive to do anything with. A single frame of 1080p is a pretty big dataset, and it's painful enough doing basic matrix transforms, but adding a bunch of higher level computations on top of that?... For example just cutting between two feeds of an inter frame compressed codec requires that the processor decompress the GOP and recreate the missing frames. Several of orders of magnitude more complicated than stopping one feed and starting another. And generally speaking the uncompressed feed you have in broadcast situation you're doing *something* oo. Switching, mixing, adding graphics, etc. But the biggest question is one of generation loss. Even one round trip through one of those codecs results in a massive drop in quality (as you rightly point out). You don't want to be compressing footage out of the cameras any more than you can, because you KNOW that you're going to be rescaling, retiming, wiping, fading, keying etc etc etc...
-Steve http://www.stevennicholson.com
Replacement tech rarely catches up. 1080p signal? Please, that is so last year. 4k is the new norm. No TV's for it yet? Actually, they are already on sale which means that if you are not recording your repeatable content right now in 4k, you will have a hard time selling it again in the future. That is why some smart people recorded TV shows they hoped to sell again and again on film and not video-tape. Because film has a "wasted" resolution in the days of VHS video tapes but when DVD and now Blu-ray came out, these shows can simply be re-scanned from the original footage and voila, something new to flog to the punters.
I don't know how much data a 100GbE link can truly handle but the fact is that trying to catch up to currect tech means by the time you are finished, you are obsolete. the 4k standard created by the Japanese (and gosh doesn't that say a lot about the state of the west) isn't just about putting more pixels on a screen it is about all the infrastructure needed to create such content. And you better be ready for it now because if you are not, you will be left behind by everyone else.
The future may not be now, but it sure needs to have been planned for yesterday.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
> The intent here is to replace so much of the specialized cabling
Yup. I'm glad I work in radio, where we've been ferrying oversampled, high-quality audio over IP for some years now.
The digital switching and input assignments are a dream as well. Not that many years ago, if someone came into Engineering and said, "sorry, forgot! We have a paid ballgame going on at 4PM!" ... my assistants and I would literally grab a punch tool and some Belden wire and start frantically running cables. Many was the time we'd put something on air by literally throwing a pair across the floor with gaffer's tape. "Watch Yer Step!" :)
Nowadays, any source in our facility can be assigned to any input on any mixer in any control room. Run once, use many times. Ah, it's a beautiful thing. I can move an entire radio station from one control to another literally in a matter of minutes. It takes longer for the staff to physically grab their coffee cups and lucky charms than it does for my staff to move the signals.
My poor brethren in TV just have entirely too much data. If we'd all go back to RADIO drama, see, this wouldn't be a problem, now woodit? :D
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.