Morning – Block E – Remote/Cloud Production

11:00 - 11:25 Eastern Time
Mixing 24p Into Live Sports
Mark Chiolis, Director of Business Developments, Mobile TV Group

Our live sports productions have been very similar over the last 50 years with 60 field and frame captures and using those cameras to tell the story both on and off the field of play.  Sure, there are have great leaps and bounds with technology such as higher resolutions, better and more immersive audio capture and delivery, higher dynamic range, high speed replay, graphics, tickers, statistics and highlights all on one screen, but over the last couple of years we’ve slowly seen a small sampling of productions introduce “cine” workflows to help craft a more complete story to the fans and viewers.  Mixing in a “cine” or 24P workflow allows the director and storytellers to craft both an on-field story and an off-field story with additional tools that provide the ability, when done properly, to draw in the fans in a more engaging environment that fits each message.  It was used recently in the Super Bowl to help with telling those different stories.  Did it work, will it be the future, what changes need to happen, what additional work and cost are involved for the operators and clients? 

 

11:25 - 11:50 Eastern Time
A Field Guide to Live High Dynamic Range Single-Stream Production: Concepts, Do’s and Don’ts
Prinyar Boon, Product Manager, PHABRIX and Andy Beale, BT Sport

This presentation will document the core concepts associated with High Dynamic Range Wide Color Gamut (HDR, WCG) single stream production where the conventional Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) production is derived from the HDR production.   This workflow is essential to driving down the cost and footprint of simultaneous live HDR-SDR production to the point that this is now a practical reality.  This technique has been deployed in BT Sport ‘Ultimate’ English Premier League, UEFA and premier league Rugby since Aug 2019 as well as NBCUI NFL Notre Dame and Chicago Basketball, Hockey and Baseball HDR productions in 2020.  The use of Closed-loop shading using a “predictive HDR to SDR” converter will be described, and the choices associated with converting Graphics Anchored material.  The necessary changes and adaptations to existing equipment and working practices will also be described.

 

11:50 - 12:15 Eastern Time
The deployment conundrum: cloud or on-premises – why not both?
Mathieu Zarouk, Director of Product Management - Media Workflows, Dalet

Multiple architecture options are available when designing a Media Workflow solution – what will work best for your organization?

Over the past year, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of enabling contributions from home across the media production and distribution supply chain. This has accelerated the transition to cloud-based solutions, which can often provide ways to address those challenges. But they do not come without technical trade-offs, and associated business transformations can prove difficult.

The good news is that this switch does not have to be neither abrupt nor total: hybrid models can offer more gradual transition paths. When considering a transition to cloud solutions, several key benefits are usually at the center of discussions. Throughout multiple implementations for our customers, we have found that cloud deployments bring great value and ROI, especially around elasticity, removing network bottlenecks, and unlocking new models for disaster recovery plans. However, such benefits do not come without their own challenges, often linked to performance, egress costs and leveraging existing infrastructure. In this presentation, we will consider how hybrid implementations can answer these challenges, from multi-site to distributed deployments. The session will include details of real-life implementations, challenges faced and solutions provided.

 

Afternoon – Block F – Production Concepts

1:25 - 1:50 Eastern Time
An OTT Primer
Paul Briscoe, Chief Architect, TAG

The media distribution industries have been rocked in recent years as the internet has become a viable and growing means of delivering TV and movie content through Over-The-Top (OTT) technologies. Based on web-centric, browser-friendly methods, it offers the ability to deliver live and various flavours of VOD content over a wide array of internet connection types and accommodates a vast range of screen sizes. Initially appearing as the viewing method for Subscription VOD based on content libraries, it has grown to include Advertising-driven VOD as well as Transactional VOD, and today embraces live broadcast-type streaming television as well as live event-based coverage. Beyond a single channel of transmission, it can offer multi-screen viewing, consumer-driven viewpoints and opens the door to future things such as volumetric camera synthesis. Its source is content in traditional formats, but everything downstream of that is completely different as compared to the flowing live-stream based methods of OTA, cable and satellite.

This presentation is a 101-level introduction to OTT. It focuses primarily on the technical aspects of how it works, beginning with well-known SMPTE standards and formats in their usual habitats and expands onwards into the world of OTT. Topic covered include an end-to-end view of the distribution architecture, how the mechanisms of OTT work, how content is packaged for OTT distribution, how the system offers dynamic response to viewing environment and connection speeds and how encryption, program guide and other ancillary services are handled.  Specific topics addressed will include HTTP Live Streaming (HLS), MPEG-DASH (MPEG-Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP), Microsoft Smooth Streaming (MSS), as well as the relevant SMPTE standards which underpin it.

 

1:50 - 2:15 Eastern Time
Using the camera's chroma signal to evaluate and calibrate LED lighting and video walls
Brad Dickson, Lighting Video

This session will cover the shortfalls of the current lighting measurements used by end-users and manufacturers to evaluate, calibrate led lights and video walls to match on camera. I will show how an imbalance can occur in the cameras when the focus of calibration is on colour meter readings instead of the actual response of the camera's image sensor. I will show the workflow that has been adopted by many virtual studios that use video walls and led lighting to get a harmonious balance between all of these based on the needs of the camera's image sensors response. I will cover the HS Scope and how it guides the end-user to obtain a calibrated setting that is based on the various camera's chroma responses. I will show the need to calibrate for the various cameras and the shortfalls of using global lighting measurements instead of camera-specific measurements.

Video walls are being used for VR sets with LED lighting. There remains a diversity of output quality along with a variety of responses from cameras image sensors. You can see the wide range of mismatching that can occur. I have worked with LEDs and video walls for decades and using my methodology I have been able to get harmony between these elements no matter the camera as I used the chroma signal as my guideline. My methodology has now been adopted by some top VR studios globally. Many gaffers have stated my methodology is the missing link they have been looking for.

 

2:15 - 2:40 Eastern Time
Transitioning from Green
Max Paiement, Ross Video

Green screen technology has been used for more than 30 years and is being used today still. It is a proven technology that is used for television shows, commercial advertisement and film/VFX productions.  The concept behind it is pretty straight forward - the talent is being shot with a green screen behind him and then, either in real-time or in post-production, and sometimes both, the green is replaced with a virtual background.  Proven technology, not too expensive, and yet, the industry is looking for alternatives.  This alternative might just be the current hottest trend - XR. XR stands for extended reality and usually refers to the use of LED walls as a replacement for the green screen.

Instead of processing the camera feed and keying the green, the walls are displaying the final graphics, ocess, manage and distribute content. This session will look into the transition in virtual productions from green screen to LED-based shows and discuss each method's advantages and disadvantages.