Entering The Age Of Operational Expenditure - Pt 2

It also integrates with traffic, business tools and rights management systems. The power for all this comes from a parallel-processing engine. V 8.0 adds full broadcast gamut colour legalisation, high bit-depth within native colour spaces, and support up to 16-bit 4:4:4:4 YUV video. Frame level metadata is also enabled.
The other eye catcher was a closed-caption translation solution – WohlerCaption – which links with the RadiantGrid to remove closed captioning from content sources and insert closed captioning back into any transcoded output.

Getting Channels To Market
Harris has built its immediate future on its strong reputation for automation and play out and managing file-based workflows, and on a trio of products – Selenio, Platinum, and Versio.
The Platinum IP3 router adds data paths to the usual matching of audio and video, thus creating triple-path architecture. It scales to multi-frame configurations; gives users clean separate video and audio signals, and puts them in good shape for handling ultra high bandwidths, such as 4K content. In a single frame it scales to 576X1024, but in multiple-frame versions jumps to 2084X2048. One big appeal is the integration of multi viewers.
The NEXIO Volt server is all about giving users higher channel counts and adding options for media storage.
It has four bi-directional HD channels and is built around software-based codecs and software licensed keying.
The media storage options consist of an integrated storage model plus direct connections to Harris NEXIO Farad systems for shared storage movement via Gigabit Ethernet or optional fiber channel interfaces.
The first two were known about already, so the biggest news was Versio.
"Launching low-cost thematic channels in very short time and with a much reduced cost per channel was a key thing," said VP of Business development Stan Moote. "So Versio was developed to specifically address that but still have premium grade automation, server and branding technology built into it, rather than putting a PC on a desk and putting a couple of cards in it."
Versio has improved automated play out, HD/SD simulcast, playlist control and graphics management features, and puts Harris in a strong position as the channel-in-a-box market starts to boom. Users get easy integration with production, traffic and billing, scheduling, asset management, content play out and master control functions.
Versio at its core combines baseband video, channel branding and graphics, and automated workflow capabilities in a 1RU based set of software solutions.

Algorithmically Sensible
Ericsson has created its own video-processing chip to grab control of its own road map and its algorithms.
"We do not rely on third party chip sets now to deploy certain features," said Fabio Murra, head of portfolio marketing, compression solutions. "For 20 years now it was Tandberg, NTS, NTL – we have been developing our own algorithms for video compression. It has always been about picture quality and the efficiency of video compression, and in order to do that often we had to choose bespoke customised hardware."
Often two boards were required to crunch the numbers, and this introduced the minus factors of less flexibility than desired and longer deployment cycles. And sometimes third party chip sets were also required.
"This brings everything together, the processing you got before on customised hardware and the flexibility of a software programmable engine," said Murra. This is embodied in the ability to re-program the chip for MPEG 2 MPEG 4, SD, HD, and UHD. The power of hardware married to the flexibility of software, was in huge evidence everywhere.

The Power Under Quantel's Bonnet
AJA was providing crucial support functionality to Adobe, Avid, Filmlight and Quantel, and it was already shipping Ki Pro Quad, a solid-state portable video recorder designed to enable 4K camera-to-finishing workflows.
This gives users a pick of 4K, Quad HD, 2K and HD workflows and the efficiencies of Apple ProRes and the flexibility of RAW data. The Ki Pro Quad docks onto a variety of cameras, and has RAW Debayering and real-time scaling from 4K to HD. It takes camera signals in and does the key things of creating 4K Pro Res files or recording RAW data straight to a Thunderbolt enabled computer system.
The Canon C500 was a big part of a camera into post demo which showed the rapid follow ups to live Debayering; and, the Sony F55 was key to 4K over 4 x 3G SDI baseband.
The new AJA Corvid Ultra OEM card – seen delivering 4K workflows with Pablo Rio - supports 2K and 4K digital intermediate workflows with HFR support (48 and 64 fps) and scaling capabilities for all resolutions. It is an instant boost to any editing, grading or graphics function.
Huge enabling credits will also be accrued by the new Hi5-4K and ROI Mini-Converters.
The first – enabling full 4K rushes assessments on set - provides a simple monitoring connection from professional 4K devices using four 3G-SDI outputs to new and upcoming consumer 4K displays equipped with 4K-capable 1.4a HDMI inputs. The second gives users a conversion and real-time scaling device for computer DVI-D and HDMI outputs to baseband video over SDI.

Thin Client Displays
New from NVIDIA is the multi GPU initiative Grid VCA – meaning visual computing appliance. Aimed at putting GPUs in the cloud/data centres, it is not just to do with computing because it puts graphic tasks into the data functions as well.
Users will get a box stacked with CPUs, GPUs and memory, and it comes in the two flavours of 8-GPU and 16-GPU. The concept is for work group style systems in medium-sized agencies. Rather than recapitalise to put GPUs under every desk, the VCA is a serious option – a sort of best of two worlds in the sense that users get high performance GPUs and a data centre available for thin client display (on laptop, tablet, smart phone).
GPU acceleration is common to film restoration, where minutes spent on saving single frames have become a real-time reality. NVIDIA is also involved in the integration of DSLR cameras, and an interesting tie up with AJA – where AJA can bring data in and out of NVIDIA GPU Direct on its boards in sub frame times. This enables virtual set and many other functions. To show that GPUs enable the clean and efficient processing of 4K, NVIDIA had a demo involving Blackmagic Resolve that highlighted real-time Debayering and processing, for display on a Sharp 34-inch 4K panel.

Read the article in the online edition of Regional Film & Video here
(IT/JP)