The Future Of 4K From NAB (Part 1)

Are technologists racing too far ahead of users? George Jarrett continues his look back at NAB with a set of companies that all have something interesting to say...

Looking at the craft skill trends coming out of NAB it was clear that being able to edit professional video in the cloud is now a big deal. Why buy more storage and servers and pay to manage them when you can outsource all of that? Coupled to this was the increasing capability for people to share in projects, or share and exploit assets.

One of the most interesting jolts, provided by a subsequent Quantel and Snell global survey into industry expectations of IP and 4K, is that the majority of broadcasters will not move fully to IP broadcast infrastructures until 2015. The wide adoption of 4K will also take longer than expected.
The poll sample (1,000 from 80 nations) produced astonishingly sober stats. Regarding IP, only 19% of respondents thought that SDI routers would be completely replaced by IP within two years, 42% within five years, and 27% only saw this happening within 10 years.

Asked whether high frame rate or high dynamic range would bring them most economic benefit, 47% of respondents saw HDR as a potential revenue generator, only 22% HFR, with 31% seeing no potential benefit from either. Regarding where IP and 4K fit in the priorities of broadcasters, respondents were asked what is the top feature they look for in vision mixers: 44% chose multi-format, multi-program production, with 20% and 16% concerned with IP and 4K readiness, respectively.

In fact HDR has jumped on considerably since NAB, as evidenced by a 4K-workflow demonstration involving the FilmLight Baselight and the new Sony BVM-X300 4K master reference monitor – an impressive full 4K in OLED and measurable at 1000 Nits. A little bit of imaging history with no drift and eye-delighting blacks suggested that the technology companies are storming ahead whilst the end user market is struggling to reconcile the fact that IP and 4K go together like boiled egg and soldiers.

Omnitek, traditionally big in T&M, drew a lot of attention with its 4K Tool Box, in which 12G is one big user requested feature along with pumping 4K across SGI. For a product that was launched last year, Omnitek also had better GUI, jitter spectrum and jitter histogram features to show off.

"There has been a big shift in the desired 4K tool box, but not a lot of test equipment around," said technical support manager Simon Crocker. "So we were getting engineers wanting a mixture of sophistication. Some are happy our box does everything, but some say they just want a generator and analyser."

Aspera had interesting new customers in Broadway Video (using its software to move content between NY and LA for post, and then for delivery and out to OTT providers) and 72&Sunny (migrating all its MAM systems to the cloud and using Aspera to do the transfer and mange the automation).
It has existed on two main models – standard perpetual software licenses and a pay-as-you-go consumable platform, and new for the show was its core software as a service.

"In the software the service is one platform and the user gets one bill from us. This will be attractive to certain types of companies; either they do not want the IT team to put together a full data centre, or maybe they just want to focus on the creative aspect," said VP of marketing Richard Heitmann. "They need Aspera technology to be able to move their content. They can just licence the software for provisioning up in the cloud and not have to worry."

A lot of this business will be project based. "The user will just want to fire it up in the cloud and use it for 3-6 months typically, and when done he will spin it all back down and stop paying for it," said Heitmann.

Aspera is big on third party tie-ups, with companies like VIZRT, Grass Valley and Telestream. In fact 11 big vendor names have integrated Aspera in a 'joint solution' for which the company had to modernise its software by adding APIs at the app level. Heitmann predicts more activity in the live sports market following experiences with UEFA (delivering pre and post match clips that broadcasters incorporated into interviews) and FIFA (where it worked with EVS, Elemental, and Akamai to deliver live streaming to second screen devices).

Aframe has grown massively since its launch four years ago. It had a new release to talk about and a technology integration project with Adobe that attracted a lot of interest.

"In our release there are five new elements, starting with improved global search. Users can search across all their content in all our data centres (NY, London and LA)," said Mark Overington, president of Aframe North America Inc. "We have also added an advanced review and approval module, expanded our format handling, and a new multi tier account hierarchy and permissions schemer. We have also expanded our ability to manage not just video assets, which we do primarily, but other assets such as JPEG files, Protools files, and graphics of all sorts."

Aframe has worked with Adobe Anywhere to develop it in the cloud and deliver it by Aframe.

"We have added Adobe Anywhere to our cloud-based servers so that people can take assets directly from Aframe via Adobe Anywhere and work with them on the desktop with Adobe Premiere Pro editing applications," said Overington. "The video you are working with normally would come off your local SAN or your hard drive, but now you have the ability to access and work with and edit video content directly from Aframe and Adobe in the cloud."

Aframe is a high performance dedicated professional video cloud/collaboration platform but Overington points to new opportunities. “In the future there is going to be opportunities to take what we have built and provide it to people and let them manage and run the system. Those are what a lot of people would call enterprise clouds, which can help people overcome some of the security issues they have with cloud technology,” he added.

NewTek had two main stories – 60+ new features for TriCaster headed by augmented reality, and the value for money backpack replay unit TriCaster Mini HD4. This comes as the HD4 with one 750GB drive and the 4i with integrated display and two 750 GB drives. This gets replay to hard to reach places, and should do as well in the education market as it does on the increasingly cost conscious broadcast arena.

Continued in Part Two...

This article is also available to read at BFV online.

(JP/LM)