This article was originally published on www.display-central.com.
Distribution of 4K content at 60 frames per second is a growing need and challenge for the industry. Three new demos are making progress toward solving this problem.
One demo feature live transmission of 4K/60p content from Prague in the Czeck Republic to the University of California at San Diego using JPEG compression. The second was at a special event in London that use HEVC compression. A third demo was an internal one featuring uncompressed 4K/60p at 10 bits with 4:2:2 subsampled video over a single fiber network. All offered real time transmission of the 4K/60p content.
The JPEG2000 demo was organized by Comprimato Systems, the developer of the JPEG2000 compression encoding/decoding. According to Jiri Matela, Co-founder and CEO at Comprimato Systems, the 4K/60p content was encoded in Prague using standard PC components including two NVIDIA GeForce Titan GPUs. On the decode side in San Diego, a second PC platform, this time using a single NVIDIA K6000 GPU (similar speed at the GeForce Titans but with more memory). The network for transmission was provided by CASNET.
In San Diego, the CALIT facility at UCSD was used. This facility is part of the CineGrid group, which is an association of mainly research labs that want to establish and promote the development of high bandwidth networks for sharing data, visualizations and video over long distances for collaboration purposes. Comprimato participated to showcase their new JPEG2000 encode/decode capabilities.
Elemental realtime 4KHEVC at full frame rates
The second demo was organized by Elemental Technologies (Portland, OR). In the demonstration in London, an Elemental used footage from a sports event shot last month in the U.S. as input to the encoder. To capture the content in 4K, a RED EPIC UltraHD camera and a Canon 300mm lens were used during a U.S. Major League Soccer Western Conference semi-final match between the Seattle Sounders and the Portland Timbers last month in Portland, Oregon (US).
The Elemental Live video processing system received high bitrate 4Kp60 AVC video in an MPEG-2 transport stream. The system was used to encode and deliver a 4Kp60 HEVC output to a PC-based decoder with final rendering on an 84-inch Planar 4K television.
“Unlike cinema, live sports are best viewed at higher frame rates. In 2014, we expect live sports to drive 4K Ultra HD adoption by those programmers and pay TV operators seeking to deliver a more compelling sports entertainment experience,” said Aslam Khader, chief product officer for Elemental. “With our HEVC implementation and software-defined architecture, Elemental gives customers a viable path to deliver Ultra HD TV services.”
Elemental has made rapid progress in developing it HEVC encoding capability. In January 2013 it announced support for HEVC, then showed 10-bit encoding of 4K content at NAB and IBC. In October, it did a live demo of 4K/30 at the Osaka Marathon.
The third demo was produced by Barnfind Technologies (Sandefjord, Norway) and Village Island (Tokyo, Japan). Barnfind is a developer and provider of a multi-functional, signal neutral transport platform to all segments of the broadcast industry. Village Island suppliers of state-of-the-art play out solutions to the broadcast industry. Together, the two successfully completed transmission tests for 4K 60p 10bits 4:2:2 base band signal over a single fiber.
Barnfind 4K-60As illustrated in the diagram, Village Island’s VillageSTUDIO 4K Play-out system was used to generate high-quality 4K content. These were delivered over four 3G/HD-SDI cable to the Barnfind multi-format media converter, where the signals were muxed and formatted for transmission over a single optical link. At receive end, an identical multi-format media converter demuxed the signals to deliver them over four 3G-HD-SDI cables to the Toshiba 4K TV.
The companies said there was no latency or jitter in the demo, although they did not specify the length of the transmission. Arild Skjeggerud, Barnfind CTO notes that, “Everybody knows how jitter-sensitive multiple SDI link transmission can be over fiber. Barnfind’s ultra-accurate over-clocking technology and zero latency / zero jitter architecture enables each SDI link to remain synchronous with minimum delay through the entire transmission chain, which is quite an accomplishment. We encourage our customers and partners to validate and deploy their 4K set-up in a similar configuration.”
According to Michael Van Dorpe, Village Island CEO, “The world is moving toward 50p/60p and customers are very aware of compression artifacts and unnecessary latency. The fact that Barnfind offers unaltered raw data direct transmission without any delay is a significant achievement and valuable asset for all broadcasters preparing for 4K.”
Good stuff. – Chris Chinnock