The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) is leading trials with several EBU Members and industry partners to shoot, process, record and distribute live Ultra High Definition (UHD) content, with High Frame Rates (HFR), High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Next Generation Audio (NGA).
The trials will take advantage of the new immersive audio architecture that is now part of SSL’s System T broadcast audio production environment.
Part of the progamme involve the 2018 European Athletics Championships and European Championships, which will see the world’s first live distribution of UHD content with both HDR (HLG/BT.2100) and HFR (100 frames per second, 2160p100). Current live broadcasts don’t exceed a field or frame rate of 50Hz in Europe, and HD interlaced (1080i25) is still the dominant broadcast emission format even though commercial encoders and TV sets manage up to 2160p50 resolution.
At the European Championships in Berlin, a 2160p100 HLG/BT.2020 production workflow will be set up in collaboration with EBU Members BBC, France Télévisions, IRT, RAI and ZDF, and a range of technology partners. The 2160p100 feed will be used to derive two additional 1080p100 and 1080p50 signals. These three feeds will then be encoded in HEVC and multiplexed for a live transmission via the Eurovision satellite network to RAI’s experimental test bed in the Aosta Valley, Italy, and via the Eurovision Fibre infrastructure to the European Championships Broadcast Operations Centre (BOC) based at BBC Glasgow.
The 1080p100 programme will also include Next Generation Audio (NGA) sound in the form of 4+7+0 channel and scene-based beds, with four additional interactive mono object signals for two commentaries and two audio descriptions. NGA is commonly thought of as providing immersive experiences, but also enables additional features, such as personalization, accessibility and interactivity, by means of ‘objects’.
The trials will enable all participants to build their understanding of the current state of the art in immersive sports content production, and its strategic potential. Some clips may also become available for public dissemination and for technical and scientific testing purposes.
SSL’s immersive audio implementation for System T places support of Next Gen Audio for ATSC 3.0, Dolby Atmos, and MPEG-H at the heart of the console architecture. With the emergence of 3D Immersive Audio in broadcast as well as in film, SSL’s new three-axis co-ordinate panning for System T incorporates two- or four-channel overhead speakers into the available channel and bus formats. As well as positioning mono and stereo sources in a 3D sound field, System T can accept multichannel 3D sources and fine-tune spatial components as they are added to the final production mix. This is essential in multilingual sports productions where effects and ambience multichannel 3D ‘beds’ will be used extensively as the basis of the individual program mixes. Other Immersive additions include intelligent downmixing facilities, a 3D monitoring section with 49 12-channel inputs, and an extensive set of processing tools for the new wide architecture.
More: www.solidstatelogic.com
