Emerging standards are making the best of existing pixels. Understand the principles of HDR, learn how to build workflows to simplify production, and deliver the highest quality HDR pictures possible.
After a year like 2020, predicting the future is scary business. However there are several leading-edge technologies—many borrowed from the IT and consumer-facing industries—that certainly look to make a significant impact on video production and broadcasting in 2021. Here are some, in no particular order, that will see continued implementation and streamline production and distribution workflows. To date we’ve seen these new tools begin to alter the way video production and distribution is done, helping the industry move forward and media businesses grow, and that’s certain to continue in new and exciting ways.
There’s no way to sugarcoat it: The pandemic has had a highly disruptive effect on video production and distribution in 2020 and many agree it will be felt for several years. The inability for people to gather safely has made it impossible for full-scale video production to go ahead as it did before. Yet, the industry has risen to the challenge in a myriad of ways and learned to be more efficient in the process.
The legacy gamma adopted in 709 and 240M has recently been supplanted by two more approaches to applying non-linearity to luminance, namely the Hybrid Log Gamma (HLG) system developed by the BBC and NHK and the Perceptive Quantizer (PQ) developed by Dolby.
There was a time, not too long ago, when 100 Gigabit Ethernet (100GbE) IP switching was only considered for IT data centers moving large amounts of financial and military data. With the growth of media and the urgent need for remotely controlled production infrastructures, 100 Gb/s is no longer a far off dream for content distribution system engineers and has become a slow-but-steadily emerging contribution reality that meets the capacity needs of today’s bandwidth-hungry media industry.
To date, the explanations of gamma that are seen mostly restrict themselves to the voltage or brightness domain and very little has been published about the effects of gamma in the frequency domain. This is a great pity, because analysis in the frequency domain produces interesting results.
It is unwise to pretend that gamma corrected signals can successfully be multiplied, added and subtracted in a matrix as if they represented linear light. Yet in television it is done all the time.
Now the CRT is history, we have to justify the retention of gamma on its performance as a perceptual compression codec. That requires its effect on human vision to be considered.
In the wake of the pandemic, Telestream has used the restrictions imposed on virtually every equipment supplier over the past few months to innovate and focus on providing new features for its products that facilitate remote operation and automated quality control for enterprise-scale broadcast and media operations.