In Broadcast - December 2014 - 62

I N T E R N A T I O N A L

WWW.INBROADCAST.COM | ISSUE 38 - DECEMBER 2014

N E W S

InMEDIA
2014 'The Year Of 4K' Cont.
workﬂows as supported by AJA,
ARRI and others."

Broader View

The question is, as ever, who will
be watching; a question that has
an added impetus following the
failure of the 'build it and they
will come' reasoning that shakily
underpinned stereo 3D.
Mention 4K in almost any context
and somewhere, not long afterwards,
IP tends to crop up. The sense
throughout the industry is not that
4K over satellite or even DTT is
impossible, just very challenging,
and that even though we have seen
test transmissions take place a lot
more work will have to
be done on optimising
the HEVC codec
in particular. But
even IP distribution

Panasonic VaricamHS
up to 240fps

will be a challenge. Streaming 4K
requires a 15.4Mbps connection,
whereas as of October 2014 it
is impossible to find a country
in the Netflix ISP Speed report
which sustains a throughput
of even 4Mbps.
That said, there is widespread,
even bullish, optimism regarding a
mass market rollout of the format.
"A recent study predicts that
around 48 million screens will be
4K by 2018," says Paquet. "This
does not take into account the
already existing 15,000 cinemas
over the world beneﬁting from Sony
4K Digital Cinema projectors. We
can consider 4K to be an
existing market that will
undoubtedly continue to
grow in 2015."
A
quick
industry straw
poll reveals late
2015/2016 to
be the favoured
time for when 4K
will really kick off,
with the Olympic
movement
and Rio 2016
presumably

4K sport coverage of the FIFA World Cup

functioning as the driver.
"Broadcast is challenged by 4K
distribution but I am not sure you
can ever pause customer demand,"
says Simon Westland, Sales Director
at Blackmagic Design EMEA. "It's
up to everyone to respond to this
demand. Many of the UltraHD
products that we've delivered over
the past 18 months are priced at
less than their HD predecessor, so
technology is not a barrier."
Also, by the time we get to the
Olympics the dust should have
settled over the debate instigated
by the EBU in its TR 028 policy

statement over whether the industry
as a whole should be pursuing UHD
Phase 1 or whether it would be best
to wait for Phase 2. Not only did the
organisation state that by focusing
on increased resolution alone the
industry is missing an important
opportunity, but it went as far as
saying that 4K will be of "limited
success" in broadcasting.
"The EBU has a valid point. It's not
all about the resolution race, but
they might need to shout louder
before it's too late!" concludes Liam
Laminman, Managing Director at
Trickbox TV.

62

Meeting The Challenge Of 4K Acquisition And Workflows
By David Colantuoni
Senior Director,
Product Management, Avid

T

televisions breaking the $2,000
barrier, the value of 4K masters will
only increase.
However, professionals struggle
to manage the huge ﬁles and data
rates of 4K without spending a
fortune on infrastructure. To tackle
these challenges, at IBC2014 Avid
introduced an update for Media
Composer | Software that allows
video professionals to acquire,
manage, edit, and deliver 4K
media faster and more efﬁciently
than ever, leveraging their existing
infrastructure.

HD and 4K may be less visible
oday's video professionals are
than the difference between SD
faced with a challenging media
landscape of new formats, fewer
and HD. However, with its higher
resources, and tighter budgets.
frame rates, wider colour gamut,
File-based workflows are
and increased dynamic range, 4K
increasing project complexity,
represents a substantial next step in
huge high-resolution files are
the evolution of digital media.
choking infrastructure, and the high
Even if today's
number of disparate media formats
deliverable is still
is slowing down productivity.
HD, working in
Also, as talent becomes more
4K can produce
expensive in major media hubs, and
a higher-quality
tax breaks are luring production
result. Perhaps
to different locations, demand
more importantly,
is growing for flexible, remote
productions
collaboration. And commoditised
working in 4K are
creative tools are lowering the
effectively "future
barrier to entry for lower cost
p ro o f i n g " t h e
service providers, crowding the
investment and
market and reducing margins in
extending the
traditional post-production services.
m e d i a 's s h e l f
All of these factors lead us to where
life. With 4K
we are today, in a world where the
volume of content creation has
dramatically increased, and so too
have resolution specifications.
I'm constantly being asked if 4K
is here to stay. It's true that the
difference in resolution between Avid Media Composer: 'resolution independence'

The solution centres on Avid
Resolution Independence, coupled
with native media support and
DNxHR encoding: seamless endto-end workﬂows, fast and efﬁcient,
delivering 4K beauty without
the bandwidth.
Media Composer offers the most
complete and ﬂexible end-to-end
workﬂow for ﬁle-based editing of
any resolution, helping content
creators deliver higher quality
content in more collaborative,
powerful, and efficient ways.
As Resolution Independence
expands to the MediaCentral
Platform and Media
Composer | Cloud,
professionals will gain
increasing value from Avid
Everywhere, our vision for the
future of the media industry.
With Avid Resolution
Independence and DNxHR
encoding, 4K material and
beyond can be edited and
mastered directly from
Media Composer.
This
means
video
professionals can reduce
time-consuming, non-billable
transcoding tasks, spend more
time on creative storytelling,
and deliver projects on time
and on budget, while futureprooﬁng for the next resolution
revolution.

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