Larry-Jordan06082017

Two challenges needed to be overcome. The distance between the cameras at the top and bottom of the hill was more than 4000’ and the temperatures were expected to be in the 20’s. To complicate matters, both the top and bottom of the hill cameras needed to be manned constantly for the entire eight hours each day for three days. No breaks.

First we set out to solve the distance problem between the upper mountain camera and the base. There was no existing cabling to carry a video signal. Not surprising. There are three ways to do this wirelessly. Only one works in this case. For closer distances or where there is a common Wi-Fi infrastructure, you can use the wifi infrastructure to span these distances. This did not exist on this mountain. Even if it had the latency between the remote HD camera and the switcher would likely have been enough to cause sync and timing issues, but as I said wifi was out.

The other two ways involve radios. Line of Sight radios to be exact. One type uses unregulated frequencies and is usually good up to ¼ mile without too much interference from other unregulated devices, but you never know when that might change causing a disruption in your signal. The other way to solve this is with radios in the regulated frequencies. The gear exists to span 4000’ or more and you can rent it, but that is not all you have to do. Because these radios use frequencies regulated by the FCC you have to get permission to use them for each event.

Do not fear. This is not a complicated process. The folks who rent this type of gear know who to call. It is usually someone who works full time at a TV station in your area. Very often they will want to rent you an engineer to go with the gear. In our case the engineer did not want to hang out in the cold with us. The setup and alignment for this gear is pretty straight forward you do need electricity at both ends which we had. The gear tolerates the cold well, but here is where the next challenge, cameras, comes into play.

Video cameras don’t like cold. If you read that section in the back of just about any good ENG video camera manual it will state the operating temperature for the camera. None we ever saw goes below freezing, 0 degrees centigrade. We knew this was going to be a problem for the gear, but then we remembered a little trick we learned from taking pictures of the stars on cold winter mornings.

There are two issues with the cold operation of any cameras, one is acclimation of the glass to the cold humid air without fogging, the second is mechanical operation in below freezing conditions. Both can be solved fairly simply and inexpensively. We tested this on the mountain weeks before we had to broadcast the live event. We already had weatherproof covers for our video cameras for rain. They fit snuggly and allow unimpeded operation of the camera on a tripod. The other thing we did was go to Walmart and purchase these break/shake hand warmer packs for about $0.75 a dozen. Put a couple of these in a sock, break them and wrap them around the lens of the camera and put a few in the bottom of the weatherproof camera bag and it will keep the whole camera warm for up to eight hours.

The actual event was easy by comparison to the technical challenges. Two camera operators up top (remember no breaks in the action). Two camera operators at the bottom and a Technical director to operate the switcher/encoder. The radios used to connect the camera at the top of the hill required no attention once they were set up and running. Voice communications was facilitated by hand held radios. The weather turned out to be clear, calm winds and 24 degrees for the three days. All in all a great success and great fun.

This has changed. It has changed because the elephants in the room, Google, Apple and Adobe had begun to unravel their relationships a few years ago. Flash became, for a while the easiest solution to implement for many content producers who simply wanted to stream their content without worrying about their particular CDN. Almost all CDN’s supported Flash and almost all desktop computers ran the free Flash player which supported a variety of desktop applications. It was a fairly easy transition for everyone.

The demise of Flash has accelerated recently as a streaming delivery solution. Google is not updating their Chrome browser to support Flash natively anymore. Others are soon to follow. Things will begin to break. That plus the increased influence of live streaming on both Google and Facebook and other streaming services is helping to drive this movement away from Flash. The movement is towards something that is both a “standard” as well as supporting virtually every desktop and mobile application with the native browsers on all devices. It is called HTML5.

This may sound like a panacea for content producers and streamers. It may well be in time, but free to use it not in the lexicon for people who wish to stream using a CDN other than the social media channels (FB, Google, etc). Those social media channels own the content you produced because you used their services to broadcast it. With few exceptions, producers who wish to control where people go to view a live broadcast and thus better control the surrounding messages are not well served by the social media channels

The social media channels monetize their streaming offerings by ad placement on the same page as the live video window. This might be fine for the casual social networking user, but is inappropriate for corporate and government producers who do not wish to compete with or tolerate ads they do not control, even if the ads do not contain offensive materials.

HTML5 offers content producers a means of delivering content to all devices, but the transition to HTML5 requires some time and decision making based upon your current and future planned usage. While CDNs will continue to offer to stream your content, in many cases you must now pay for the video player that resides on your servers. Two metrics seems to be emerging for payment, one is bandwidth based. How many GB per month will you stream? The other is Hits/Visitors based. How many visitors will you have in a given month? Mind you that this cost is only for the player. The video player vendors track your usage and bill accordingly. The CDN costs are on top of that. The third option is to have the CDN host the player for you. You will pay a bit more for this type of service, but the player which detects what device you are using and sends the appropriate stream is pushed from the CDN servers. Nothing is free anymore.

Important is ….. as far as interchangeable lens camera’s, the only thing Panasonic
has that this competes against is their own Varicam, so they have
lots of elbow room to push the envelope wth this and not have to
encroach on that product line.  SONY does not have that
luxury, so it kinda sorta boxes them in.

As an aside, Im waiting to see what Black Magic does with their pocket camera too.

My gut (for what its worth) is telling me that with HDR closing in, internal 10 bit recording at
4k is a new and significant sweet spot for cameras starting below $2,000.  If
Panasonic can clean up V-log-L and squeeze in one more stop of Dynamic Range
over all and keep the price about where the GH4 was, It might represent the start
of a new wave.  (even in camcorders)

Its time for this to happen, (affordable for the masses internal 10 bit 4k) and the sooner competitors
are driven to go in that direction the better. We will be standing in line next year to try the new GH5 out.

It’s a way to connect video devices to each other via coaxial cables and what’s called BNC (Bayonet Neill–Concelman) connectors to move digital signals from one point to another.  The SDI standard provides for video signals as well as multiple channels of embedded audio on a single core wire using bit serial transmission.

Since its standardization in 1989 updated versions of SDI have emerged to accommodate growing video resolutions and corresponding data rates.

Here is a timeline of the current standards being implemented:

• SD-SDI (SMPTE 259M) ——————1989 Standard TV resolution
• HD-SDI (SMPTE 292M) ——————1998 HD resolution both 720p and 1080i
• Dual Link HD-SDI (SMPTE 259M) —2002 HD resolution 1080p
• 3G-SDI (SMPTE 424M) —————–2014 HD resolution 1080p (higher data rates)
• 6G UHD-SDI (SMPTE ST-2081) —–2014 4K   30p resolution
• 12G UHD-SDI (SMPTE ST-2082) —2014 4k    60p resolution
•  24G-UHD-SDI (SMPTE ST-2083) —2015 4k 120p resolution

So we have a progression from standard definition video, to ultra-high definition video all using the same connectivity standard of BNC.

The common coaxial cable versions run anywhere in length up to under 300 meters (over 900 feet).  Fiber optic cable versions used with the 297M standard as an example, can have cable runs only limited by cable length, or the use of fiber optic cable repeaters.

There is a great deal of technical information about the standard that involves resolution and color bit depth and more. Images either uncompressed or compressed.  All that data gets parsed by engineers into packets of digital information and depending on how much data needs to be transmitted, is what dictated the development of a standard to accommodate that.

Cameras using SDI are connected to recorders and or switches that have SDI built-in.  Whether you’re in a small conference room with a single camera on one end of the room and a recorder/switcher on the other end, or you’re in a giant football stadium with many cameras running a live signal to a control room or mobile truck the same SDI standard is implemented to make the happen.

The many other parts used outside of just the cables and connectors are what your video professional is trained and experienced to manage for you.  It can be simple or very complicated depending on the requirements of each job.  SDI is simply the standard that connects all the pieces needed to make it all work.

There are other standards like Video over IP (NDI) that are waiting in the wings that have been proposed.  It’s already been rolled out in limited situations.  The new standard is supposed to overcome limitations of SDI and accommodate more flexibility in the workflow.  In theory it’s all good but the ability to implement new technology to accommodate all that’s required to do the many jobs there are to do will make it a slow going process.  One of the main things to consider is that a video professional is not just an entity unto himself, he/she/they will on occasion work with clients who themselves have video elements that must be interfaced with.

One of the main limiting factors that can slow the adoption of new standards is that broadcasters and people who create content at the highest levels of the business in places like NY and LA is budgets.  Not just in major media markets but in smaller markets as well.  As a professional video organization the idea of re-wiring your whole set-up in the face of shrinking budgets is a non-starter, technical arguments not withstanding.  In the meantime SDI works very well.  That’s the good news of a standard that’s been tried and tested and improved over time.

Our eyes see much more detail and a much broader scale of gray and contrast then our camera technology has been able to bring to market till now. The ability of our modern technology to acquire and store visual data at the highest quality given a certain size sensor is only limited by the technology itself.

We judge camera image quality with our eyes. How our eyes first collect the image, then how the information is processed in parallel to various visual centers of our brain is how we see, how we visually judge our camera technology.

The retina of the eye is really several layers of brain tissue and is the human equivalent of the digital camera sensor. In addition to collecting, then sending data, the retina acts to spatially encode (compress) data to the optic nerve. This is because there are around 100 times more photoreceptor cells then there are at the layer just below it called, the ganglion cell layer. What’s amazing to our technical standards is that the size of a human retina is only about 22MM+ in diameter In camera terms that’s a camera sensor with a 22mm image circle. That would be much smaller then a full frame sensor with an image circle of around 41mm. Granted the field of photoreceptors of the eye is not limited to a rectangle area within that sphere. Still however the eye has around 120+ million photoreceptors involved in acquisition. The equivelant to a 120+ mega pixel camera sensor acquiring, then processing, then sending and writing image data to storage. The way the eye allocates that job is, 120 million receptors getting light sensitivity information and around 7 million receptors for light frequency. In camera lingo that would be similar to,120 million pixels allocated to collect luminance information and 7 million to collect color information.

So imagine if you will, a camera sensor designed to leverage 120 million pixels for acquiring high detail and contrast, including low light and shadows and 7 million for sampling just the color information, then being able to merge the two across the whole spectrum and all in the space of an image circle for a micro 4/3’s camera sensor.

The hard part for camera technology to emulate is the adaptive part of vision. The human eye has a static contrast ratio of around 100:1 but because of the very sophisticated way in which the human visual system adapts to changing light conditions we effectively have a dynamic contrast ratio of closer to 1,000,000:1. That’s the human miracle of sight. That’s the goal post our camera technologies are always chasing after.

So one might argue that it’s not the size of the sensor or the size of the pixels that limits the quality of the image at all. Instead it would be the amount of pixels, how those pixels are assigned to collect data, how the processor deals with all that information and lastly how that information is compressed and stored and at what speed. Historically, our cameras have generally leveraged surface area to convey the amount of light sensitivity and image depth through the channel. But that might only be only a limitation of our technologies for now.

Think about it, If you took the weight and mass of the eyes then the human brain and subtracted everything in the brain not needed for sight, you would end up with something pretty small and lite including a pretty decent fixed lens.

What are the latest features in Webcasting Technology? What Kind of Interaction and Screen displays are possible?

Webcasting, unlike video conferencing is more like watching television than conducting interactive events with scores of participants. However interactive webcasting (as apart from video conferencing) is available and has been implemented in various ways for many state agencies.

There are three ways to make a webcast interactive with remote viewers, but before we describe these three ways we should point out the major difference between webcasting and video conferencing. Video conferencing is interactive up to about eight remotely and diversely  located video presenters. If you get beyond that number, video quality for video conferencing deteriorates rapidly, cost go up rapidly and control of the audience audio begins to become inordinately complex. Webcasting on the other hand provides much greater control of larger audiences and for interaction.

The greatest impediment to real-time interaction with remote viewers on a video webcast is the 20-40 second delay between what is happening in the room that the broadcast originates from and the remote viewer. You cannot support a live call-in type of interaction with webcasting if the caller needs to rely upon interaction with what is on their remote computer screen. However, many state agencies look at this as an advantage. Here are the three ways to engage remote viewers and the benefits that accrue to the folks originating the webcast.

1. Off-camera telephone call.
2. Off-camera emails sent to a “throwaway” email address.
3. Scrolling messages on the bottom of the webcast screen to provide the phone number to call or the email address to send questions (also included in meeting notices).

Think about radio call in shows…what do they all have in common? Call screeners. For interactive webcasts all calls and all emails during, before or after a broadcast come to a dedicated off camera person who screens the calls, orders them, eliminates duplicates and presents those questions to an on-air panel for their consideration and response during the broadcast. The call screener has great latitude to determine what is appropriate and should be presented to the panel for comment. For those questions that are not answered during the broadcast for whatever reason (time, appropriateness, etc.) the panel, at the end of the broadcast tells the viewing audience that if their particular question was not answered during the live broadcast, then it will be answered when time permits after the broadcast. This type of control for open audience interaction is huge for the presenters and is generally not achievable for video conferences because the video conference is more like a party line where anyone can say anything at any time. That is not best practices and certainly complicates control of the proceedings.

Screen displays for webcasting can be significantly larger than the proprietary screen sizes or video resolutions that come with canned video conferencing solutions. There are, to be sure, fixed base video conferencing systems that support full HD, but they are not portable and still come with all of the bandwidth limitations of video conferencing. Webcasting requires much lower bandwidth at the source than video conferencing at the source since in video conferencing you must be able to see and be seen at all points connected to the broadcast, whereas like television as we mentioned before, is one way delivery of video and multimedia content. One other major difference between video conferencing and webcasting is that webcasting has no practical limits on participants, whereas videoconferencing is licensed by the seat by various providers. One State agency we know of has run up against the participant limits (seat licenses) of their video conferencing license and denied participants (in several cases State Execs) from joining an online event. I would not want to be the meeting facilitator for that one. Videoconferencing has this problem. Webcasting does not have this problem. For video conferencing the only way to solve this is intractable problem is to purchase the largest license (seats) affordable even if it will only be used rarely. Again, webcasting does not have this problem or limitation.

Are there other technologies available to provide interactive information sessions to the public? What are the main features?

We pretty well covered live webcasting interaction and how we do it in the above #1 response. What we did not cover was the archive of a live webcasting event. In many cases these live events are (California Specific) Brown Act or Bagley Keene public meetings that must provide an archive of the publicly noticed meeting. Our firm provides interactive archives of the live video as well as all of the interactive content and agendas for all meetings that we webcast. We do all the work and host the archives. Some webcasting providers send you an appliance and tell you to do the work. We do not. In addition we segment the video archives based upon the public meeting agenda. For instance, if there is a meeting with 12 agenda items, the indexed archived and hosted video will be broken up by agenda item by our staff after the broadcast so that people wishing to watch a specific segment (agenda item X) of a public meeting can go to the video of the event by clicking on the agenda item (X) in the archive. A simple example of a webcast video landing page with client branding and the indexed archive (link in lower right corner) can be found here: http://slc.videossc.com/

For our forte’ live streaming, switchers like the NewTek Tricaster and almost all others that we use so much are not a 4k device so its all HD for that now.  What we hope to find out with a test drive in October of the Panasonic AG-DVX20, its newest 4K camera, is to find out is how the Image Stabilizer performs in HD for the streaming we do.  Many of the shots we need are from across a room or auditorium. We want to see less movement when zoomed in and we want to see less interference from people walking near the camera (particularly the press gorillas).  If the IS is (like a lot of new camcorders now) much better ………. then combined with a heavier lens, it might be what we need in that regard.  And we have 4k for more eye-popping production work.

One of our PDs ……… gave thumbs down on the camera saying it was not updated enough technology wise.  Specifically he was on the whole High Dynamic Range kick saying that was the next thing coming…..soon.  I don’t think he understands what thats really about.  Then again maybe he means something different.

Let me explain.   At the HPA Tech Retreat back in 2013 I think it was, Dolby Labs introduced Dolby Vision.  It’s about re-producing greater color depth combined with MUCH brighter images and more dynamic range.  The key is “re-producing” images at the viewer level.  You may have seen what images looked like in a TV station control room vs what they were like once you got home.   Because broadcast monitors were capable of much brighter and sharper and more color accurate images what you saw in the control room was not what you got when you got home.

Dolby has come up with a way to (using a carrier signal) infuse way more color and brightness information into a TV designed to decode that signal at the viewer end.

There are TVs about to hit the market that can do this but they are very pricey and the only high dynamic range content that I know of now are streaming solutions.  Though SONY wants to play with this as well.

Here is the take away on this and why I’m not sure our PD and I were on the same page.  There are already cameras out there that can shoot video to take advantage of high dynamic range. There have been for a while its just that we have a broadcast medium and older TV standards that cannot “re-produce” it.   RED, Black Magic, Kinefinity, ARRI can all do this.  14-16 stops of dynamic range 12 bit color etc.  $5,000 an up.   The work flow on the back end for post using these rigs is not cheap. Our own Black Magic Cinema camera when shooting RAW can already do some super eye-popping video working in 2.5k resolution that would far out perform what a standard TV could give you.