Production Technology Seminar 2009 - EBU Technical

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WDR decided to use ARRI D-21, which offers maximum picture quality, no disadvantages in comparison
to film, and a quality comparable to 35mm film. The cost saving induced by the absence of the
processing of negative film allows the higher cost of the digital camera equipment rental.
Workflows
In the workflow with the camera D-21 directly connected to the HDCAM SR recording unit [14], the video
is first down-converted to XDCAM SD for off-line editing. One can use the recorder internal look-up table,
to transfer basic colour-corrected material to the postproduction suite. Audio is transferred on hard disc
drives to postproduction.
In the workflow with the Venom Flashpack (unfortunately 4:2:2 only, not 4:4:4) attached to the camera
[15], the material data are transferred on the set to avoid to have too many Flashpacks.
The postproduction workflow [16] consists of the final on-line video editing with Quantel eQ and of the
audio editing on Avid Media Composer.
1.5 New studio codec tests & concatenation issues
Massimo Visca, Centro Centro di Produzione TV di Torino, RAI, Italy
The new P/HDTV group (successor of the PMC project P/HDTP, which conducted the initial studies on
HDTV in the production environments) has defined the following tasks:
1 Share the experience between EBU Members (lead by EBU).
2 Investigate studio compression codecs (lead by IRT).
3 Analyse the performances of the lenses for HDTV cameras (lead by NRK).
4 HDTV cameras and camcorders (lead by BBC).
Concerning the HD production codecs, the final goal is to provide guidance and neutral information to
EBU members, to help them to take their own decisions. The preliminary tasks were to:
� define a test plan 10 [8] of stand alone chains (cascading of the same encoders [12]) and production
chains (cascading of the same encoders [24]+[25]);
� define the corresponding test conditions [13] + [26] and select reference displays [14].
Concerning the requirements for HDTV codecs, it was noted that it is necessary to test them to the 7th
generation, with a quality headroom mandatory in any case, because large display acts as magnifier of
artefacts and archives must be usage future-proof.
Picture quality is only one of the parameters to be considered in the comparison of different solutions on
the market. Other key parameters are: storage requirements, network requirements, physical media
bearer, error resilience, quality and cost related to use.
The activity started 2 years ago [10] with the test of legacy algorithms (HDCAM, HDCAM SR,
DVCPRO HD, XDCAM HD) and of 4 new algorithms (Sony XDCAM HD 422, Panasonic AVC-I, Avid
DNxHD, Thomson GV JPEG2000) 11 .
In November 2008 the expert viewing of the Apple ProRes422 codec was performed. The results for
standalone chains of this codec are presented in the table hereafter.
10 EBU BPN 076-079 Supplement, December 2007 – New HDTV Studio and Acquisition Compression System Analysis
11 Cf. Production Technology seminar 2008 report - § 2.4
© EBU 2009 / Production Technology seminar / January 27 - 29, 2009
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