OTTAWA—China Media Group selected the Ross Video Voyager platform to help with its production of Chineses broadcaster CCTV’s New Year’s Eve broadcast, which featured Extended Reality (xR) features.

Per CMG, this was the first use of xR on Chinese TV. The set was comprised of a large LED display wall with an LED floor in front, which enabled graphics to be rendered and displayed behind and below talent and guests. Augmented reality components were also incorporated, with camera tracking used to make sure graphics moved naturally with camera pans and tilts.

To assist with these production elements, CMG chose to use the Voyager graphics rendering system from Ross.

“We couldn’t be happier with the results,” said Mr. Feng, technical engineer with CMG. “This was one of the most technically challenging shows I’ve ever worked on, but everyone was amazed at the final visuals which were absolutely stunning. XR isn’t just an alternative to a green screen—it’s a revolution that offers so much more creativity and immersion, and it’s being driven by developments in real-time rendering like the Voyager solution from Ross. We’ve already started planning the Spring Gala Festival show for CCTV—the world’s most widely viewed TV program—and we’re hoping to bring even more amazing images to our audiences thanks to our great partnership with Ross.”    

For more information, visit www.rossvideo.com.  

OSLO, Norway—In what it is saying is the first large-scale application of TICO video compression, virtualized media production systems provider Nevion shared that its software-defined Virtuoso media node was one of the tools used by China’s Media Group (CMG) during its live broadcast of the 70th anniversary celebration for the People’s Republic of China.

For the event, CMG had more than 120 Virtuoso units to broadcast the live 4K footage across China Central Television’s TV stations and websites, as well as 4K movie theaters.

The Virtuoso has a TICO media function that enables encoding and decoding of UHD/4K video for transport over 10GE/IP or 3G-SDI links with a 4:1 compression ratio and latency of a few milliseconds. The Nevion platforms help to ensure TICO encoding and decoding of all 4K/UHD signals from the OB vans, on-site cameras and microwave links in and around Tiananmen Square. Compress signals were transported between two master control rooms, four 4K studios and CCTV’s 4K playout system at different site as 3G-SDI TICO streams over Nevion’s fiber transmitters and receivers.

In addition, 4K PGM signals were encoded by Virtuoso using lightweight TICO compression technology and sent back to LED screens in Tiananmen Square.

The production required three encoding-decoding cycles for each 4K/UHD signal.