CLEVELAND—As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of hip hop, there have been a lot of homages done for its musical pioneers. However, some legends were being overlooked. I realized no one was examining the role that Cleveland artists had in the rise of hip hop, and I needed to change that.

With that, “216: Legends of the Land” was born. The four-part docuseries focuses on the people, places and things that helped evolve Cleveland’s hip hop culture from the early ‘80s to the superstardom of Bones Thugs-N-Harmony. It premiered this fall at NerveDJs’ 20th Anniversary & Hip-Hop’s 50th Celebration & Awards Weekend and as a first-time filmmaker, it was a dream to have my project premiere at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Each of the docuseries’ 30-minute episodes focuses on a different part of the culture, and features local legends such as DJ Cochise, DJ Johnny ‘O, M.C. Chill, Cleveland radio station WDMT FM 108, graffiti legends Sano and Mr. Soul, and b-boy Forrest Getemgump. 

Software for Collaboration
For the docuseries, I worked in lockstep with three other editors (as well as serving as the DP, producer and director). Although we originally started editing the project with one software, it quickly became clear that we needed a different setup as we were running into issues with workflow and digital handoffs, stepping on each other’s toes instead of smoothly collaborating. 

We were familiar with Blackmagic Designs’ DaVinci Resolve Studio since we were grading the docuseries with it, as well as shooting select scenes and interviews with a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera 6K. I also had used DaVinci Resolve Studio’s Fairlight audio post-production tools in the past to score movies and I knew what it was capable of, so we decided to dive in.

Since DaVinci Resolve Studio combines editing, color correction, VFX, motion graphics and audio post-production all in one software tool, we knew that not only could we edit the series, we could also effortlessly transition to the next part of post production with a single click and no downtime in between, saving us precious time and energy.

Streamlined Workflows
After transferring the entire project to DaVinci Resolve Studio, it grew legs and wings—each editor was able to seamlessly work on the project without hampering each other’s work. Our workflow was smoothed out and became extremely efficient and we no longer had any lags or crashes throughout the process. With an editing team of four, the ease of digital handoffs was a big benefit.

In addition to video editing, we also used DaVinci Resolve Studio for its robust color management system and ease of use for sound design with Fairlight. The animation and VFX tools it has for green screen work were also incredibly helpful for the series’ narration scenes. On DaVinci Resolve Studio’s Fusion page, the motion graphics tools for keyframing, dynamic zoom tool, cleaning up green spill and more made life so much better and easier. Additionally, the color space transform tools really came in handy since the docuseries was filmed with multiple cameras with different codecs.

Ultimately, the move to DaVinci Resolve Studio smoothed out all the editing issues we were having, and we were able to take advantage of the program’s additional Fusion and Fairlight tools, which was an added bonus. It was very user-friendly and allowed multiple editors to work together seamlessly, so we could deliver the project in time for its premiere at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

More information is available at www.blackmagicdesign.com.

CLEVELAND—Local broadcast TV streaming service Locast is now being offered in the Cleveland market, with the ability to deliver 70 local TV channels to 4 million residents, per Locast. Cleveland also marks the 30th market that Locast is serving.

Locast delivers local TV stations via the internet to phones, tablets, laptops and streaming media devices at no cost to the consumer (though donations are welcomed). This gives consumers who may have opted to cut the cord access to their local news, storm coverage, emergency information, sports and entertainment programming.

In Cleveland, Locast is offering the market’s ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC affiliates, PBS station and more for a total of 70 channels.

The counties covered by Locast in the Cleveland market include Ashland, Ashtabula, Carroll, Cuyahoga, Erie, Geauga, Holmes, Huron, Lake, Lorain, Medina, Portage, Richland, Stark, Summit, Tuscarawas and Wayne.

Locast operates as a non-profit organization, which the company claims puts it under the Copyright Act of 1976 so they do not need a copyright license. This has been a point of contention for broadcasters.

To date, Locast has more than 2.5 million registered users across its 30 markets nationwide. Locast says that its service is available to half of the U.S. population.

For more information, visit www.locast.org.  

CLEVELAND—The latest field testing of ATSC 3.0 from the NAB-CTA-sponsored experimental Next Gen TV station, Tribune’s WJW Fox affiliate in Cleveland, successfully demonstrated the ability of 3.0 to deliver SHVC-encoded LDM base and enhancement layers for mobile and high-quality UHD HDR fixed receivers, respectively.

“The test was an immense success. We assembled a commercial system to show ATSC 3.0’s ability to support enhanced over-the-air services in challenging urban environments,” said Alan Stein, VP of Technology Development and Standards at Technicolor.

Several use cases with a variety of test scenarios were tested in Cleveland, he said. Among them were carrying a 1080p Layer Division Multiplexing (LDM) base layer and an LDM enhancement layer with 4K and Technicolor’s SL-HR1 high dynamic range data; a 540p base layer and 1080p/HDR enhancement layer; and two high-quality SHVC services.

“When we did the HD and the 4K, the core PLP [physical layer pipe] was QPSK [modulated] 7/15ths [bits per symbol] code rate. That was the video base layer and audio,” said Stein. “The enhancement layer was 64 QAM, 9/15ths code rate, and that carried the SHVC enhancement layer data and the SL-HDR1 metadata.”

For that configuration, the core PLP capacity was 4.5Mb/s, while that of the enhancement PLP was 17.5Mb/s, he said.

SHVC, or scalable high efficiency video coding, is a particularly useful technology when combined with LDM because it enables broadcasters to enhance the bits delivered in the core layer to create the highest quality images on fixed receivers while preserving more bandwidth for additional services, such as mobile.

Although not nearly as robust as the core layer, the enhancement layer has a much higher throughput, capable of carrying the heavy data load needed to build the 4K UHD HDR image in a fixed receiver.

The Cleveland test demonstrated that despite being less robust, the enhancement layer—as well as the core layer—could be received downtown at the offices of test participant Osborn Engineering, an environment in which the transmitted signal was subject to reflections off adjacent buildings, which creates multipath interference.

“At the video coding layer, the enhancement layer is about 3x to 4x more bits, when we think about how the video encoder is set up,” said Stein. “But that is mitigated by having less physical layer robustness. The FEC [forward error correction] coding and using QPSK versus using QAM at the physical layer, the overhead is actually quite less.”

To test the ability of 3.0 to handle two high-quality signals, the test organizers worked from the assumption that a Next Gen TV signal in a 6MHz channel can carry 20Mb/s to 25Mb/s. With that in mind, PLP configurations were set to stay around 10Mb/s of total capacity. “The idea was we could have two services each taking 10Mb/s of capacity and have a multicast of two high-quality services,” he said.

That required the video bit rate to be reduced. For the core layer, it was reduced to 1Mb/s and the enhancement layer was set to 4Mb/s, “where the physical layer parameters gave us an aggregate of 10Mb/s capacity,” he explained.

Rather demanding test footage of a Washington Capitals hockey practice supplied by NAB was used. The footage was “fairly challenging” because of the ice, the ice spray from players stopping short, the players’ bright, saturated red and blue practice jerseys and the fast edits in the piece, he said.

“Subjectively, the quality delivered was acceptable, even at those very challenging bit rates and even with a first-generation SHVC card,” said Stein.

To make the test happen, organizers assembled a team of 3.0 vendors and experts, including: Technicolor, which encoded content with its SL-HDR1; ETRI, the South Korean-government funded research institute, which supplied LDM technology and a professional 3.0 receiver; Kai Media, which provided a professional HEVC and SHVC and SL-HDR1 decoder; and LG, which supplied a consumer OLED 4K/UHD/HDR TV. Technicolor also provided its Intelligent Tone Management (ITM) technology to convert source content from SDR to HDR using equipment provided by Cobalt Digital.

The Cleveland test isn’t the first for Technicolor, Stein said. A few years ago, it worked with Sinclair Broadcast Group to test mobile reception of a 3.0 signal transmitted from a Sinclair experimental station on board a train from Baltimore to Washington, D.C.

However, a lot has happened since then. “We are really happy to see this [3.0] commercialized,” said Stein.

Kelly Williams, senior director of Engineering and Technology Policy at NAB, is pleased with the testing for another reason. “The ability to deliver multiple broadcasts of enhanced video—in this case content encoded with Technicolor SL-HDR1—on a single channel will help to transform the economics of the broadcast industry, and meet the high expectations that consumers have today,” he said.

For a comprehensive source of TV Technology’s ATSC 3.0 coverage, see ourATSC3 silo.

CLEVELAND—A TeamCast Vortex II exciter with new software supporting advanced ATSC 3.0 configuration profiles has been integrated into a Hitachi Kokusai Electric Comark TV transmitter at Tribune Media’s WJW for the next-gen TV testing station being conducted by NAB and the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), the company announced today.

The FCC has extended the experimental broadcast license under which WJW conducted two phases of testing—one focused on ATSC 3.0 performance in the VHF band and the second on UHF performance. The next testing round made possible by the extension will see the implementation of a completed, advanced real-world head-end system and tests of advanced next-gen TV configuration profiles and modes, including Multiple Physical Lay Pipers (Multi-PLP), Multiple Sub-Frames (time division multiplexing) and Layered Division Multiplexing (LDM), TeamCast said in a press release.

“With the recent announcement of the release of the ATSC 3.0 suite of standards at CES 2018, ATSC 3.0 is now real, and these field tests we are sponsoring with the Consumer Technology Association aim to demonstrate that ATSC 3.0 meets broadcasters’ expectations as being the most advanced service platform,” said NAB SVP Technology Lynn Claudy in the release.

Use of the TeamCast exciter, which is the second generation of the company’s DualCast ATSC 1.0/3.0 rack exciter, is “critical to successfully evaluating the capabilities” of the technology needed to support the next-gen broadcast standard, he added.

For a comprehensive list of TV Technology’s ATSC 3.0 coverage, see our ATSC3 silo.

WASHINGTON—Sinclair isn't the only one looking to leverage Tribune spectrum to boost next gen TV.

The National Association of Broadcasters has been granted an experimental license to use spectrum from Tribune's Fox affiliate WJW Cleveland (ch. 31) to test the ATSC 3.0 next generation broadcast standard. It will team up with the Consumer Technology Association to use the channel as a "living laboratory" to help broadcasters and manufacturers prepare for the rollout of the standard.

“This is the place where broadcasters, professional equipment manufacturers, consumer technology companies and other interested parties can work together and experiment with the innovative new standard," said NAB President Gordon Smith.

“Just as we collaborated to implement a test station as we led the nation’s transition to digital and HDTV, this partnership will help us test and experiment with this flexible new standard across a variety of applications and with fixed and mobile receivers in a real-world environment,” said CTA President Gary Shapiro.

“With this test station, NAB and CTA are putting the new transmission standard through its paces to demonstrate how ATSC 3.0 technologies can deliver meaningful benefits to broadcasters and viewers alike," said Tribune Director of Engineering Operations Bill VanDuynhoven.

The FCC is planning to vote to approve the voluntary ATSC 3.0 transition framework at its Nov. 16 meeting.

The ATSC rollout will be all about sharing, with broadcasters teaming up to put ATSC 3.0 transmissions on one station in a market, and the 1.0 transmissions on another so that viewers can still receive a signal with existing sets--the ATSC 3.0 standard is not backward compatible.

NAB points out that WJW aired the first sports broadcast in ATSC 3.0, the second game of the 2016 World Series.

This article originally appeared on TVT's sister publication B&C. 

See Also

Cleveland ATSC 3.0 Test Station Using Enensys Gear

Comark & TeamCast Support ATSC 3.0 Cleveland Field Test

World Series Gets ATSC 3.0 Broadcast in Cleveland 

Inside the Cleveland Futurecast ATSC 3.0 Transmission Tests

LG, GatesAir, Zenith to Conduct Six-Month OTA ATSC 3.0 Tests 

For a comprehensive list of TV Technology’s ATSC 3.0 coverage, see our ATSC3 silo.