JOHNSTON, IOWA—I have been doing some research recently on unmanned aerial vehicles (drones) both for the Iowa Public Television production department and for use in engineering to do tower inspections. There is no doubt about it, drones can provide some amazing footage for a production. I happen to think they could also provide some value to IPTV in doing inspections of our towers.

Obviously it wouldn’t replace having a skilled and certified crew climbing the tower and making a true physical inspection but a stable drone with a high definition or even a UHD camera could provide a recording that could be used to look for obvious problems such as bent cross members and damaged antenna elements. It might even provide the tower crew with a look at what they will need to fix prior to climbing the tower.

Please note that I did specify that the drone needed to be a stable platform, especially if the recorded images are going to include surface details for evaluating the condition of an antenna or tower. This will entail a drone with enough mass to minimize being buffeted around by the wind and a skillful operator that can maneuver the UAV in close enough proximity to the tower to make the footage useful.

An image from Prairie Aerial's video of technician changing beacon bulbs on tower.

My inspiration for this idea was this video by Prairie Aerial from a year ago of a technician changing the beacon bulbs on a 1500 foot tower. If you watch the video you can see how stable and detailed the image is. My colleague Deborah McAdams interviewed Prairie Aerial’s principal and photographer Todd Thorin about this video earlier this year. The unit he used was modified to operate at the higher altitude and included a real time downlink from the camera that allows for live ground observation and adjustments.

I cannot over emphasize the importance of operator skills. At this year’s IBC, there was a new featured area called the Drone Zone that allowed attendees to observe and take a hand at flying a drone. I stopped by on a number of occasions to watch and was dismayed to see the number of crashes and damaged done to drones by operators not being familiar or comfortable with their operation. It is obviously not as easy as it looks.

But before you rush out and buy a drone and start using it to spice up productions or take a close look at your transmitting antenna, you need to consider what the Federal Aviation Administration has to say about UAVs and their operation. The first thing to consider is that while anyone can purchase and operate a drone for hobby or recreational purposes, as soon as you start using the drone for production, news gathering, or in the case I have described, tower inspections, it is no longer being operated in accordance with the rules for model aircraft operations. The FAA would classify these as commercial operations and their position on this is that all commercial operations are illegal unless specifically authorized. So while it may be tempting to take your drone out and get some great B-roll for a story or a program, don’t be surprised if you get a call from the FAA telling you to cease and desist. That is essentially what happened to Mr. Thorin when folks at the FAA got to see his video via YouTube.

Now all is not lost as the FAA is developing rules for commercial operations of drones. Until those rules are implemented they do have a procedure for gaining an exemption to the rules that apply to unmanned aircraft. You would need to file a petition for exemption under section 333 of the FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012. Instructions for what information needs to be included in the petition and the process can be found on the FAA’s website.

While the procedure is not particularly onerous, be aware that a granted exemption has limitations. For example, the UAV must weigh less than 55 pounds. This probably isn’t much of a concern but it is something to be aware of. Also, daylight only operations tied to local sunrise and sunset, so if you are planning to capture images of the city lights at nights, that would not be advisable.

The UAV’s maximum altitude is 500 feet. This was one of the primary reasons that Mr. Thorin was told to cease operations because his drone was over 1500 feet in the air for some of the shots. I have yet to have a conversation with the FAA about this limitation and any potential for higher operational ceilings for my tower inspection scenarios.

One limitation is the requirement for visual line-of-sight operation. The FAA’s proposes that the UAV must remain with the VLOS of the operator or visual observer. That got me thinking that if we had people over a wide area that were all in direct contact with the operator, we could greatly increase the operational area. Unfortunately, they also specify that the UAV also has to remain close enough for the operator to be able to see the drone without any special devices.

The final limitation that I will mention is that the UAV may not operate over any persons not directly involved in the operation. So again, if you are planning on a dramatic overhead crowd shot at an event, you are probably going to be in violation of the exemption.

Another thing to keep in mind is that in addition to the FAA, about half the states have passed legislation or resolutions to study and/or restrict UAV operations. Most of these have to do more with privacy but they are also focused on property damage and liability.

As I said at the beginning, this is a research project that I have just started on. At this point in time the rules are fluid and it is unclear what the final parameters and restrictions will be. As I get answers to my questions, I will update my readers and maybe I will be able to post a recording of a tower inspection done by a drone in compliance with the FAA.

JOHNSTON, IOWA—Some 40,000 years ago, some primitive peoples painted pictograms of meaningful events on the walls of caves, mostly found in Europe and Asia. Here is a question for those of us who are documenting the stories about the meaningful events of our time. In 40,000 years hence, when we are viewed as the primitive people of the past, what will scholars and historians in those days be able to deduce from the stored 0s and 1s?

At the recent SMPTE conference in Hollywood, my colleagues Merrill Weiss, Brian Campanotti and James Snyder presented a session entitled “Standards for Archives and Production Workflows.” The fundamental talking point within the three presentations was the recently published SMPTE AXF standard and the ongoing work to further expand and refine that standard. And while Merrill’s and Brian’s presentations were interesting, informative and engaging, I really want to focus this article on the presentation that James Snyder from the Library of Congress did, called “Media Archiving, Standards and the Library of Congress.” James’ presentation really highlighted and brought home the challenge of archiving in the digital age.

Iowa Public Television archives its material within a SpectraLogic T-950 robotic LTO-based tape library. Now where to begin? I won’t go into all the specific details that James shared as an introduction to the history and function of the Library of Congress other than to say that it is the world’s largest archive and research institution with over 155 million items and growing. Its audio-visual collection is staggering, with the copyright depository of the motion picture, broadcasting and recorded sound industries. More than 1.4 million moving image recordings and more than 3.5 million audio recordings, both in almost every format known are maintained in its archives. They also have somewhere around 255 million feet of film, paper records and an ever-growing collection of content that has started its life as a digital element. And more stuff is constantly coming in.

Even if the mission was just to digitize everything, it would be a Herculean task, but the collection also has to be usable. So in addition to digitizing this enormous collection using well-documented standards for video and audio, the LoC has to maintain the metadata so that all these items can be used in the present and actively preserved into the future.

The Library of Congress’ sustainability plan for these items is a minimum retention period of 150 years. Now while this is certainly not the 40,000 years that the early pictograms have survived, there is a huge difference. Most notably, the pictograms don’t need to be decoded to be read. As the old adage goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words” and this is especially true when there are no native speakers of the original language. The human brain essentially looks at the pictogram or sequence of pictograms and can deduce with varying levels of correctness what the message is. But in our digital age, the pictures and the sounds become sequences of 0’s and 1’s that must be properly decoded to even be viewed. It presents quite a challenge.

BACK TO THE FUTURE
In high school, some of my friends and I programmed a two-dimensional space war game where we portrayed the universe as a huge x/y matrix and the solar systems were smaller sub-matrices of the larger. The program was written in Basic A and I still have it stored on the original paper tape that is now a little more than 40 years old. Now before you roll your eyes, I have found a USB 3.0 paper tape reader so if I really wanted to pull out the old code, it is quite doable.

My point is that the storage medium is one of the critical elements in archiving, but is not permanent, so for the archive to be useful I have to migrate the archive based on the stability and usability of the storage medium or its usefulness and value is diminished. So any digital archive has to have a migration plan that allows for incremental and fundamental changes in the physical storage medium.

Here at IPTV our archival material is stored within our SpectraLogic T-950 robotic tape library, which is an LTO-based medium. When we first ordered the library as part of a larger project, the unit was sized to eventually accommodate all of our existing historical content based on LTO-1 tapes, with the potential for adding an expansion frame.

The Library of Congress However, due to delays in the original project, by the time our system was delivered, LTO-2 was the current version so the capacity of the library doubled based on the change to the medium. Since the original installation was based on the LTO roadmap and the practice that each new generation is fully compatible with the previous generation and read capable two generations back—we instituted a plan to replace the LTO tape drives and tapes every second generation. We are currently on LTO-6 and planning for LTO-8. This plan allows us to migrate our data in an automated fashion and increase the capacity of the library based on the capacity increases of the medium.

Current LTO-6 capacity is 6.25 TB per tape and generation 8 is estimated somewhere in the 32 TB range. The LTO roadmap currently extends to generation 10 and it is unclear if there will be generations beyond that. History would seem to imply that at some point the technology curve will flatten out for LTO and the cost benefit ratio will make further generations make less economic sense. However my guess is that before that happens, a new technology will lead to a seachange. If you have an interest in long-term archival storage, I would recommend researching DNA digital data storage, which promises exceptionally high capacity and longevity along the lines of 60 million years or more. It is as future-proof as I can conceive, since DNA is the data storage mechanism of living biology.

Notice that I mentioned that the medium is “one of the critical elements.” It is not the only one and ultimately may be the easiest to deal with, as data migration is merely the transfer of bits and bytes from one medium (i.e., paper tape) to another medium (i.e., LTO-10). But what do those bits and bytes mean and how are they to be decoded and reassembled into meaningful, worthwhile and understandable information? I’ll address that in my next column.

Bill Hayes is the director of engineering for Iowa Public Television. He can be reached via TV Technology.

JOHNSTON, IOWA—I’ve spent a considerable amount over the last few years working on projects that examine what television broadcasting will be like in the future. Between my involvement with ATSC 3.0, the NAB Next Generation Broadcast Platform committee, the Future of Broadcast Television and the IEEE Broadcast Technology Society, I have devoted a lot of attention to trying to understand what television will look like in the not too distant future and what role Iowa Public Television will play. The nice thing about committing the time to participating in all of these activities is that it exposes me to a lot of cutting-edge thinking and really broadens my view of the future. I would like to take this column to share a few of my thoughts.

Syncbak is just one of several ways to get a local station’s service to the preferred device of many viewers and allow them to consume content on their own terms. GOING MOBILE
I think we need to rethink the concept of mobile, which many of us continue to consider as an add-on to our traditional broadcast service. And why wouldn’t we? The existing mobile service is just that: an add-on. The problem with thinking about it that way is that the audience doesn’t think about in those terms. Some facts that we are going to have to face is that the opportunity for growth in viewership for television is not in sets sitting in the living room but on tablets and phablets being carried everywhere by everyone. I would encourage you to stop thinking in terms of what portion of your service will be mobile and what portion will be fixed, and just think about it as your service. People will consume content on whatever device is most convenient and meets their needs and they expect the service to work. Almost everyone has a mobile phone and they expect it to work whether they are mobile or sitting still… it is not a mobile service, it is simply “the service.”

Along the same lines, we can tailor content based on the preferred consumption device, but we need to recognize that this is not absolute and that the consumer may use a less than optimal device for consuming the content. This is nothing new to us; color television programs were viewed on black and white televisions and stereo television programs were listened to on monaural sets. We didn’t make different versions of the same program to address the different capabilities of the devices. These receivers collected the entire service and then displayed the content based on the capabilities within the device; we should expect nothing less from the next generation of consumer devices.

HYBRID DELIVERY
But even if our target device is the traditional fixed television receiver we still need to adjust our vision of what television is. In the majority of television sets being sold today, the RF receiver is just one of the many ways of getting services into the device. Smart televisions come with Ethernet connections, Wi-Fi connection and multiple HDMI inputs in addition to the standard RF connector. Over time it will not be surprising to see that the RF connector becomes the least utilized input on the television as even the wired services such as cable and satellite their set top boxes use an HDMI input to the television. Ultimately we may see the over-the-air tuner become an option within a television that very few people purchase.

Within the work being done by the standards development organizations (SDO) and affinity groups working on the next generation of broadcast standards we are looking at “hybrid delivery” of content. The idea of some portion of the total content being synchronously delivered to the primary or secondary devices via a distribution channel other than the over-the-air stream is being developed. We are already seeing handheld devices that can display the content they receive on a smart television on the same network. It doesn’t take a large stretch of the imagination to look at that as eventually being a full duplex connection with both devices working together to enhance the viewing experience.

THE IMPORTANCE OF OTA
Another consideration for local broadcasters is the role that the over-the-air signal plays in the station’s overall delivery strategy. Stations need to adjust their thinking to recognize that their over-the-air service— while important to their identity—is one method of reaching the audience but certainly not the only way.

I have recently been in conversations with Syncbak regarding their service for delivering station content to internet connected devices within the coverage area of the station. This service takes a direct feed from the station using an IP connection of typically 5 to 6 Mbps per stream and—using their technology for determining the location of the Wi-Fi enabled device—deliver the stream to devices that are within the coverage contour of the station. This is another way of getting a local station’s service to the preferred device of many viewers and allowing them to consume content on their own terms.

I don’t take these thoughts lightly. Compared to the national averages, a larger percentage of our viewers rely on our over-the-air service but having said that, I still must acknowledge that the majority of our traditional viewers are watching our service via a delivery method that is not using the over-the-air signal. If we want our audiences to grow, it is not going to be by redesigning our service to be incrementally better at reaching fixed receivers. Our service has to be available to them where they want it and on the devices of their choosing and sometimes that is going to be via our own over-the-air delivery and sometimes it may be through strategic partnerships with outside entities.

My final thought is to encourage my local station colleagues to get involved in the process of creating and vetting the standards. There are a number of groups within organizations like ATSC and FoBTV that would welcome participation and input from knowledgeable people working at local stations. If you are interested in getting involved, contact me and I will be glad to point you in the right direction.

Bill Hayes is the director of engineering for Iowa Public Television. He can be reached via TV Technology.

JOHNSTON, IOWA—In late February, Avid announced its “Final Sale Plan for FastBreak Automation,” the name for the automation system the company acquired when they purchased Sundance Digital in 2006.

Avid’s plan included a list of key dates and events that are important to Iowa Public Television. We purchased our automation under the Sundance banner and made the transition to Avid’s system, and through it all we have been very satisfied. Our long-range plan has been to keep the automation system and the underlying physical infrastructure operational for the next five years.

FROM PUSH TO PULL
One of the fundamental reasons for taking this stance is associated with strategic planning at the PBS network, which is currently evaluating transitioning the station distribution model from a satellite-based “push” technology to a terrestrial fiber, cloud-based “pull” technology. The introduction of a pull architecture and services in the cloud provide for some fundamentally different ideas when it comes to designing station infrastructure.

We plan to continue with our current operational methodologies while the broader network system is developed, deployed and debugged. This will then allow IPTV to deploy systems and services within our local station environment that integrate and mesh with the PBS network systems and services. This is one of the visions of operations that I have had for many years working in both commercial network and public television stations.

Now I could easily get into bashing Avid for its decision to discontinue a product that IPTV, along with many other stations are committed to; that is human nature. However, I took the opportunity to review the Avid plan and noted that the company's road map for the product did include an option for support through the end of 2019, which, for IPTV, actually lined up with our long-range strategy. The announcement generated some discussion among the public television stations on the PBS Connect messaging service, which demonstrated that IPTV wasn’t alone in trying to determine how to address this challenge.

After a couple of exchanges with Avid and with the leadership of the PBS Engineering Technical Advisory Committee (ETAC)—of which I am a member—I was able to coordinate a conference call between the senior folks at Avid and a number of the PBS stations that were concerned with end-of-life plan for the automation system.

MAKES SENSE TO ME
A couple of very positive things came out of the call. For me, one of the best was an understanding of how Avid came to the decision, and, while it is still an inconvenience for my station, I realized it was a sound business decision and one I would have supported if I were a decision-maker within Avid. The market for automation has changed dramatically since the original development of Sundance. Most of the manufacturers in the space have moved away from selling and supporting an automation layer within a broadcast environment to the “channel-in-a-box” solution where all of the infrastructure and control is within a single box or rack.

All of us have been through the experience of doing what we think is a fairly innocuous update to a component within a system only to find that the update somehow ripples through the system and things stop working and we then spend hours tracing down the issues and making corrections and adjustments. The channel-in-a-box concept alleviates a lot of that since the manufacturer of the system handles all of the updates within the box and hopefully deals with any ripples within the confines of their equipment. Last year, IPTV replaced our Omneon video servers with newer Harmonic (formerly Omneon) servers, and we went through some debugging and adjustments to get the new replacements to work within the our station infrastructure. It was not a huge issue for us, just an inconvenience, but if I scale that up to the potentially thousands of variations that are possible, it is easy to see where the challenges of support come from.

DECISIONS, DECISIONS
I was also impressed with the interchange between the other public stations and Avid. The questions and answers indicated that there were some opportunities to be explored, including some potential group purchasing of hardware, primarily the qualified Dell servers and software that are needed by many stations to provide for support through 2019. I was able to coordinate a face-to-face meeting at the PBS Technical Conference in Las Vegas just prior to the NAB Show which was well attended and allowed for more exchanges regarding potential opportunities for stations. Since then, Avid has reached an agreement with a distributor to fulfill the turnkey server orders, including all components and configuration. IPTV is still working with the distributor to determine final pricing for our systems to determine how best to proceed.

Given that IPTV has a hardware infrastructure that can be maintained until 2019 and beyond, we are looking at a couple of options. Theoretically, the easiest thing to do would be to upgrade/update our existing FastBreak system to meet the requirements necessary to maintain support through 2019. But even this has some options, depending on whether or not Avid supplies the replacement hardware, and the difference is considerable. If Avid does a complete turnkey, we are looking at investing about $125,000 in the project. If we independently purchase the hardware, the price drops considerably to about $66,000. Now while this sounds great, it does change the dynamic of the support relationship with Avid since it will not offer hardware support on customer-supplied equipment, only the software. This requires a separate hardware support agreement with the hardware manufacturer, which is certainly doable.

But let me share with you something that happened right after I arrived in Las Vegas for the PBS Technical Conference. One of our Sidon servers failed, but thanks to our service agreement with Avid, a fully configured replacement unit was over-nighted to the station and installed. Using our own supplied hardware, we would have had to have the computer supplier ship us the replacement system and then install any necessary software and configure the system. This certainly can be done from a backup of the failed unit but it still adds downtime.

So to my mind, that idea of a single entity providing the fully configured system has some value and that value will be somewhat south of the difference between the turnkey price and the $66K figure.

Another alternative would be to purchase a new automation layer to implement within our infrastructure. While at NAB, I visited a number of providers, including Pebble Beach, Snell, Imagine Communications, Grass Valley and so on. As I noted above, most of the focus in this space is the channel-in-a-box solution, but all the vendors seem to have the capability for breaking out their automation layer to control external systems since for most, that is the heritage of the system.

The potential downside that I see to this alternative in the near term involve the challenges associated with deploying a new control fabric within the established infrastructure, and making sure that all of the components play well together. Of course the operators also face a learning curve to become proficient in the new system, which is a short-term problem.

Of a more strategic concern is the ongoing support for the automation layer independent of the associated hardware. A channel-in-a-box vendor will test and deploy upgrades that work fine for their all-in-one systems that may create problems for a standalone automation system. Likewise, upgrades or updates to the independent systems being controlled may disrupt the automation layer. In both cases what will support be like for the station using the orphaned system?

This is not to say the idea of upgrading the original system and relying on the manufacturer to continue its support through 2019 is without its concerns. Looking down that road, the path seems clear for the first couple of years, but as these systems age and begin to be replaced either by newer channel-in-a-box systems or even cloud services, will the vendor be able to maintain the staff and infrastructure to meet the needs of a dwindling number of users? This is the conundrum that IPTV and a lot of other stations are facing.

Bill Hayes is the director of engineering for Iowa Public Television. He can be reached via TV Technology.

JOHNSTON, IOWA—The Iowa Public Television production truck went into service in 2008 and since then it has done quite a few live and live to recording events. The vast majority have been concerts or debates and while those events were produced in high quality on a par with any national program, they really haven’t taxed the capabilities of our truck. That changed in early March when IPTV took on the live broadcast of the Iowa State Girls High School Basketball Tournament at the Wells Fargo Arena in Des Moines. This is the first event in a multi-year agreement that includes a variety of other girls high school sports.

Earlier this year, IPTV took on the live broadcast of the Iowa State Girls High School Basketball Tournament at the Wells Fargo Arena in Des Moines, the first event in a multi-year agreement that includes a variety of other girls high school sports. One of the challenges that a local station faces when tackling a project like this is making sure that the event looks as good as it can. Thanks to ESPN and the plethora of regional sports networks that are available, viewers have an expectation on how a sporting event will be covered and how it will look on the air. Basketball is a great example because it’s a popular sport that has been televised for decades so there is a basic formula for how it should be captured which makes it fairly easy to plan for and simultaneously fairly complex to implement.

DYNAMIC AND ANIMATED
Our basic truck configuration includes six Sony 1500 HD cameras with a variety of Canon lenses, a 48-input GVG Kayak switcher, a 64-channel SSL audio console, six-channel EVS system, two-channel ChyronHego Hyper-X graphics system along with an integrated Ku uplink. We augmented the truck to provide some basketball specific enhancements, including a GoPro camera mounted behind the backboard to provide a downward look for shots and action below the rim. We also incorporated an automated scoreboard and clock system that received data from the arena’s scoreboard system which takes some stress off our soon to be replaced ChyronHego graphics system.

For the vast majority of the remote productions we have done, the truck has been great. But in live sports everything seems to take on a more dynamic and animated presence. Graphics no longer fade in and fade out, they are flying on and off the screen coupled with an appropriate audio effect. Utilizing these effects created a challenge. Due to the limited number of channels in our existing EVS system we were required to build and record a number of these effects within the Kayak. Now while the switcher is capable of doing this, the process involved in capturing and subsequently displaying them is somewhat clunky and makes the technical director’s job a little more difficult. While these seem like minor stresses, in the heat of the action they can rapidly add up.

IPTV Technical Director Neal Kyer programming animated graphics into the GVG Kayak Switcher. Consider that the lulls in the action of the game are filled with slow-motion replays from various angles or pertinent prerecorded or live content so from the production standpoint, there really aren’t any lulls at all. When I think about comparing the live production of a concert to that of a basketball game, the former is like taking a leisurely drive on a meandering country road and the latter is like racing on a treacherous mountain road and pushing the limits of the driver and the vehicle. Both have the potential for the unexpected but the pace determines the time to react and the consequences of failure to react in a timely fashion.

COMPETING CONTENT
So while we are able to produce a very high-quality program, we were also able to see where we need to look at improvements and modifications to make the ride a little less hair-raising for the crew. One item we are looking at is our EVS system and whether it can be modified or replaced to allow for external clip and alpha channel playback instead of relying on the internal system within the Kayak. We’ll also be adding at least one or two more GoPros to provide interesting POV cameras as most sporting events have potentially interesting locations that don’t lend themselves to traditional full-sized cameras such as the net on volleyball or the goals on soccer.

Earlier in this column I implied that the quality of the production has to be as high as we can possibly make it. Probably the primary reason for this is that even in the most rural areas, the viewers have access to so many content sources. I first noticed this phenomenon in the old days of NTSC when viewers started asking why my broadcast signal didn’t look as good as the satellite-delivered cable feed. Now the quantity of sources has further increased to include OTT, Blu-ray and a host of other options and simultaneously the home viewing option probably has better performance capabilities than any of sources available. So our content has to compete in that environment and I think we nailed it with our basketball coverage. Visit www.iptv.org/sports and watch our production on one of the games and let me know what you think.

One question that I have been asked and I am sure will be asked again is if it is really worth the time, money and effort to cover events such as high school sports. I often say and truly believe that the value of a local station is the local content it creates and distributes. When I look at something like I have discussed in this article, there is a strategic component that needs to be considered and understood. For a local television station to survive and thrive, there needs to be a symbiotic relationship between the station and community or communities it serves. Creating interesting and compelling local content is one key way of developing and strengthening that relationship.

Bill Hayes is the director of engineering for Iowa Public Television. He can be reached via TV Technology.

JOHNSTON, IOWA—Regular readers of this column know that I have recently been writing about UHDTV and its potential applications in the terrestrial broadcast environment. Regardless of whether we actually broadcast UHD terrestrially or not, the format will have a place in the station environment. For long-tail content, UHD provides a methodology for making content more future-resistant as technology continues to evolve. Additionally, stations such as Iowa Public Television that create content have to begin considering that the terrestrial path will not be the sole delivery method and while one avenue may not support a piece of UHD content, others may.

BACKBONE INFRASTRUCTURE
With that in mind, I began looking at our facility and figuring out how we would deal with UHD content in the production environment.

Utah Scientific’s UDS router The situation is not unlike our conversion to HD. Long before we were able to broadcast in hi-def, IPTV had begun producing content in HD; likewise, I expect that IPTV will begin producing UHD content before we have the facilities to terrestrially broadcast it. However, a key difference is that other delivery mechanisms like OTT have already begun to evolve to handle UHD and the consumer hardware to display it is already being deployed.

It is always great fun to go out and look at the acquisition, production and editing systems. I think because of their direct interface to the users, they are always top of mind. Equally important, although not as sexy, is the backbone infrastructure which is why I started looking at the station’s routing facility. Our existing facility uses a Utah Scientific 400 series router with a primary matrix of 184x240.

I am a big fan of the Utah Scientific products for a number of reasons. First and foremost is that their products just work. Secondly, their customer support is excellent so when we do have the occasional problem the repair is made quickly. Of course there is their 10-year warranty and no maintenance support contracts so ongoing cost of ownership is very low. I am therefore highly motivated to try and stay with them for our UHD evolution if at all possible.

VARIATIONS TO CONSIDER
It turns out there are a few variations that I can consider. Probably the simplest would be to use dual or quad links in and out of the router, which would allow the use of the existing routing fabric with no modification to the router itself, however each UHD signal would tie up two or four crosspoints. While this is an interesting idea and would probably be acceptable for some experimentation or very limited production use, as a long-term solution, it leaves something to be desired. Most stations do not have a large number of vacant inputs and outputs in their core router.

Another potential is the wholesale replacement of the existing router with a system that is UHD-capable. This is pretty much what was done when IPTV converted to HD. The difference I see here is that the conversion to HD was revolutionary in that virtually everything was changing. We were converting from an analog facility to digital and from 4:3 aspect ratio to 16:9. It was an entirely new world!

I see the migration to UHD as a much more evolutionary step. Everything is still going to be digital and 16:9. The big change will be in the amount of data being moved but it will still be data.

So I took a look at the Utah Scientific UDS series of routers. The system is a single link so that each UHD signal transitions through the router on a single path. Now while the UDS is designed as a standalone router, it can be configured as a layer within the architecture of our existing 400 series. Since we’re very happy with the performance of the 400, this provides a way to migrate while maintaining our existing workflow. As I extrapolate along the evolutionary path, I can see a complete transition of our facility to UHD without the disruption and turmoil that would be caused by a wholesale replacement of the existing infrastructure.

That is not to say that there will not be challenges. In its current maximum configuration, the UDS router doesn’t appear to have the total crosspoint capacity we currently need and I expect our needs may grow. I expect larger capacity units are already being planned but the UHD environment is just beginning to develop and based on our experience, Utah Scientific is a company that focuses on helping it customers throughout the entire life of their products.

Bill Hayes it the director of engineering for Iowa Public Television. He can be reached via TV Technology.

JOHNSTON, IOWA—I attended a SMPTE Section meeting in the U.K. recently and got involved in a discussion with several broadcasters regarding our road maps for the future. The discussion focused primarily on the potential for implementing UHD in our studio environment regardless of whether or not we will ever broadcast it terrestrially. We discussed the many aspects of UHD including larger color space, high dynamic range, higher frame rates in addition to the increased resolution. I talked about how at Iowa Public Television, we work in an uncompressed environment when creating shows in our studio and how that has simplified our infrastructure. But as I look forward to implementing UHD, even at a relatively small facility, the laws of physics and the laws of economics seem to be conspiring against the concept of the uncompressed backbone.

In addition, next-generation broadcasting will almost certainly be based on IP packetized data transmission to allow for tighter integration of terrestrial broadcasting within portable, mobile and fixed devices that will be acquiring content from broadband services of all types. That tight integration is not just at the receiver by way, as we have to realize that in the future, the content that we create will not be delivered exclusively by our over-the-air services. Ideally my station must be able to create content in a manner that allows for its seamless distribution over a myriad of different methodologies and systems.

IT BOILS DOWN TO MONEY
This is where it becomes so incredibly challenging to understand and make informed decisions about the networks involved in the acquisition, creation and distribution of content and the interaction between these networks.

The decision for acquisition and creation are pretty straightforward and essentially boil down to how much money you can invest. As I said earlier, we were able to construct an infrastructure at IPTV that can handle uncompressed HD and any lower data rate. We didn’t spend a lot of time worrying about error correction or concealment or capacity. We designed the infrastructure with a tremendous amount of headroom and capacity and were meticulous in how the plant was put together. We put in the time, effort and money on the front end and the dividend is that the signals that travel through the facility are kept pristine.

UHD shown in comparison with other popular digital video formats The transmission aspect is a little trickier in that we needed to compress for ATSC broadcast and do it in such a way that the quality video and audio content was not degraded. Obviously that is an impossible task since any form of lossless compression would not provide the reduction necessary to squeeze a 1.5 Gbps video stream and its associated 5.1 channel audio stream into the data bandwidth available in a 6 MHz broadcast channel. Couple that with the fact that my station has an HD stream, two SD streams, an audio-only stream and some datacasting applications and obviously some compromises are required.

Add to that the fact that unlike our internal networks where we have complete control over the environment, once the signal leaves the antenna, we have no control over the delivery network and the challenges grow. Pile on to this the idea that in addition to the terrestrial delivery network that we currently rely on, we will also be relying on wired and wireless networks over which we have even less control and the audience that is using these service is the one that is growing. It becomes pretty mind numbing to try and figure out how to ensure that every viewer accessing the content is getting the best quality possible.

MAINTAINING RELIABILITY
In the professional space we manage the quality and reliability of our networks through service level agreements that specify the characteristics of the service and any guarantees that may be associated with the service. SLA’s can be a real challenge for those of us who have been in the business a long time as the terminology and metrics used are typically related to data packets, so the metrics are about the packets. Our interest is about the content and ultimately that is about the information within all of the packets and trying to decide what is an acceptable packet loss or jitter parameter is difficult.

A modern compression codec utilizes both spatial and temporal compression algorithms to create a stream. That stream is then packetized for transmission, but because of the nature of the compression engines used, the value of the data within each packet may vary from unit to unit so the impact of packet loss will vary depending on which packets are lost as well as the quantity.

In an extreme example, if all of the packets that are lost are null packets, the impact to the content is negligible, but if a few packets that are lost contain the data necessary to recreate the video or audio service, the impact is enormous. I am obviously overstating the case to make the point that it is very difficult to use data metrics as a way of measuring the quality of delivered content.

The reason this is so important is that we are seeing this technology move into the professional space and we need to educate ourselves, the manufacturers and the service providers regarding what we need and why. If I create an IP network within my facility, I will again have complete control over the network and will design it with the capacity and overhead necessary to ensure reliability. If I have to link that network to others outside of my control to allow the utilization of cloud services then I had better fully understand the capabilities and limitations of the services being offered to insure the quality of not only the packets on the network but the content included in them.

Bill Hayes is the director of engineering for Iowa Public Television. He can be reached via TV Technology.

Radio538 (RTV) Group, the largest commercial media group in the Netherlands, has developed a new radio and television broadcast facility around a Blackmagic Design infrastructure, including the Universal Videohub and ATEM Production Switchers.

JOHNSTON, IOWA —Every now and then, the stars align and a plan comes together and for me, this article is one of those moments. Over the last few months I have been researching production switchers. Not that Iowa Public Television is looking to replace our Grass Valley Kalypso HD switcher in the near term, but I am looking into the future and what role ultra high definition will play in our operation. IPTV began shooting and editing in high definition in 1998 and we built our entire facility as a 1080i HD plant. However, even as we were building the infrastructure we were talking about 1080p as a potential step in our digital evolution. I don’t think any of us really envisioned how quickly the technology would change, but now with 4k displays already showing up in viewers’ living rooms and ATSC 3.0, the step from 1080i to 1080p may be incrementally too small to be worthwhile.

Since the research on this is essentially just that, I decided to check the offerings from Blackmagic Design. A couple of years ago I stopped by their booth at the NAB Show where they introduced their 4k production camera at an extraordinarily low price and was surprised at the quality. I thought at that time that this would be an affordable way to experiment with 4k production.

PRICE AND PORTABILITY
I recently started seeing advertisements for their ATEM Production Studio 4k switcher and like their camera, the price for the unit is surprisingly low. According to their website, the top of the line model is $2,495 and is self-contained in that it includes a 1 M/E 10 input switcher, DVE, graphics and keying and a multiview monitor driver. Literally you can put this in a small travel case to take to a live remote with relative ease. The price doesn’t include the control panel that we are used to so control is either by the button matrix on the front panel of the switcher frame or via software on an attached PC. I know the PC control may sound clunky but I harken back to an article I did a while back regarding touchscreen control and I would expect that the software package running on a touchscreen device would provide a much better interface than trying to use a mouse or touch pad. Of course you can order more traditional control panels for the ATEM frame.

Now before anyone runs out and buys a system, remember I started this article out mentioning stars aligning. As part of my research, I attended the SMPTE 2013 Symposium on Next Generation Imaging Formats in Hollywood last month, where most of the program was focused on UHD and there was a lot to learn. Starting with nomenclature, you may have noticed that I have used the term 4k in lower case. That is because the capital K that is so popular is actually either the symbol for potassium or specifying that a temperature is in degrees Kelvin so 4K is -452.47°F and that is cold even by Iowa standards. Furthermore, 4k is the Digital Cinema Format which is 4,096 x 2,160 pixels and UHD-1, the format we are most interested in is 3,840 x 2,160 pixels. Now this may sound like nitpicking but I invite you to engage in a discussion with IT experts on file size, storage size and bandwidth based on what a megabyte really is and it gets really confusing.

However, before making the plunge into 4k production, it is important to note that the higher resolution is not the only factor and in many cases, it may not even be the most important or critical from the point of the consumer. The importance of resolution is directly related to viewing distance and saturating the retina of the viewer. Viewing from too great a distance and the advantage of the increased pixel count is lost; too close and our eyes begin to differentiate the pixels themselves.

BANG FOR THE VIEWING BUCK
The optimum viewing distance for a standard HDTV set is three times picture height so for a typical 42-inch diagonal set, that is about five feet back. For a 42-inch diagonal 4k display with its increased pixel count, the distance is halved in order for the viewer to perceive the increased resolution. The viewer therefore must either view from a distance of 2.5 feet or stay at five feet and increase the size of the set to approximately 75-inches diagonally. Now while all this math is pretty straightforward and easy to do, the fact is there are very few places that have their current HD sets at the proper viewing distance and if they purchase a 4k set, there is very little likelihood that they will see any significant advantage based on resolution.

Where the benefit will come from is not just from the increased number of pixels in the raster because it is reliant on the viewing distance. Where the real “bang for the buck” will come from are the other factors whose impact is apparent to the viewer at more typical viewing distances, greater than the existing three times picture height. Factors like increased frame rates of 100Hz or higher are easily discernible at more than three times picture height. Higher dynamic range also adds to the realism of the images at more typical viewing distances; so will a wider color gamut. These elements probably have more potential for impact on viewers than resolution in most environments. However, they don’t come without a price and that price is bandwidth so even my facility with its 3 Gbps infrastructure isn’t enough.

Based on our past experience, much of the content that we create at IPTV has historical value and is considered “long-tail” content. It is therefore incumbent upon us to consider what the content will look and sound like when it is played back in the future. This means looking not only at how it is stored and archived but how much information is actually captured and preserved. Our team designed our facility to work with uncompressed in both the video and audio domains because we determined the cost penalty for going uncompressed provided a better long-term product compared to compressed and concatenated material. In the present, the technology to create an uncompressed environment is either not available or the cost penalty is too great, which is why this is still a “research project.”

MORE HORSEPOWER
So circling back to my original research on the Blackmagic Design ATEM system, when I look at the specification I noted that the UHD 4k standards support is limited to 23.98p, 24p, 25p and 29.97p which is a bit of a concern if I am looking to make content that is both future proof and will eventually provide our viewers with a significant improvement in their experience at home. Color precision on the ATEM is 10-bit which is acceptable for HD content but with 4k, the industry experts and the math points to 12 bit or 14 bit as the target. However, the spec sheet does note that the ATEM will work in the REC 2020 color space which will provide some serious benefits right out of the box.

So summing it all up, based on what I have read and the conversations that I have had, I would look at the ATEM as an entry-level product for an organization to gain some experience working in the 4k environment but it will need to gain some horsepower to handle higher frame rate and higher dynamic range to be a long-term contender. I think they are planning for that because I noticed that they talk about supporting the 6G-SDI UHD SDI Interface which, when I checked the SMPTE website, is being worked on by the 32NF- 70 work group and is 5 percent finished with an estimated completion date of mid 2015.

Bill Hayes is the director of engineering for Iowa Public Television and can be reached via TV Technology.

The author’s first article in TV Technology, 1986.

JOHNSTON, IOWA—The 30th anniversary of the launch of TV Technology has really given me pause. In 1983, I had just completed a one year adventure having been recruited to move to Hawaii as the chief engineer for Mauna Kea Broadcasting which owned an FM radio station in Honolulu (KSHO) and a construction permit for a full-power UHF television station, Hawaii’s first full power UHF.

My family and I were preparing to move back to the mainland as soon as I could find another job when I was offered an engineering position at KHON TV which at that time was the NBC affiliate. I figured if I was going to actually stay in television I needed to get educated so I joined organizations and subscribed to journals and magazines. I am guessing that I started reading TV Technology with its first issue and it rapidly became my most valuable resource.

One of my favorite parts of reading the magazine was the User Report section. Being a self-taught engineer in radio and now trying to teach myself television technology, reading how other station engineers were implementing technologies was a tremendous value. One of the articles I read was on using 8281 coaxial cable to create delay lines and time video and I remember doing a few experiments to check the accuracy of my calculations for timing and the impact of progressively longer and longer lengths of cable.

Timing became a huge issue at KHON as NBC rolled out its Ku-band satellite distribution service and we replaced bicycling tapes from the mainland with recording live east coast satellite feeds for our 5 or 6 hour delay. Hawaii doesn’t observe daylight savings time so there is a one hour shift twice a year. To join network live during sporting events and live presidential speeches we initially locked all of our timing to the satellite feed but the glitches that happened during the satellite feed would disrupt the recordings being made and the playback on the air so we went back to local sync.

TRIAL AND ERROR
TV Technology helped me with that project as well, as we needed to purchase a frame synchronizer and at the time the only one any of us was familiar with was the ADDA VW-2 which was quite expensive. However, in TV Technology I read a user report on a relatively new frame synchronizer from a Canadian manufacturer that was reasonably priced and worked well. I made the recommendation to the chief engineer based on my research and we brought one in. It worked so well we purchased several more for our ENG microwave feed system and our ancillary satellite service.

I always had a sense of humor so using the knowledge I gained from reading TV Technology, I did the math and the expense budget for building a six hour time delay using 1,000-foot spools of 8281 and frame synchronizer to act as equalizers. I did a complete report and submitted to my boss, Ken Erickson. Ken and I got along very well and he was a huge do-it-yourself kind of engineer so when he called me in to talk about the proposal he wasn’t absolutely sure I was kidding until I presented the follow-up documentation regarding the housing all of the spools of cable and the cooling requirements for the thousands of frame synchronizers.

One of the moments where I felt like I had arrived occurred with my first piece published in TV Technology. NBC was in the process of implementing stereo and we had cobbled together a stereo audio router to work with our Grass Valley Group 1400 master control switcher through some clever engineering. We had also modified the input of our RCA F line transmitter to handle the wideband stereo signal. Our biggest concern was how we could install stereo generator and audio processing at the studios. More than 98 percent of our viewers watched us via cable and we had a direct feed to the cable headend. The only way the cable company would be able to use our stereo service would be to take our off-air feed.

However, KHON had a single F-line transmitter which, when it was off the air, didn’t really generate too many viewer calls. I had an idea and worked with the company that had supplied the wideband subcarriers generators for our studio-to-transmitter link to see if they could manufacture one at 4.5 MHz that I could put on the video that fed the cable modulator. A couple of phone calls back and forth and I was able to modify one of the units and use common audio processing and stereo generator for both services. I sent my write up in to TV Technology and was very happy when I got a note back saying it would be published.

THE BIRTH OF DIGITAL JOURNAL
Through the 1980’s and 1990’s I had written sporadically for TV Technology and did pieces for NAB issues and the like. In 1999, not long after I came to Iowa Public Television, the folks at TV Technology asked me if I would consider writing about IPTV’s digital conversion and thus the Digital Journal was born. In the early days of writing the Journal I had the opportunity to share some of the problems and pitfalls of the huge and complex transition. On a number of occasions I shared some less than complementary observations about companies I was working with. I also had many more occasions to share how companies and people responded to issues resolved problems. For the future, I see the Journal continuing to observe and point out how digital technology is being implemented in and changing broadcasting. There is, in the minds of many, the idea that the DTV transition ended in 2009 with the shutting off of full-power analog television transmitters. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Digital technology is constantly in transition and therefore, for the services that rely on it and the people who use it, the transition is unending.

So thank you to Steve Dana for the vision. Thank you to Carmel King for printing my first article. Thank you to Marlene Lane, Susan Ashworth, and Bob Kappler for giving me the opportunity to write the Digital Journal. Thanks to Tom Butts for allowing me to continue to share the experience I am having in the endless transition. Most of all, thanks to the people who have read these columns. I am not sure if I am the longest running TV Technology columnist or not, nevertheless, I figure I am pretty high on the list. Thanks to the people who have let me know when a column has hit home.

It sure doesn’t feel like 30 years.

ATSC plans to issue a candidate standard for ATSC 3.0 by the end of 2016.

JOHNSTON, IOWA—How are broadcasters going to ensure the future of over-the-air terrestrial broadcasting? I am actively participating in a number of organizations that are contributing to enhancing current digital television services and developing the next generation of services.

Organizations like Advanced Television Systems Committee and the Future of Broadcast TV (FoBTV), an unincorporated, non-for-profit, voluntary association founded by 13 television broadcast organizations from around the world, are looking at the future on a global scale while other organizations like NAB and EBU have a more regional focus, but are still very actively participating in the global view.

In an ideal world, we would all get together and hammer out worldwide standard that would allow manufacturers to build products that worked everywhere and consumers could watch content on any device anywhere. I don’t think there is a technological reason that would prevent that, but technology isn’t the only component of the mix. There are social, political and cultural components that will also come into play and will influence and may even dictate what can and cannot be done.

MOBILE DTV
One of the main projects going on at the ATSC right now is the mobile DTV enhancement to the existing ATSC service. I personally have looked at mobile DTV as an “experimental” service to prove the concept that if we offer broadcast services that can be received on mobile devices, people will use them. The experiments that I have seen certainly demonstrate that the technology, while not flawless, does work, but adoption has been slow.

What is needed is a catalyst and I am most interested in the Mobile-EAS project that is being directed by Jay Adrick. Repeatedly, we have seen where, during a crisis when traditional mobile services such as cellular have collapsed, broadcast continues to provide emergency and often lifesaving information. An M-EAS plan that would allow broadcasters to deliver the same feature- rich emergency information that we send to our traditional viewers could be that catalyst. I can envision a smart device that not only has the graphical map of the area of interest, and the text and audio alerting the user, but also takes advantage of the geolocation capabilities of the device itself to let the user know where they are in relationship to the event. This is the kind of service that terrestrial broadcasting could provide during situations that would crush the traditional cellular service.

ATSC 3.0
Another area of interest is the next generation broadcast standard, ATSC 3.0. In late 2011, the ATSC formed a Technology Group to explore what was next for terrestrial broadcasting. Probably one of the hardest decisions to make in creating the charter for the group was that the new standard would not be constrained to be backward compatible with the previous ATSC DTV standards.

System requirements were drafted in 2012 and the process was quite interesting as we worked closely with the FoBTV organization in soliciting potential use cases from interested parties worldwide. The ideal would be a global standard, but if that is not possible, at least to have global standards for as many of the components that make up the systems as possible. More than 70 use cases were gathered and they were distilled down to 13 usage scenarios encompassing everything from flexible and efficient use of spectrum to interactivity and accessibility. The end result is a list of some 140-plus requirements.

Coincident with the latter part of this work was the creation of specialized groups to tackle the fundamental designs of the specific layers proposed to make up the new standard. The current Technology Group (TG3) structure breaks out into the Physical Layer, the Management/Protocol layer and the Application/Presentation layer. Each group is tasked with building the functional blocks and developing the components that will make up the new standard. It is quite an undertaking, given that the timeline that we have established requires the delivery of a candidate standard by December 2016. I will make one appeal to my readers: if you are interested in working on the future of terrestrial television broadcasting, contact ATSC and find out how you can get involved.

Although I am concerned about the future of terrestrial broadcasting, I know that we can create a more robust, vibrant and valuable service through technology. I sit in meetings with people that I consider to be geniuses at solving technological challenges. My concern is that the audiences that have benefitted from our past work, currently benefit from what we do today, and will gain additional benefits from what we do in the future, are unaware of the nature of what we are. Our biggest challenge will be to educate consumers that television everywhere will require a robust and well thought-out ubiquitous wireless service. We have been that for more than half a century.

Bill Hayes is the director of engineering for Iowa Public Television. He can be reached via TV Technology

Shane Hurlbut, the cinematographer on “Act of Valor,” was able to put the Canon 5D DSLR in positions that directors wouldn’t dream of using with a more traditional movie camera.

JOHNSTON, IOWA—Regular readers of Digital Journal know that I am firmly convinced that the value and the future of local broadcasting is in the local station’s ability to acquire and create compelling local content. As the quantity and variety of methods for consumers to consume content increase, the value proposition for being a primarily a carrier of content created by others becomes increasingly more difficult to sustain while still maintaining a credible presence in the local market. So it should come as no surprise that when Iowa Public Television started to look at the digital conversion I championed the idea that we needed to create the best local content we could at the highest quality possible.

We built a facility that is 100 percent high-definition based initially on Sony HDW-700 camcorders and SRW-5500’s and HDW-2000 record decks. We have since migrated to XDCAM utilizing PDW-700 camcorders and PDW-F75 and PDW-U1 decks. When making the transition from tape-based to disc-based media, we also took advantage of the improved video quality offered in the XDCAM system by utilizing the MPEG-HD422 mode codec to acquire content in full 1920x1080 resolution and 24-bit audio as compared to the HDCAM, which was 1440x1080 and 20-bit audio. Because much of our content has a long tail, our focus is always in acquiring at the highest quality possibility.

WHAT ABOUT 4K?
For the last few years I have been looking into what will be our next acquisition transition and started to look at camera systems with 4K and greater imagers. Cameras with these imagers primarily exist in the realm of feature films, but at the SMPTE conference in 2011 I saw a presentation by cinematographer Shane Hurlbut on using the Canon 5D to shoot the majority of the 2012 film “Act of Valor.” The image quality on a large screen was stunning and because of the relatively low cost of the camera, he was able to put them in positions that you wouldn’t dream of using a more traditional movie camera. There is one overhead shot in a room where a live hand grenade is tossed in and you watch it explode. However, the 5D is a DSLR camera and not primarily designed to shoot moving video so they had to essentially turn off a lot of the camera’s features since they were designed to optimize still photography.

At the 2012 NAB Show I stumbled upon the Blackmagic Cinema Camera. Coming from the world of television I confess that it is an odd looking camera when compared to what I am used to seeing but I made note of it primarily because it produced images that were at least as good as anything we have at IPTV and it was priced at just under $3,000. At NAB this year I checked out the Blackmagic Production Camera 4K which has a super 35 imager and utilizes EF or ZE mount lenses. It’s priced at just under $4,000, which puts this camera that is designed to acquire UHD content in the price range of many of the DSLR’s that have added video acquisition to what is essentially a still camera.

Blackmagic Production Camera 4K I don’t think this market is lost on the more traditional DSLR manufacturers. At CES this year I stopped by and looked at a number of DSLR-type cameras that are optimized for their potential role as cinema cameras. Canon has the EOS-1D C, which uses a 18 megapixel imager for better than 4K resolution but the price tag is pretty hefty at about $12,000 and audio recording still looks to be a little behind the curve compared to what I am used to in a dedicated video camera. Last year I borrowed a Nikon D5100 and used it to shoot some high definition video just to get a feel for what it was like. I was quite impressed with the quality of the video, but again, the form factor seemed a little odd. I did stop at Nikon at CES but their focus (pardon the pun) seemed more on their compact still cameras than on their highline DSLR’s entering into the digital cinema world.

I was able to try out both the D7100 and the D800, both of which were extremely comfortable to use. I am probably a throwback, but there is something very comforting about looking through the lens at the image as opposed to looking at the image on a small display mounted on the back of the camera.

A CHANGE IN PERSPECTIVE
So what does this have to do with cameras at IPTV? Last April, one of our PDW-700’s fell off its tripod due to a worn mount. As is the rule, it of course fell lens first to insure maximum damage. The camera body was shipped off to Sony service for evaluation an estimate for the repair. The estimate came back at just over $20,000; a replacement was just under $30,000. Given the age of the camera and the fact that the repair estimate didn’t include any work on the mechanics of the disc system, we opted to go with a new camera body for $30K. This is not a knock on Sony; the industry is changing. But when we think that the same $30,000 would have purchased 10 of the Blackmagic Cinema Camera bodies, it is time to adjust our thinking.

Another epiphany for me came while discussing this topic with my wife. I explained to her that my topic was camcorders and she looked at me and said “when you have kids, you go out and buy one.” At this very moment, new parents are recording home videos using consumer cameras that probably deliver better images than what we are currently acquiring our content with. So it appears to me that the next transitional step in acquisition at IPTV will not only involve better pictures and audio but an adjustment in the type of equipment we use and how we operate it. We may actually be trying to keep up with the Jones.

Bill Hayes is the director of engineering for Iowa Public Television. He can be reached via TV Technology.

 In the early 1970’s, the author wrote computer programs by using punch cards and a light reader that were fed into a small computer called the “comp-u-core.”

JOHNSTON,IOWA—Since returning from NAB, I have been giving a lot of thought to “the cloud” and how it may impact the workflow at Iowa Public Television.

First, I would like to explain my interpretation of “cloud.” In the early 1970’s, I started writing computer programs to solve math equations in high school, initially using punch cards and a light reader that were fed into a small computer called the Comp-U-Core. I moved from machine language to Fortran to Basic, where programming was via a Teletype Corporation ASR33 terminal with a paper tape reader/ punch that was connected via dedicated phone circuit to the Hewlett Packard 2000C time share computer... this was my first experience with “cloud” based computing. So from my point of view, the concept of cloud- based services is no more new than wireless delivery of television pro- grams to receivers.

IS CENTRALCAST ALREADY THERE?

Within the PBS member station community there are a couple of very high-profile central casting projects being implemented in New York and Florida. From the point of view of the participating stations, these would be cloud services. Services like switching, graphic inserts, and the like take place outside of the station (in the cloud) and then the final mixed product is delivered from the cloud to the station for distribution via their local transmitter systems as well as cable and satellite services. Local content is created on-site and then uploaded into the cloud for inclusion with national network and syndicated programming.

As I understand it, the national and syndicated programming is actually captured and stored at the cloud facility rather than at the local station so that all of the stations using this cloud-based service are working from a single (but fully redundant) copy of shared content rather than each station storing a copy of the same content at their local facilities. In this environment, the shared master control treats each individual stations’ content streams as separate, individually processed channels and will pull common shows from a single library.

This is no doubt an over-simplification of the cloud-based facilities but I think it is conceptually correct. The benefit to the individual stations is increased efficiency and cost savings by eliminating the need for standalone master controls at every station. I remember discussing this same concept while working at NBC affiliates in Honolulu and West Virginia in the 1980s and 90s after the network had switched to satellite

delivery and was providing real time feeds to all time zones other than Hawaii and Alaska where we were required to manu- ally tape delay east coast feeds.This was still better than the old process of getting tapes of the network programs in Honolulu and airing them a week later than they did on the mainland and then bicycling them up to Alaska where they aired two and then three weeks later.

The primary objection from the network affiliates that I remember was that if there was an error at the network, it went out na- tionally, not just to the eastern and central time zone. In this case, 30 Rock became the cloud and the affiliates weren’t comfortable with the concept, especially the occasional Saturday Night Live F-bomb that would make headlines in the east and yet never be heard west of the Mississippi. Obviously times, technology and broadcasting have changed so centralcasting is once again a hot topic.

LOW-HANGING FRUIT

The concern that I have with the centralcast model is that it looks for savings in an area of most stations that have very little potential. Since the dawn of primitive sequencing and early automation, master control was the “low hanging fruit” and I am not convinced that there is all that much more money to save. All of the facilities I have been involved with have automated master controls that are run by a single per- son or are unattended. Even when the room is manned, the operator is seldom running master control; they are performing numerous other station functions, most of which do not go away if master control is moved to a cloud.The local operator’s primary interface with master control is to deal with exceptions and those are becoming less and less frequent.

In addition, based on my preliminary research into companies offering master control as a service, I am hearing figures be- tween $20K–$40K a month, not including the last mile connection to the cloud. I am not convinced that there is that much money to be saved in the average master control operation.

I’d like to do more serious research on the idea of moving the computational part of the master control system into the cloud with a fairly simple internet appliance-type controller attached to my local storage and switching infrastructure. In his 1996 book “Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Identify and Exploit the Crisis Points that Challenge Every Business,” Andrew Grove spoke about a “connection co-op” and internet appliances. While he was dubious about the usefulness of these less sophisticated limited devices, the book was written almost 20 years ago and a lot has changed since then.A cloud-based high-end processing system understanding the capabilities and orchestrating the function of a myriad of simple device controllers seems quite possible. You only have to look at the work going on within the IEEE and its SmartGrid initiative to see the potential.

LOCAL STORAGE

Local storage seems to make sense to me for a couple of reasons. First, storage is already commoditized so as an expense item, it is relatively cheap.There are also the concerns regarding cloud storage such as security, as in the protection of your intellectual property and the more subtle where in the world your content is actually stored. Not everyone is comfortable with the idea of their data being stored on foreign soil. I understand that these issues can be dealt with but my concern is will the benefit be worth the hassle?

In addition, originating content from cloud-controlled local storage requires a high bandwidth path between the station and the cloud facility which is an added expense that may not be inconsequential. A simple terminal at the station that monitors the cloud-based control system would not need a lot of bandwidth and the high bandwidth path for the local distribution system already exists.The local terminal equipment would also allow for local control when the need arises such as during a pledge program where at my stations, we dynamically slide our program breaks as we follow the mood and flow of our audience.

It just appears to me that the improvements that centralcasting can make in the efficiency and costs at most local television station master control operations are marginal and may not actually be as effective as envisioned in an area that has undergone repeated iterations of automation and redesign, all focused on reducing costs and personnel requirements.The real area of opportunity may be in developing an architecture that allows for costs and benefits of improvements in the speed and sophistication of the computational platform to be shared among all the users independent of changes in simple control devices and systems at the individual local stations.

Bill Hayes is the director of engineering for Iowa Public Television.

The BBC demonstrated its prototype hybrid MIMO-based electronic field production system at IBC last September.

JOHNSTON, IOWA— Last month I spoke at the IEEE Broadcast Technology Society’s Second Annual Graduates of the Last Decade Workshop, in Cagliari, Italy. The focus of the program was next generation broadcasting, a topic that is very near and dear to me, since, in addition to my participation in BTS, I am also involved in groups from ATSC, SMPTE, NAB and FoBTV that are all working in this arena. While the presentations from the program looked primarily at distributing content to consumers, there was one from Peter Moss of the BBC’s R&D group that offered a little extra.

MULTIPLE INPUT, MULTIPLE OUTPUT
Peter’s talk was titled “MIMO Technology in Broadcasting—and an application in Programme-making,” and it is the application in program-making that I wanted to look at. MIMO, which stands for “Multiple Input Multiple Output,” requires at least two transmit antennas and two receive antennas, and the idea is to take advantage of multiplexing gain, diversity gain or both to improve channel capacity. If you look at the channel capacities of existing systems you can see that conventional broadcasting services using a single transmitter/antenna and the most sophisticated coding and interleaving techniques are very close to the Shannon limit. So even if major changes are made in the methodologies, the improvements are small—in theory, we have reached the point of diminishing returns. What Peter’s presentation demonstrated was that, by using MIMO techniques and some clever coding and optimization, channel capacity can be increased significantly, perhaps doubled!

So what has this to do with field production? Well, when we consider that the spectrum crunch is not just about the UHF band as the CTIA’s recent letter to the FCC suggested, yet another reduction in the BAS allocation could be in the offing. Not long ago we retooled our 2 GHz EFP services to reduce the amount of spectrum within the band and the size of individual channels. Spectral efficiency is now (and will continue to be) a driver as we move forward in time. The BBC project looked at applying these same RF techniques and some the techniques described in the developing DVB-NGH (next-generation handheld) standard to develop a high-definition wireless camera that used half the bandwidth of an existing 2 GHz channel. In their case this was reducing the bandwidth from 10 to 5 MHz while maintaining a 20 Mbps data capacity. For the experimental system, the engineering team at BBC were able to “cherry pick” some technologies out of the existing DVB-T2 system, as well as MIMO models from DVB-NGH.

For me the most interesting and intriguing part was using quad polarization for the MIMO transmission. As I understand the system, they created a 4x4 MIMO system using linear polarized antennas (horizontal and vertical)— which we are familiar with from traditional terrestrial broadcasting— combined with circular polarized (right-hand CP and left-hand CP) that are more typical in microwave and satellite systems. This hybrid transmission and receive system not only improved data capacity but also reliability in challenging environments.

The prototype system was demonstrated at the IBC last year, and I have heard nothing but good things about it. While this particular implementation is on a camera-mounted 2 GHz transmitter, there doesn’t appear to be any significant reason why the same techniques could not be applied to 7 GHz or higher frequency systems and with some clever antenna design work, perhaps applied to vehicle or helicopter mounted ENG systems as well.

REVISITING OFDM
Since the development of this system is occurring in the U.K., the underlying modulation technology is COFDM, 16QAM in this case. However, suggesting another look at OFDM is not the heresy that it appeared to be 20 years ago as the United States was moving toward the introduction of a digital television standard. Many of the groups looking into the next generation or terrestrial broadcasting services are revisiting the concept of an OFDM-based system to reach an audience that is considerably more mobile than they were in the past.

I confess that when I first heard about the development of DVB-NGH, I was also hearing about European countries shutting down their DVB-H infrastructure due to a lack of consumer interest. It gave me considerable pause as the U.S. was just starting to roll out the ATSC mobile service after developing and approving a standard at a speed not seen before. I think one of the things that this work has indicated to me is that we may eventually be looking for a broadcast standard that doesn’t differentiate between whether the receiver is mobile or fixed.

Producing HD content, whether for high-end programming or newsgathering, is what the audience expects and the BBC’s “halfRF” system would seem to be a contender for allowing more flexibility in how the work gets done. Peter Moss pointed out that, while the system is still under development, the BBC did actually use the camera on the “One Show, Christmas” special. The camera was set up to view some reindeer, and while it may not have been the camera of choice to jump out of a helicopter with James Bond and the Queen, reindeer are an important star in most Christmas programs, so they obviously have faith in the technology.

Bill Hayes is the director of engineering for Iowa Public Television.

Harris Platinum IP3 router

JOHNSTON, IOWA—Routers are not particularly glamorous or exciting, but since they are in most cases the foundation to the audio and video signal flow through the plant, I tend to want them to be simple, stable and dependable. When we retooled Iowa Public Television for digital, these were the qualities we looked for that led us to select our current Utah Scientific router system.

Although IPTV is not currently in the market for a new routing system, I think it is wise to stay on top of what is available. I often approach this process by looking at what we currently have, how our workflow is changing and then trying to determine what we would want to do if we were purchasing one today.

One opportunity that I see in designing a facility today is the combination of two high ticket systems into a single package: the router and the multiviewer. A number of manufacturers now offer routing and multiviewers in the same package and if you look at the function of the two systems, the combination makes perfect sense. IPTV’s current Evertz multiviewer has been reliable but is getting up in age and we’ve discussed about whether to replace it in the near future.

METADATA LAYER
Looking into this led me to a story about the new Harris Platinum IP3 router. Initially, I was just interested in seeing how they integrated the multiviewer into the router package since our installation involved an array of distribution amplifiers. The Platinum router incorporates the Harris HView modules into the router frame providing the ability to monitor all of the audio and video inputs to the router and drive a multitude of monitors without the need for external distribution amplifiers which for me was kind of a nice feature.

One of the features that I liked in the IP3 was the signal path layering. When we did our planning at IPTV we made the decision to be a discrete audio facility, partially because at the time, embedded audio was still struggling with some glitches. I was confident that the technology for dealing with embedded audio would improve but the main reason we went discrete was that our creative staff was simply much more comfortable with discrete audio and in a facility the size of ours, there weren’t any significant cost savings to be realized by going embedded. The layering within the IP3 is very similar to what we currently have except that they have added a third data layer for metadata which I believe will become critical over time.

For more information, I spoke with Kerry Wheeles, Harris’ director of product marketing at Harris. One of my first concerns was about this data layer and how the router would handle embedded closed captioning. Since we are working diligently on ensuring that closed captioning makes it through our systems to air, I wanted to know what the IP3 would do with closed captions embedded in the digital video passing through the router. Kerry told me that in the current version the router doesn’t touch the closed captioning but passes it straight through. Harris is currently looking at 5 or 6 possibilities for utilizing the data path. One that is in development is an input decoder module that would allow the router to accept IP or ASI input signals and route them to any baseband output. Another potential for the data path is the ability use it for insertion of metadata such as closed captioning into the output.

LESS DISRUPTION
Sustainability in a system such as a router is of paramount importance. Given that the router is the foundation of most facilities, the idea of installing a system that becomes obsolete or unsupported within a few years of purchase is untenable as no one wants to replace a router too frequently. In addition, the system has to be serviceable without too much disruption. The IP3 inputs are clustered in groups of 9 while the outputs are in groups of 8 or 16 depending on system configuration. Smaller grouping lends itself to disabling fewer sources or destinations when a card needs to be replaced. Another interesting feature that I will look at in more depth at the NAB Show is the ability to perform and test system updates without disabling or disrupting the operation of the router. Software updates continue to be one of the most troublesome chores in any modern facility and the idea that an update could be installed, tested and—in the event of a failure or unforeseen side effect, be reversed—is quite interesting.

Probably the thing that most intrigued me about looking into the IP3 was not so much the technology but the company. When Harris announced that they were looking to sell their broadcast division, many of the folks who have been in the industry for a while remember when Harris and RCA were the giants. I am sure that concern over whether Harris would survive played on the minds of many broadcasters when considering investing in new equipment. The IP3 seems to be an indicator that the new Harris will continue to meet the needs of broadcasters.

Bill Hayes is the director of engineering at Iowa Public Television. He can be reached via TV Technology.

Timbre is an interesting audio characteristic. In music, it is the quality of the sound that allows us to differentiate between instruments. JOHNSTON, IOWA—Have you ever wondered what makes audio so difficult for television? Think about it. It literally took an act of Congress to get the television industry to focus on the problem of loud commercials.

This certainly wasn’t a new problem. I remember fielding calls from irate viewers while working for an NBC affiliate in 1982. Our audio certainly wasn’t digital, it wasn’t even stereo at that point and yet there were frequent complaints about the commercials being too loud. In my years prior to that, I worked in radio and remember tweaking audio processors to make my AM station the loudest one on the dial at the request of the program director. The goal was to jump out at the listener as they rotated the manual tuning control of their AM radio as they were driving down the road looking for something to listen to.

‘RHYTHMIC JACKHAMMERS’
In the very early 1980’s I worked for an AM/FM combo in the San Bernardino/Riverside, Calif. market, KFXM/KDUO and had what I believe was a prototype AM processor made by Gregg Labs (Greg Ogonowski) which was, in my opinion, one of the most flexible and amazing audio processors I ever worked with. If the program director wanted to park the modulation meter at 98 percent all the time, the Gregg Labs processor at KFXM could do that with the least amount of offense to the listener.

In audio, our focus tends to be on the loudness and intensity of sound. In my days at KFXM I got pretty good at making sure that when we modulated the transmitter, the negative peaks never exceeded 98 percent (loudness) and that when we were playing a song the audio stayed at 98 percent for the duration of the record (intensity). While this attracted the attention of the listener in that it got them to stop on our station, it also had a negative effect of fatiguing the listener since there was no longer any dynamic range in the music. We essentially created “rhythmic jackhammers” that attracted attention and then drove away the very people we attracted.

While this was a problem in radio, I think we benefited from the fact that while the audience was listening, their visual senses were focused on something unrelated… hopefully their driving. In television, the typical viewer hopefully has their senses of hearing and sight focused on a common element: the program they are watching. So the audience has an expectation of correlation between the two and if that is violated, they notice. Sometimes the violation is part of the program—the sudden slamming of the door or a scream of terror from out of the dark that is designed by the program creator to elicit a response. Sometimes the violation is used car dealer screaming to “Come on down to Widetrack Town!” which also elicits a response, although not typically favorable. But now all of this has been corrected thanks to the CALM act and the proper application of ATSC Recommended Practice A/85 which is available for free download from the ATSC website, www.atsc.org.

TIMBRE VS. TONE
So now that there is a spotlight focused on television audio, what are some of the other qualities of audio we should be thinking about as we move forward? I would invite you to consider “timbre,” (pronounced TAM-ber). Timbre is an interesting audio characteristic. In music, it is the quality of the sound that allows us to differentiate between instruments. If I play a 440 Hz note (A) on a guitar and play the same 440 Hz note (A) on a piano, they sound different. The timbre of each instrument is very different and it distinguishes them from each other. With a little practice almost anyone can pick out specific instruments playing the same notes from a mix assuming it is a small group of distinctly different instruments. In the above example, if I were to hook up a 440 Hz notch filter to an audio console and switch it in both the piano and guitar, notes would vanish. And yet if I were able to access that same filtering process within my brain, I could filter out the piano and pass the guitar through, so clearly there is more to the processing of sound than frequency, loudness and intensity.

When considering timbre, it is important not to confuse it with tone; tone is a function of pitch or frequency. In the old days we had tone controls that adjusted the bass and treble. These controls adjust the response of the audio system to a group of frequencies within a limited range. If we want to hear “bright” sound we increase the level of the higher frequencies, but it is all sound within that frequency range regardless of the sources. If I am listening to an orchestra and I ask for more high frequencies, I will get more high frequency from every instrument in the orchestra, whereas if I ask for more high end from the strings, I am asking for more sound of a specific timbre.

What this accomplishes may seem subtle but it is important because of the way the brain processes sound. It might also be possible in addressing timbre to allow digital audio processing to pick specific voices out over background sound and allow for better clarity of dialogue to improve the audiences’ overall quality of experience based on local conditions such as room acoustics and overall volume at the receive location.

Unlike with our vision, sound is initially received and processed in the very primitive areas of our brains and reaches our emotional centers. This is why people are frequently moved by certain pieces of music. It is also why people react violently when startled by a loud sound, known as the “fight or flight” response. I theorize it is also why they get so mad when a loud commercial startles them out of whatever state they are in when it happens.

As we move further down the road in the creation and distribution of digital content, I think it is critical that we divest ourselves of the preconceived notion that audio is a less important component than video. I would point out that for most of us, we spend eight hours a day with our video receiving senses shut down while our audio receiving sense functions 24x7. I think we also need to recognize that based on the way our brains process sound, we need to consider the more subtle and harder to define qualities of audio such a timbre when determining how much processing power we need to assign to the audio components and how much bandwidth and space we need to use for their associated transmission and storage.

Bill Hayes is the director of engineering for Iowa Public Television. He can be reached via TV Technology.

iSwitcher... coming soon? JOHNSTON, IOWA—It appears to me that there is a bit of a war going on in the production switcher world—not between manufacturers but between the user interface and the underlying technology. Anyone who has installed software in the default mode quickly recognizes that the favored user interface is a touchscreen on a tablet, not a keyboard and a mouse. The use of the old interface really inhibits the natural workflow that the software is designed for. I suspect that this is happening in production switchers and is probably the driving force behind the interest in production automation.

The first time I worked with a production switcher was as a student at Loyola Marymount University in California. As a communications arts student and a bit of a “gear head,” I really enjoyed tinkering and playing with the technology so I often ended up being a technical director on student projects. LMU had what at the time was one of the topof- the-line Grass Valley Group switchers that in addition to fades and cuts had Chroma key capabilities and a wipe generator subpanel that was programmable from under the work surface through the manipulation of a matrix of little silver toggle switches. Most of the other student TD’s had no clue that the control panel could be opened let alone that there were subcontrols available. I remember doing an offset saw tooth oscillating wipe to a camera shooting crumpled aluminum foil lit with red and yellow lights to simulate flames. It was an idea that I got from seeing the film “Krakatoa, East of Java” which was nominated for an Academy Award for “Best Visual Effects.” Sadly, red- and yellow-lit foil on a conveyor to simulate flowing viewed on a giant screen at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood didn’t work as well as my oscillating wipe when viewed on a small color television monitor.

INCREMENTAL GROWTH
The capabilities within a production switcher have increased with each subsequent generation. Multiple effects buses, infinite re-entry, and layers of keying (both Chroma and luminance) per bus grew even in the old analog days. While working for KHON (then a NBC affiliate) in Honolulu, I remember watching TD’s on programs pushing four and five buttons simultaneously to move from one shot to the next complex shot. It was not unusual on a live show to see one of the keys come in late. This was a classic example of where the capabilities of the switcher electronics exceeded the capabilities of the user interface, the control surface. I began research at KHON to replace their aging GVG 1600 switcher with something newer like the GVG 200 which had E-MEM that allowed for the storing of complex setups. I unfortunately left KHON before they retooled but I took my research and applied it at WSAZ in Huntington, W.Va.

During the rebuild here at IPTV, the production switcher research took a great deal of time and effort. It was my first foray into replacing a production switcher in almost 10 years and I was amazed at the capabilities that were standard features within the units. Now they included 3D visual effects, still stores, and more power in a single bus than was in a fully loaded GVG 300, which was the yardstick by which production switchers were measured. The E-MEM system for managing these complex systems had also grown to include interfaces with external devices allowing for extraordinarily complex setups and transitions. In addition, the underlying infrastructures are now software-based so substantial changes in capabilities can happen via software update with no change in the hardware. So there is this incredible increase in the capabilities and potential of the switcher and yet the user interface is substantially the same except for some minor evolutionary changes.

THINK OF THE CUSTOMER
Now before the switcher control panel becomes a huge touchscreen, we do need to think long and hard about the end users.

I was an early adopter of computers. I wrote code in machine language using a punchcards and a light reader. I have programmed mainframes in Focal, Fortran and Cobol. I liked working with DOS and I still run some things from the CMD window. When I was asked to try out Microsoft Windows along with products like DESQView and a couple of other user friendly multitasking environments, I remember being bitterly disappointed in their performance. They certainly were not user friendly or intuitive to those of us that were comfortable working with a blank monitor and a blinking cursor. The mouse took awhile to get used to and for quite some time I continued to use a trackball because it was more accurate for the type of work I did. So I don’t expect established TD’s will welcome a major overhaul of the basic switcher control surface with open arms. There will have to be demonstrable benefits that are important to them in order to make the fundamental change. I remember being at an NAB Show in the early 1980’s watching a switcher demonstration from a European manufacturer. While the switcher performed flawlessly through the demo, none of the American TD’s were comfortable operating it. Why? The fader bars moved over a raised semicircle on the control surface rather than linearly along the flat surface they were used to. It may seem meaningless to the nonusers but I would point out that I have never been in a facility in the United States that uses a vision mixer with raised fader bars.

Bill Hayes is the director of engineering for Iowa Public Television. He can be reached via TV Technology.

Two new Ericsson receivers, racked above the existing Sencore receivers, await deployment at Iowa Public Television. JOHNSTON, IOWA—In a recent article on the changing face of routing within a broadcast facility, I speculated that future equipment might only have a National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) power connection and an RJ45 jack on the back panel. There will probably be a power indicator on the front panel and maybe a power switch and of course, the manufacturer’s logo, although I’d actually incorporate the power indicator into the logo (I could never figure out why Omneon didn’t spell out their name with those cool blue lights).

Whether or not we actually end up with hardware that has no front panel user interface or not remains to be seen but we certainly see networked control interfaces that allow us to access, configure and troubleshoot systems from a networked user’s computer running a web browser. In the digital world, the essence—the metadata, control instructions— everything is data and can be transported over a shared IP connection.

NO MORE CANDYCOATING
So what has this to do with station automation? Well, for better or worse, most stations approached automation from the standpoint of reducing the number of people it takes to run a facility. I know we have candycoated it and talked about repurposing people to do more important jobs, but look around most facilities and there are fewer people and automation is one of the primary drivers for that reduction. I don’t think we can continue to look at automation or operational efficiency as a way to cut costs.

I am also of the opinion that we cannot save our way to profitability and success; we have to create more compelling content for our audiences at the national and local levels. Therefore new automation projects need to actually allow the people that are displaced to contribute to creating content that will spur growth instead of downsizing them out the door to save a few dollars.

Rudimentary automation in broadcast stations began long before digital technology. I worked at radio stations in the 1970’s that used theoretically inaudible tones on audio tapes to trigger the next event. The RCA TCR-100 and Ampex ACR- 25 spot players combined robotics using quad tape cartridges to sequence commercial breaks. Traditional automation has essentially been focused on accurately running a sequence of events based on the traffic log and even in today’s world of video servers, that still seems to be the primary goal.

But what if we took a step back from thinking about automation in terms of running a sequence of events and thought more about it in terms of facility management? I have been involved for awhile in the SMPTE 34CS AdHoc Group on media device control over IP, and that is where I see us heading. One of the tasks we have been working on is creating a list of device categories, types and capabilities in order to develop open control protocols. I have been walking around Iowa Public Television, looking at the racks of equipment and making notes of what types of devices we have, how we use them and how we control them. It has been an interesting exercise for me because I have started to think about a more “heuristic” facility management architecture.

As the MDC group has discussed the required interchange needed between devices and control systems it becomes clear to see that much more than automation is possible. If the media devices and the control system can actually communicate not just simple commands like play and stop but can actually report capabilities and availability of the media devices, then the operation becomes more of a thinking organism. We see the basics for this in plugn- play devices that we install on our home computers. As devices are installed, they announce themselves to the operating system, negotiate interfaces and control and report when ready for use. Devices do this via USB, SATA and Ethernet, although the latter still requires more end user input to set up then is really desirable. In an IP over Ethernet environment, new or replacement equipment needs to be able to be installed, plugged in, turned on and then integrated into the environment based on the capabilities inherent in the system.

IMPERFECT EXAMPLE
Here is an imperfect example that we are working through at IPTV and my idealistic vision of what could be. As part of the ongoing next generation interconnect system (NGIS) project, the PBS network is converting all of its real-time satellite delivered programming from MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 over the next few months (see related story, p. 1). IPTV currently uses 12 Sencore MRD 3187A integrated receiverdecoders (IRD) to downlink HD and SD content from PBS and other sources for our primary and two secondary streams. Because of the nature of our operation and our predisposition in how we automate and limitations in the control architecture, we essentially park receivers on services within a transponder and leave them there. That means an IRD spends most of its time looking at a single service and outputting the SD or HD content from that service only. We do make changes when needed but this requires an operator to manually interact with the IRD. Since the 3187A is not upgradeable to receive DVB-S2 satellite service or MPEG-4 data streams, the existing 12 IRDs are being replaced with eight Ericsson RX8200 IRDs. The reduction in the number of IRDs used is a function of the soon to be deployed non-real time (NRT) component of the NGIS project (which will be the subject of an upcoming article).

In order to make the transition happen, we are taking advantage of the enhanced capabilities of the RX8200s by cloning the profiles from the existing 8127As and configuring them as DVB-S1 IRDs outputting MPEG-2 streams. Satellite services will then migrate around and run in parallel MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 for a few weeks and then MPEG-2 services will cease. During this process it will be necessary to go through and load profiles into the new IRDs manually. In my idealized vision of how this should actually work, I would plug my new RX8200s into the network architecture. The IRDs would announce themselves to the system complete with all of the capabilities included such as the capability of receiving DVB-S1 or DVB-S2, working with MPEG-2 and MPEG-4, outputting HD or SD content, etc. Then in the idealized facility management architecture, the system intelligence configures and manages the media devices and uses the appropriate tools to do the job.

As I said, this is an imperfect example since the devices that I am talking about are not currently on the list of media devices that SMPTE AdHoc is creating, but I may suggest that they be added, or at least considered. Be that as it may, the goal of creating an open set of control instruction sets that can be implemented across a wide array of devices is one step in moving towards a more intelligent facility management system that will free up time and people to do the really important work of creating compelling content. I would encourage my fellow station engineers to consider joining this AdHoc group so that the document that is produced is what the industry really needs.

Bill Hayes is the director of engineering for Iowa Public Television. He can be reached via TV Technology.

A Dodge Ram converted for ENG use sits in an outside exhibit at the 2012 CC BN in Beijing.
JOHNSTON, IOWA: As regular readers of this column know, I have spent the last 10 years or more documenting the conversion of Iowa Public Television from analog to digital. One of the first areas where we actually did our digital transition was in field production. At the end of the first year's budget we had enough money left over to purchase a couple of HDCAM systems and a first generation HD nonlinear editor from Avid. Over the years we expanded our field production systems to include five XDCAM systems, 10 HD editing systems (five Avid, five Final Cut Pro), and a six-camera HD production truck. Our mission is to capture stories about Iowa and share them with all Iowans and since most of those stories take place outside of our studios, we are committed to going to where the stories are and bringing them back.

NEWSGATHERING

Every year I go to the NAB Show and look at electronic field production technology to see what changes are happening and what we need to be prepared for. I talk with colleagues at commercial and non-commercial stations about what they are doing, how they are doing it and what works and what doesn't. The idea is to gain knowledge and learn from others and share knowledge that others might find useful. In March I had the opportunity to exchange ideas with a new group of colleagues while speaking at the 2012 CCBN, the China Content Broadcasting Network exhibition held in Beijing. The event is sort of a combination of NAB, IBC, SMPTE and SCTE conventions all rolled into one. Part of my tour included visits to some of the broadcast facilities in Beijing as well as time wandering the floor of the convention. I took advantage of the opportunity to look at field production and see what they were doing and how they did it. As you might expect, their field production is broken into two basic categories: news and programs.

The majority of equipment in a typical newsgathering vehicle at CC BN was familiar for any U.S. broadcaster On the news front, newsgathering seems to be done primarily via satellite, no surprise in a country the size of China. Looking into a typical newsgathering vehicle, I saw not only equipment that I am very familiar with but also brands and models that I did not know. Whether in RF and antenna control in the rear of the vehicle, or in the video operations area located in the midsection of the vehicle, I was pretty sure that I could fire up the system and make it work, even if I couldn't read Chinese. It also helped that in many cases, the Chinese word for some technical components is the English word. So it appears that for newsgathering, our methodologies are quite similar.

PRODUCTION

Production was another area of interest and I took advantage of the opportunity to look over several vehicles, large and small, and to talk with their engineers regarding operations. One very interesting rig that I went through at the convention was a newly delivered unit built by U.K. manufacturer A. Smith Gt Bentley Ltd. and is still featured on their website. The unit was labeled as an "HD unit," but while I was taking the tour they were touting and showing a 3D production of an annual music festival in Beijing. If I understood the truck engineer, the 3D production they were showing had been produced by their first 3D production truck and this was their second and was capable of being used for either 3D or HD production. Evidently 3D production in China is starting to happen and there is currently a cable-delivered 3D channel available as a test. I will be very interested to see how their experience with 3D works out as I am involved with some of the standards work that is going on within ATSC on this very same subject. As with the newsgathering vans, in virtually every OB truck I saw at the stations and at the exhibit, the production equipment was all virtually the same as we would see in any U.S. vehicle.

The larger production vehicles were equipped to do both stereo and surround sound productions. Coming from my past where I wanted to be an audio engineer for a recording studio and spent a number of years working in radio and then in television, often being the only engineer on staff that thought about audio, I am always looking at what equipment is being used. In the one large truck where I could get into the audio booth, I saw a Lawo MC²66 console. Lawo is a manufacturer out of Germany of which I was unfamiliar with. I spoke at some length with an engineer in the truck but the language barrier kept me from getting any real details about the performance of the console. I am not in the market for audio consoles at this time as IPTV is very happy with our SSL's, but I wanted to try and find out what the similarities and differences are.

Overall, having briefly looked at field production in China, I was pleasantly surprised to find we have more things in common than I thought.

Bill Hayes is the director of engineering for Iowa Public TV. He can be reached via TV Technology.

JOHNSTON, IOWA: In 1982, for my first job in television, I was hired to go to Honolulu, Hawaii as the Chief Engineer for Mauna Kea Broadcasting who at that time was the licensee of KSHO-FM and held a construction permit for a full-powered UHF television station licensed to serve the community of Kailua on Oahu. I had been working in radio for a number of years so while I was intimately familiar with AM/FM radio station hardware, other than watch TV, my only other television experience was to occasionally provide an extra pair of hands for the engineers at KMIR and KESQ when I worked in radio in Palm Springs, Calif.

Although it was an exciting and somewhat frightening challenge to move my family to an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and oversee the construction of a brand new TV station, I was blessed to have two consultants work with me on the project. One should be familiar to virtually all TV Technology readers, Doug Lung. The other was Bill Burnsed and some old timers may remember Bill from his company B&B Systems which made stereo phase monitoring equipment in the early days of television stereo. In the days before B&B, Bill and his wife Polly worked with me on the construction of the studios used by KSHO TV in Kailua.

IPTV's ADC high-definition patchbayCHANGING TIMES

When I say worked with me, what I really mean is Bill told me what to do and I did it. In some cases Bill actually had to show me what to do, like installing my first BNC connector on a piece of Belden 8281. I'd like to say that at the heart of the KSHO-TV studio was a router but that would not be correct. Instead it was a patchbay and despite suggestions to the station owner that we really should buy a router, it never happened on my watch.

One of the fundamentals that I learned from Bill was the importance of making the router, or in our case, patchbay, time zero in the plant. I spent a number of hours listening to Bill discuss the fundamentals and importance of video routing while I sat installing BNC connectors on cables. The lectures must have worked because to this day I still view the router as the heart of the plant and I still think it should be time zero. But as Bob Dylan said in 1963, "the times they are a-changin" and maybe the timing as well.

When we renovated the Iowa Public Television facility to digital we made some fundamental decisions on how the plant would be configured, based on the technologies available and how we viewed our workflow. We opted for a 100 percent uncompressed high definition video plant. We also opted to go with non-embedded AES audio. The Utah Scientific router that we installed is—as in all my previous constructions—the time zero reference point in the facility. I expect we will stay that way for quite some time for while there are other ways of doing this, the complexity of facility management still outweigh the benefits of changing to a deeper IT-based infrastructure. The core of my facility has a 10-year warranty and works extraordinarily well so we have time to watch and see what develops.

COSTS VERSUS BENEFITS

But where it is all heading does have some really intriguing potential. I recently wrote an article about the conversion of the Iowa Communications Network to video over IP and how that may impact the carriage of our signals to our nine transmitter sites ("Preparing for the IP Transition," Jan 18, 2012). As of this writing we are still looking at potential methodologies. At the same time I am also actively participating in a SMPTE ad hoc group looking at media device control over IP networks. So where am I going with this?

One of my primary reasons for being somewhat resistant to a more IT-centric infrastructure within the broadcast station environment is that the complexity and costs often outweigh the alluded to benefit. I know my IT friends will throw up their hands and tell me that I am missing a few marbles. They will talk about the commodity nature of IT hardware and software, the flexibility of IT infrastructures and on and on.

Their arguments may indeed be accurate in a broadcast network environment or in a television station in a top 10 or top 20 market where the talent pool is large and the salaries offered are enough to draw in people with the IT expertise to manage these complex and flexible networks. But from where I am, the budget can't support attracting and holding those people for too long. The budget also can't support changing out the infrastructure based on the ethereal driver of Moore's Law. But maybe there is a change in the wind that might change this.

Let's imagine that the core of the facility is now an IP network. In a packet network, the packets can be anything. In a broadcast facility the packets can be the video (compressed or uncompressed), the audio (mono, stereo, surround), graphics, metadata, control signals and so on. Now let's imagine that every piece of gear in the facility from monitors to servers and switchers to archives is plugged into the core IP router. If I look at the back of any piece of hardware in this environment I see two connections: the IEC power socket and the RJ45 Ethernet connector. OK, there might be two IEC connectors if dual power supplies are used.

But think about it! Every piece of equipment plugged into the core is turned on and identifies to the core, what it is, what it does, what it has on it, and pretty much anything and everything about it. Since these are full duplex connections that can handle anything, suddenly production switchers are control panels with a single Ethernet connection back to the core rather than to a frame with individual feeds coming from each piece of hardware. Editing systems, audio consoles and the like are all single Ethernet connections to a core router that literally routes every aspect of the devices attached and manages the interaction with the other devices attached to the core. Now there is a change that is worth making. A system limited only by the creativity of the users.

I suspect there is more than a bit of science fiction in the envisioned system but ever since I saw the first "Star Trek," I have been told that IT can do anything and I believed it... I wonder what the support service agreement on the Enterprise would be?

Bill Hayes is the director of engineering for Iowa Public Television.

JOHNSTON, IOWA: It wasn't a dark and stormy night, Wednesday, Dec. 15, 2010. In fact it was quiet in the White House... almost too quiet, but things were going to get a lot quieter. President Obama signs the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act and starts the clock ticking on regulations to protect consumers from loud commercials. The act gave the FCC one year to develop the regulations and methods of determining violations and enforcement procedures. A year later, on Dec. 13, 2011, the commission released its Report and Order adopting the rules and regulations associated with the CALM Act and started another clock giving all concerned parties one year to take the steps necessary to become compliant with the law and the methods for demonstrating compliance.

IPTV's audio processing system includes Linear Acoustic Aero.air Audio Loudness Manager on the HD stream and two Aero.one's for SD streams. I would encourage everyone to read the both the CALM Act and R&O 11-182 at the FCC web site. Read the latter because a good understanding of the requirements will help greatly in making the correct decisions. Read the former because there just aren't too many laws passed that are less than two pages long.

SEAMLESS TRANSITIONS

To be completely candid, at Iowa Public Television, loud commercials have never been much of a concern. And I am not making the point that we're non-commercial, we do have sponsors and we air spots that we call interstitials. For better or worse, our sponsors want to be viewed as part of the program they are underwriting rather than stand out from the program. The transitions tend to be much softer and more focused on flowing seamlessly from program to message to try and hold the viewers' attention.

I am not an advertising or marketing person but the sense I get is that if someone has just watched and enjoyed a program, they have a good feeling about it and the sponsors want to have that good feeling transferred to them by the association. Falling back on my old disc jockey days, it's like executing a smooth segue where the listener doesn't realize that the song has changed until they are already engaged in the new song. By contrast, commercial advertisements seem to want complete separation from everything around them so that they are viewed as a unique individual. Kind of makes them sound like teenagers looking for their individual identities.

Anyway, at IPTV we have been looking at this for some time. Like most stations, we have a shrinking staff and we looked for ways to be compliant that could be implemented as simply as possible. We multicast, so the solution had to be able to handle our primary high definition stream and our two standard definition streams. Adding to the mix is the fact that we are beginning to do some productions in true 5.1 surround sound. After many demonstrations, conversations with other engineers and tests, we decided on a solution from Linear Acoustic including the company's Aero.air Audio Loudness Manager on our HD stream and two Aero.one's on our SD streams.

AUTOMATED CAPABILITIES

Starting with the Aero.one, since the two SD channels are stereo only, we went with the TV model which offers dual stereo processors. Since much of our programming includes either SAP or video description information, each stream needed a unit. Down the road we can see a time when both services will be required and having the four channel audio capability really added to the value of the units. Another feature that was important to us was the 5.1 downmix that happens automatically. As I stated above, we pass and produce 5.1 surround material for our primary HD channel. Much of that content also gets played on one of our SD channels and the downmix capabilities allow us to use the same stored program from both the HD and SD playbacks without operator intervention.

The Aero.air on the HD stream and the Aero.ones both offer automated loudness control which in our environment is important. As I stated earlier, we have never really dealt with a loudness control issue and given our environment, I don't expect that will change. But one never knows and in the event that something does happen, the Aero.air has the processing/limiting capabilities to correct the error. Now my purist friends all tell me that if you get the metadata right, this capability is unnecessary and in fact changes the integrity of the sound. My experience is that getting the metadata right is a big "if," especially when dealing with content from multiple sources delivered as files. The added security of the more traditional limiters incorporated into the boxes is a good safety net when considering the procedures required to deal with an FCC complaint issue.

Probably my biggest act of audio heresy is the fact that we have the Aero.air set up to upmix anything that isn't true 5.1. I was extraordinarily skeptical about doing this. I worked for an NBC affiliate in Honolulu when we converted to stereo and went through a couple of iterations of stereo synthesizers. They were horrible; BTSC stereo separation wasn't all that great to begin with and the synthesizers made it even worse. But times and technology have changed and I have to say that the upmix capability in the Aero.air is pretty amazing. I have spent a good deal of time with some local electronics stores listening to the upmixed 5.1 and more importantly, listening to the downmixed stereo from the upmixed 5.1. I will not try and convince anyone that it is true 5.1 but it is very good and for people who have 5.1 systems, the upmix that comes from the Aero.one and is processed by their home systems as true 5.1 sounds better than any home system's upmix of stereo source material. At least any of the ones I have listened to.

So what is next for digital audio? I am hoping that a serious look at synchronization will take place. I have already started working on acronyms for the system. It will be great when television audio is CALM and COLLECTED. I may need help on the latter.

Bill Hayes is the director of engineering for Iowa Public Television. He can be reached via TV Technology.

JOHNSTON, IOWA: In the late 1980's, the State of Iowa passed a bill authorizing the construction of the Iowa Communications Network (ICN). The state's leaders recognized that being a rural state meant that many small communities would be disenfranchised from opportunities to grow in education, access to medical specialists and the approaching advanced communications services that were on the horizon. Iowa spent the first half of the 1990's and somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 million on construction of a private fiber-optic network. The ICN provided full motion video service to school, universities, government buildings and IPTV's then eight transmitter sites. The ICN continues to serve these facilities today.

IPTV's fiber I/O to the Iowa Communications NetworkBUGS, BUMPS & MISSED PROMISES

Of course technology has changed over time. When I first arrived at IPTV in 1999, the interconnects between the IPTV transmitters and the studios were DS3 circuits carried on a frame relay network, but the ICN had already started on conversion of the network to ATM and the video services were moving to MPEG-2. At the same time at IPTV, we were working through the technologies for transitioning to DTV.

As with any technology upgrade there were bugs, bumps and missed promises in both organizations. In that environment, I endeavored to keep IPTV from being subjected to the problems that I knew the ICN would be experiencing. At the same time I also sought to keep the problems that IPTV would encounter as isolated from the ICN as possible. I have been involved in too many system-wide upgrades where the problems in one area manifest themselves in remote areas and take forever to locate. So an agreement was reached with the ICN that whatever they did, our I/O to the network would continue to be DS3's and that we would handle all of the processes necessary to multiplex and demultiplex our then analog and digital streams into the DS3 carrier.

Ten years appears to go by much faster than one might imagine and now we find ourselves in a similar position. The ICN is now beginning to transition to IP networking. Our existing Harris NetVX interconnect system is getting a little long in the tooth and we have long since stopped sending an analog stream along with our digital transport stream. And quite frankly, our budgets have gotten tighter and we, like everyone else, are looking for efficiencies and cost savings to improve our ability to do the things that matter, like make programs. So clearly the concept of making another deal with the ICN to continue to provide us with a DS3 I/O is not practical. So what to do?

BRIDGING THE GAP

Over the last few years, as part of my work with the IEEE Broadcast Technology Society, I have been involved with the development of a training course called "Bridging the Gap." The focus of the course is to train traditional broadcast engineers like myself on the IT-based technologies that are being deployed within broadcast environments. One of the people involved in the creation of the course from very early on is Wes Simpson. Wes, who pens the "Video Networking" column for this magazine, is also one of the instructors, along with well- known broadcast consultant and expert John Luff. With the development of the BtG class, I have had a numerous conversations with Wes. He is one of those people that really knows his stuff and more importantly enjoys helping others learn it.

The build up here isn't to promote the BtG class, although I am not above that. It really is to talk about a book that I am about one third of the way through. The book is "Video Over IP" written by Wes. The folks that know me well know that I read a lot of books, magazines, white papers and such. Every now and then, I'll read a book that really sets something off in me and it is not unusual for members of my staff to get a book as a gift that I have read.

I started reading "Video Over IP" so that I could have some intelligent conversations with my staff about the prospects of converting our studio to transmitter links to IP. I also wanted to have similar conversations with the ICN so that I could ensure that our services would not be degraded. Being an "old school" broadcaster, my preference would be to have dedicated dark fiber with full control over all of the active systems involved with moving the signals back and forth. Being a realist, I recognized that is not a practical solution, so finding a compromise that makes sense is critical.

What I have discovered is that I should have read this book a long time ago. Wes' writing style is very much like his teaching style and I am learning a lot of subtle stuff that I just didn't know. The book is written very conversationally, which I like. At the end of each chapter is a checklist which I have been using as a quiz to make sure that I understand the substance of the chapter. The downside for me on the quizzes is that while I thought I would get through the book in a few days, I have had to go back and reread things more than a couple of times to make sure I fully understood the concept.

I had hoped that in this article I would be able to give a brief overview of what IPTV's plans are for IP networking via the ICN. Instead, I have discovered that I need to do a little more research and reading before I can put that into an article. I will tell some of my friends in the industry, don't be surprised if you get a copy of this book as a gift from me.

Bill Hayes is the director of engineering for Iowa Public Television. You can reach him via TV Technology.

JOHNSTON, IOWA—Over the last decade I have shared many experiences, both good and bad with the readers of TV Technology. about IPTV's transition to digital. A great deal of our earliest experiences in dealing with the transition were not related to the transmission technology but rather to the electronic field production arena. In 1998, long before IPTV could broadcast a digital signal, we began experimenting with digital EFP and were producing high definition productions on a regular basis by 2001.

One of the values of writing a journal is reviewing the past to see if the plans worked out as envisioned and what impact the changes have had. In the field of EFP, I have seen the technology change as we moved from analog tape to digital tape to digital disc in the field and from linear analog tape editing to digital analog tape editing to nonlinear digital tape editing to file-based editing. I have written in the past about the successes, challenges and failures as these transitions occurred. However, I am not a videographer or a producer so I was curious to get a different view.

Duane Huey'REASONABLE' STANDARDS

I sat down for lunch with IPTV Senior Producer/Director Duane Huey for a discussion about how the transition has impacted his work. Duane's tenure at IPTV exceeds mine by many years and his earliest productions were shot on 16mm film so he has seen more than his share of change. Our discussion was pretty wide ranging but I started by asking Duane what he liked and didn't like about producing content digitally.

He framed his initial response with the statement that he loves digital nonlinear editing. The flexibility that it gives him in creating a program is a huge advantage. Being able to make changes as the ideas occur with little or no inconvenience or effort makes for a great creative experience. Most of the creative people I know are not prone to linear thinking. They see the parade of ideas from the blimp above the route and zoom in to specific areas to work rather than sit at a fixed point on the route and watch the ideas go by.

In the linear editing environment this was enough of a challenge that it was not uncommon for good ideas to be untried or forgotten because of the hassles of re-editing a linear piece. Duane points out that there is a downside to this infinite flexibility in that it requires discipline to stop trying things and finish the program. At some point the show must go on.

One thing that Duane mentioned that he would like to see is "reasonable standards." Since I have been involved with some standards work, I wanted to understand what he meant.

He talked about the wide variety of formats and resolutions that are available and how selecting one over another was very difficult since in many cases there were no "perceivable differences in the end result." He feels that he is placed in a position of making choices for which he has no real level of comfort regarding the differences and the potential impact they may have. The ramification of the choices being made are not readily apparent until there is trouble. The most common problem is when content is created on one standards-based system and then sent to another standards-based system only to not work because the flexibility within the standard and the choices made by the end users have disrupted the interoperability of the systems. From the discussion it seemed to me that Duane's "reasonable standards" are really recommended practices.

NATURAL SELECTION

Based on all of the years he has worked in producing content, it is safe to say that Duane had mastered the tools he was using in the analog world. Given the rapid change and wide variety I asked him if he ever thought that he or anyone could master digital. Duane believes it is possible but thinks it is a ways off. Part of the mastery will be through the process of "natural selection" that takes place within the digital ecosystem as new ideas and processes are brought to light and then either die out from disinterest or are incorporated in to the environment. According to Duane, right now the processes are "piece meal" with specialized components or plug-ins doing specific tasks. While that works, it is not uncommon for a change in one of the components to ripple through and disrupt the functionality of the system. Since Duane and I have talked on many occasions he noted that this is the same as the problems I have discussed in our on-air environment where a change in one system has shut down or disrupted our broadcast service.

As we finished our lunch and drank a cup of coffee we did a little "pie in the sky" thinking about what the ultimate solutions might be. Duane envisions that systems will eventually have the artificial intelligence necessary to understand the environment they work in and as new components are added or modified, the systems will negotiate with each component and pull from the web or the cloud, the updates and modifications necessary to maintain the overall system functionality. That would seem to be a pretty ambitious ideal but in a world where virtually everything from toasters to electric power plants are going to be communicating with each other, it may actually happen within the next 4 or 5 digital generations... that would be 6 or 7 people years.

Bill Hayes is director of engineering for Iowa Public Television.

JOHNSTON, IOWA—When Iowa Public Television was retooling our plan to transition to digital, we were blessed with having an old but well maintained analog plant. We also recognized that—because of the age of the equipment—virtually none of the existing hardware systems would stay after the end of analog.

So although we were not making any structural changes in the building or permanently relocating any control rooms, as far as hardware was concerned we were starting with a clean slate. This meant that we could capitalize on what we knew worked in our existing layout and improve on functionality as we transformed from a composite video, stereo audio facility to all HD with 5.1 audio. Realizing the audio portion of the plan has been more of a challenge than we initially had thought but we are approaching the end of that transition and will be complete later this summer.

IPTV's new SSL MORSE routing systemINCREASE FLEXIBILITY

When looking to replace our existing stereo consoles we evaluated all of the consoles that would meet our need for 5.1 channel production. We selected the Solid State Logic C100HD as the console of choice and since we were outfitting our primary control room's audio booth, our 300-seat auditorium's audio booth and the audio booth for our HD mobile production, we ended up with three of these consoles. One of the mission-critical selection criteria for our operation was to have identical equipment in all three areas if possible to ensure that our operating staff could move seamlessly from one control facility to another and find equipment that they were familiar with. To increase flexibility over our previous audio control booths, we wanted to incorporate into the audio design the flexibility to allow any of the audio control rooms the ability to function with any of our studios, and if necessary, to operate in unison to expand the capabilities.

Since our planning team determined that embedded audio was not the best choice for our operation, flexibility in routing discrete audio within our facility was critical. The idea of adding more audio to our plant router was considered but the complexity and cumbersome nature of having to use an outboard router was definitely not our first choice.

One of the features offered with SSL audio consoles was the Modular Resource Sharing Engine (MORSE) routing system. The MORSE router provides a system for sharing remote audio inputs and outputs as well as related control data between any of our studios and audio booths. Obviously routing I/O's between rooms is nothing new but one of the nice features with the MORSE system combined with the C100 consoles is that the consoles have direct control of the router. This allows the operator at the console to modify the configuration of not only the console itself but the router as well and store all of the information. Complex configuration can be recalled easily including router designation, input parameters, phantom power, etc.

In each studio we have a 3RU MORSE MADI Stagebox. The primary studio has 8 of 14 slots filled which gives us 32 inputs while the Stagebox in the auditorium has 20 inputs. Each input card provides 4 inputs that can be configured as microphone or line level and includes a switchable 48 volt phantom power capability a 12 dB pad and a 24 bit A/D converter. The direct interface with the C100 consoles allows remote control of the analog pre-amp gain, phantom power and pad for each channel so the flexibility and ease of control for the operator is exceptional. Each of the Stageboxes is then linked back to the MORSE router frame via fiber optic cables. In our case the MORSE router frame itself is located in the auditorium audio control facility adjacent to the largest of our C100 consoles. This is essentially the audio center for our facility and the room where we do our most complex audio productions and post productions.

MADI TUTORIAL

The MADI (Multichannel Audio Digital Interface) communications protocol—also called "AES10"-—defines data formats and electrical characteristics for carrying multiple channels of digital audio. SSL, along with several other companies, originally developed MADI for use in professional audio, which allows for the use of either coaxial cable or fiber-optic lines. As noted above, IPTV elected to go with the fiber-optic cable implementation to eliminate any potential issues related to the long runs from the Stageboxes to the MORSE router.

The I/O cards in the Stageboxes allow the user to select sampling frequencies up to 96 kHz; and as tempting as it is to specify the highest sampling rate available for insuring the most accurate audio capture, there is a trade-off. Using the higher sample rates decreases the number of channels available from the Stagebox back to the router, so at 96 kHz, only 28 channels can be accommodated. While this would not be an issue for most productions it is something that needs to be considered when setting up the system as changing sampling frequencies is not as easy as making many of the other changes and the benefits may not be noticeable.

Routing is one of the more basic functions found within most professional installations. It sprang up from the desire to improve the flexibility that patchbays offered while eliminating many of the downsides associated with physically moving cords, dirty connectors, incorrect levels and the unpleasant sound that occurs when the wrong cable is moved at the wrong time. The sophistication, flexibility and complexity that digital has introduced is a two edged sword that can improve the capabilities of an operation but can also leave the operator mired in a digital rat's nest of virtual wires and connections. The MORSE system with its direct control capabilities with the C100 consoles at IPTV have allowed us to incorporate the benefits offered with minimal impact to the operator's focus on audio.

Bill Hayes is the director of engineering for Iowa Public Television. He can be reached via TV Technology.

LAS VEGAS—Once again I have made my annual pilgrimage to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. I have typically used the research I do at this show to write a column on audio from the standpoint of what is available to the consumer at home and I guess I will now have to expand my research to include mobile systems as well.

Dolby’s booth at the 2011 CES I was also interested to see what impact the passage of the Commercial Announcement Loudness Mitigations (CALM) Act had on concumer electronics manufacturers. Finding interesting audio topics and knowledgeable people was a little bit of a challenge at this year's CES because most of the hype was around 3D displays, Internet-enabled televisions and tablet PDA's and their plethora of applications.

NO DOG IN THE HUNT?

Virtually every television and set-top box manufacturer I spoke with seemed to think that the CALM Act was a broadcaster issue and didn't have a dog in the hunt. Most believed that it was up to the broadcasters to implement properly implement dialnorm and the CALM Act provided the club to insure that this happens. This reminded me of some of the data that I had acquired at last year's CES when I asked Dolby's folks why Dolby Volume was desirable. They pointed out to me that not everything that came into the receiver was Dolby encoded, so dialnorm metadata wouldn't be present when switching between cable and terrestrial channels. Nor would dialnorm necessarily be present when switching between inputs, like from television to disc to game console and now web content. So even after the CALM Act is implemented and broadcasters are in compliance, inconsistent loudness may still be an issue for many consumers.

Raising this point with various manufacturers resulted in requests for my business card so "someone from the head office could get back to me." Since I am writing this column immediately after the CES, no one has contacted me yet but I will try and follow up on this issue.

In my early years of working in the industry, I actually wanted to be a recording engineer for a record company or a studio. I realized pretty early on that as much as I loved audio, I didn't have the ears that the great audio engineers I met had so I had to content myself with fixing the tape machines and audio consoles. My work in radio provided me with a better opportunity because my ears were good enough to allow me to manipulate audio processors for radio stations and make them sound really.

When I moved into television I generally was the engineer that got the audio jobs because none of the video engineers really wanted to work on audio, and after all, pictures are what television is all about. In all that time, I have seen many bad pictures. Inconsistent color reproduction, smearing, white clipping, crushed blacks and washed out images and yet no one has ever demanded that television stations get their act together and fix their video. As a matter of fact, the only video problem that I have ever heard a consumer really get ticked off about was too much sync, which of course created a buzz in the audio. But what is it about bad audio that is so upsetting? Think about it! We now have a federal mandate dictating to broadcasters that they need to insure that their audio won't upset the audience.

MECHANICAL SENSE

First you need to recognize that the sense of hearing is different from the senses of vision, taste and smell. The latter three all involve a chemical reaction taking place within the body while the process of receiving sound is completely mechanical. All those tiny bio-mechanical devices within the ear gather in what you hear and send it straight to the brain. Not to the thinking part of the brain however, but to the emotional and pleasure centers.

I recently read the book "This is Your Brain on Music" by Daniel J. Levitin, a Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience as well as a musician and producer. In his book, he analyzes how the brain processes music and how it relates to our emotions. One of the interesting things he notes is that as the brain processes sound, immediately after the auditory cortex recognizes the sounds that the ear has received, the association cortex compares those sounds with past memories. This is how we remember a song and in theory the happy or sad times that we associate it. Other parts of the brain are also working on the sounds we hear such as rhythm, chord progressions and chord resolution. All of this takes place without conscious thought or analysis—this is why people say they love a song. On a fundamental level, the music is touching their emotional control center directly.

Sound makes its way into our brains with virtually no conscious processing and it elicits immediate emotional response. Therefore when it is done poorly or something completely unpleasant and unexpected happens it generates an immediate and emotional response from the listener. People don't think about sound, they feel about sound. This is why it is crucial to ensure that the sound that passes from our facilities triggers the right emotions with the audience.

In the 1974 southern rock anthem "Sweet Home Alabama," vocalist Ronnie Van Zant starts the song saying "turn it up" and millions of fans did because the music triggered an emotion that they wanted to intensify. The CALM Act is the inverse statement of "turn it down" and if we don't get it right we'll next hear the audience say "turn it off."

Bill Hayes is the director of engineering for Iowa Public Television. He can be reached via TV Technology.

Pixelmetrix' Electronic Couch Potato monitors and reports Quality of Experience from the end user point of view.
JOHNSTON, IOWA— There has been much written about the difficulties of delivering video services over an IP network. Packet loss, latency, timing, jitter and bandwidth all present challenges even in a well-designed private network. When the consumer's connection is via the public internet, the challenges are magnified by all of the other stuff that is sharing the road. There are some people who believe that ultimately all media consumption will be via a data network (wired or wireless) and that real-time steams of content sent via traditional broadcast mechanisms will cease to be. I have to admit that I am not one of them as I believe that each method is a tool and at times one tool is better for the job than the other.

QUALITY OF SERVICE

Be that as it may, the fact remains that the content that originates at our stations is even now being delivered as video over IP network connections. Therefore understanding the measurement criteria for the services throughout the entire system is crucial. Quality of Service (QoS) is a term that most broadcast engineers are familiar with but they may not fully understand what it actually means. Quality of service is a term from the telecommunications engineering business and is essentially a service reservation. I liken it to booking tickets on a plane. It allows the person making the reservation to select which cabin they want to sit in and sometimes even the seat they want. Another term that we are now becoming more familiar with is Quality of Experience (QoE). Quality of Experience is the subjective measure of the end users experience. It is essentially the overall perception of how good our service is to the viewer.

Quality of Service is an important metric to fully understand. Overtime, even a well-engineered network will experience changes that may affect the performance of the service. In the old days of point to point systems, the paths between send and receive devices were dedicated and the traffic was tightly controlled and well regulated. Bandwidth was a factor of inputs and outputs on the routing switcher rather than the amount of information traveling on the wires. IT- based networks use a shared switching fabric and infrastructure. They are typically designed using load statistics rather than counting inputs and outputs. It is common for even a well-designed IP network to have some QoS issues like packet loss timing variations caused by congestion. The designs are done at a point in time, taking into account current network loading and making a best guess at future loads. However, new ideas spring up all the time that may not have been considered when the system was designed which add to the load on the network.

A more subtle issue is the fact that as many of the high speed components in the system age, their performance tends to roll off. In the old days of analog video, as components aged it was not uncommon to see high frequency roll-off which showed up as a loss of detail in video. This was pretty easy to diagnose and track because everything traveled independently on dedicated paths. When devices start to exhibit age-related performance issues in an IP network, my experiences have been that the indicators tend to be more intermittent because of the statistical nature of the loading and the fact that they're harder to track down. Of course if I was following Moore's Law, I would be replacing my infrastructure every 18 months and this wouldn't be a problem. Unfortunately, my budget doesn't adhere to Moore's Law and prevents me from wholesale replacement of systems. This is why it is vital to monitor closely the systems and record each and every modification, addition and subtraction so that QoS issues may be determined as quickly as possible.

QUALITY OF EXPERIENCE

The other side of this coin is the Quality of Experience. Within a facility, there isn't a whole lot of difference between the two. The service provider and the customer typically all work for the same organization and the communication while not always perfect is pretty much immediate. Engineers in the station can work closely with their colleagues to diagnose and correct issues or at the very least perform a work around. But what happens if the customers are the viewers in their homes? Now the content is leaving the tightly controlled and theoretically well designed internal network and traveling through the public network? One of the Quality of Service metrics that will have a direct relationship to Quality of Experience in the home is bandwidth. Bandwidth to the home is typically specified as "up to" some number. However, the theoretical minimum may be far below that number and will vary based on time and the amount of other consumers sharing the fabric. As more and more consumers migrate to these types of systems to consume content, including high definition, the Quality of Experience they have may be far worse than they will tolerate and yet no Quality of Service metrics will be violated.

I have recently started acquiring devices such as the Logitech Revue, the Boxee Box and AppleTV because I want to experience what many of the consumers of the content Iowa Public Television produces. In order to improve the quality of service though these devices, I want to make sure that I share the quality of experience.

Bill Hayes is the director of engineering for Iowa Public TV. He can be reached via TV Technology.

JOHNSTON, IOWA
A couple of years ago when Iowa Public Television decided to produce virtually everything in HD, we designed our core infrastructure as a single layer of HD video routing, switching and processing. In our view, from the technical side, this made for a much simpler plant design that was easier to understand, work in and maintain than a more complex multilayer plant with SD and HD levels as well as file based layers. In essence, we wanted to avoid creating a cloud within the confines of the IPTV facility which we sent things into and hoped that what we wanted came out.

Grass Valley KalypsoDECISION TREE

As an example of our decision process, I'd like to look at our selection of production switchers, what we ended up with and how, now a few years down the road that decision has panned out. The first go/no-go decision was pretty easy—we analyzed our production workflow for the type of content we create and then looked at all of the possible choices out there and asked the question: Does this product work in that environment? If the answer was yes it went to the next round. The next question was: Does this product really work? Much of that evaluation was based on numerous visits with manufacturers at NAB, SMPTE and other shows and asking for demonstrations of specific required features or processes.

Typically we were told that a required feature wasn't available yet but would be in the near future if we would wait one more cycle (typically six months). If it wasn't available by then, the product was a no-go and pulled from consideration. I had a few manufacturers complain that we weren't providing them with enough time but I expect the delivered product to do everything that was promised. As part of that process, the IPTV team also had to reconfirm that the feature was a "must have." If not, it was pulled from the requirements so that all of the manufacturers had equal opportunity.

'SOFT AND FUZZY'

Through this decision tree process we got down to four production switchers which met all of the requirements so that from the purely technical viewpoint, we knew that any of the products would work in our environment. This is where the digital decision tree ended and the "softer and fuzzier" decision process begins. This involved bringing in all four of the switchers for week-long setup and demonstrations and having technical directors, producers and engineers go through the systems, try them out and rate them based on more subjective qualities.

I am an engineer that looks at the creation of content as a combination of technology and art. So I look at the technology—in this case the production switcher—the same way a musician looks at an instrument. Most musicians that can play a specific instrument will tell you that they can play any make or model of the instrument but they have their favorite makes and models and even specific units within the model. If you ask for explanations as to why, you'll hear terms that are hard to quantify, like "feel" and "tone" and "warmth." It really is an emotional response, not a technical response.

I hear similar things when I talk with technical directors at IPTV and other facilities that I have been associated with. As their skill level increases, they become much more aware of and in tune with very subtle factors that make one instrument more pleasing to play than another, even when talking about switchers. It was this level of evaluation that led IPTV to ultimately select the Grass Valley Group Kalypso switcher for our HD production control room.

The Kalypso has been in service for about three years and the question is, are we still happy with the selection? I am pleased to say that the answer to that question is yes. From the technical side, the system has performed very well. There were a couple of early infantile failures like power supplies and bad switches, but nothing fundamental to the long term performance of the system.

Anyone who watched the Iowa Caucuses during the 2008 elections saw this switcher in operation since that event originates from the IPTV studios. If there are any complaints regarding the switcher's capabilities it may be that we underestimate the capabilities of the unit and find ourselves in some ways underutilizing it. The only negative comment I will make is that I made a technical decision regarding the switcher's stillstore capability that turned out to be wrong. Whereas the Kalypso has a pretty good capacity for functioning as a stillstore, in our environment, the methodology for inputting stills into the unit was too cumbersome. Our technical directors raised the issue before we purchased the unit; I asked them to try, they did, and then we all agreed that although the capability was there, it didn't meet our needs so we ended up purchasing a stillstore which did.

My advice when buying instruments for your orchestra is to work closely with the people that will be playing them because even if you can't tell the difference, they can.

Bill Hayes is the director of engineering for Iowa Public Television.

JOHNSTON, IOWA
Has anyone else noticed that transitioning to file-based digital media has now made workflow analysis a top priority? If I can quote Andy Rooney, "Why is that?" I think the primary reason is that the traditional broadcast workflow doesn't make sense in the file-based environment...or does it? Well, it depends on how you look at your broadcast plant and the mission of your organization. When it comes to evaluating workflows, a couple of the fundamental questions to ask are, "what is our business?" and "is it still relevant?"

If your business is being a carrier of content primarily created by others, than you are in essence a repackaging operation, which in the multi-stream world, is highly commoditized and therefore requires a very lean organization to be sustainable.

A network-affiliated station, relying on advertising revenues from the network stream and syndicated components to pay the bills and then relying on revenues from its local news components for profitability, may see some real challenges. As the non-local products increase in their availability from other sources and the audience migrates to those sources, it is highly unlikely that the advertising revenues will keep pace with the increase cost per viewer that will result from audience dilution.

The author and his tools
In this environment, the underlying technical plant has to be fully automated, highly reliable and inexpensive to operate and maintain. I think in essence you're looking at a facility that is actually driven by the traffic department, not by engineers or operators. As far as I know, the companies that are making traffic systems don't really want the responsibility of taking direct control of the automation that is running the content on the air. But, without that seamless connection, there will need to be an interface layer that verifies that what traffic is sending and what automation is playing agree.

METADATA MATTERS

Now on the other hand, if your business is about creating local content, then the underlying technical plant has to be capable of efficient operation without getting in the way of the creative process. This may or may not sound easy but I have seen and quite frankly been involved in projects that failed because the intuitively designed technology made sense to the designers and engineers but not to producers and users.

Some of my colleagues at various PBS stations have been discussing how to handle audio at the broadcast station with the soon to be implemented CALM Act. One of the discussion threads has been about implementing proper metadata when using Dolby E. I'm not complaining about Dolby E or any Dolby product but a few of the comments pointed back to producers not ensuring that the metadata on their Dolby E encoded content was correct. A few of the producers at my facility and some others I talked with all knew the name Dolby and the term metadata. Some had even heard of Dolby E. None of them knew anything about the metadata required for ensuring that the audio was properly encoded or decoded. More importantly, none of them wanted to know about audio metadata. For most producers, metadata is the stuff they used to write on the tape label, the box and on their story notes. They know and understand this metadata because it is useful to them in the creation of their content. This techno-geek metadata is at best a non-issue to them and at worst, a reason not to use the systems or services that requires it. That is not to say that producers won't learn new technologies or systems, but for the creative person it appears that they have to want to learn it rather than have to learn it.

So when designing a workflow in the content creation realm, we need to understand that there are times when the lowest price may not be the most strategic decision. Early in my tenure at IPTV, all of the IT staff was moved into my department and one of the dividing lines was the familiar Mac/PC boundary. Since the vast majority of the station was PC based, I decided that whenever possible we would purchase PC versions of software. I made that decision because I was looking at the complexity of managing and servicing the systems used throughout the station. It took several years and the patient understanding of a couple of editors and a few IT people who were all willing to try. We finally got to the point where it was clearly proved that I was completely wrong in trying to implement this strategy. Having spent time with editors and IT professionals, I realized even though the software could be implemented on both platforms, there were time when it just ran better and was easier to implement on a Mac and the cost savings didn't make up for the differences.

ASSEMBLY LINE VS. CUSTOMIZED

I think most stations are really more hybrid operations based on my analogy. They have this distribution factory that repackages parts from others and they have this "skunk works" that turns out specialty parts (content) that has a premium price compared to the wholesale price they pay for the outsourced parts. So when planning digital workflow it is vital to understand the different requirements between the two. Using the automobile industry as an analogy, think about the different mindsets, processes and budgets required for turning out a custom car vs. a production model. Which is the right business model? Are you working for an assembly line facility that turns out a low cost stream? Are you working for a custom shop that turns out premium components? Are you working for a hybrid operation that does both? There is no right or wrong answer, it is just important to recognize and understand the differences. That way you can design the workflow to be realm appropriate.

I'll share one last analogy from my own life. Not counting my family, I have two things I love; technology and music. I enjoy exploring technologies, understanding them and using them. I enjoy playing music, figuring out songs and learning to play better. I have a complete love/hate relationship when I try to combine the two.

My music room is littered with sophisticated guitar effects multi-processing pedals that feature unlimited creative possibilities. Most of them I use for three or four setups because they are too complex to program and when I am in the creative realm things need to flow. Having to figure out how to activate the flanging effect or turn off the echo-plex disrupts the flow and hinders my creativity. However, when I am in my technical realm and am noodling around with these effects just to hear what they sound like, I'll spend many happy hours experimenting.

The difference in the latter realm is that I want to do it. I don't think it is too different for the people that create the content we broadcast, they live and work in two parallel realms and move between them happily at will and begrudgingly when forced.

Bill Hayes is director of engineering for Iowa Public Television.

JOHNSTON, IOWA
When I came to work at Iowa Public Television in May 1999, I inherited a four-year plan to convert the studios and the eight full-powered transmitters to digital. As time rolled by, I used to joke that I was seven or eight or nine years into a four-year plan. On August 23, 2010, the four-year plan finally was completed when our digital translator in Decorah, Iowa was placed on the air and all of our services became available to all of our viewers.

I don't look back on any of this as bad planning because at the time the plan was created, much of what we were planning for hadn't been invented. As a matter of fact, one of the primary drivers for IPTV to create and continue the Iowa DTV Symposium for 14 years was the recognition that we didn't know what we didn't know and we weren't alone. So some delays were the results of slow product development and ideas that didn't pan out.

New digital transmitters en route to their final destinations in Decorah and Lansing, Iowa. Some delays were caused by the unforeseen, such as two unprecedented economic downturns. The first downturn early in the plan slowed progress but provided time for the inventions to be refined. It also gave us time to revise and refine our goals and become one of the leading stations in the adoption of high definition throughout our facility. The second economic downturn or the "great recession" as we now refer to it, towards the end of the plan has slowed the finish work. You know, the things we'll go back to complete once we get all of the big item finished?

UNFORESEEN WINDFALL

Among the "finish work" for IPTV was the conversion of our eight translators from analog to digital. Our translators were a concern even at the beginning of the plan. All eight of them had been displaced by DTV full-power stations and when I arrived at the station, seven of them had construction permits to be moved to non-core television channels and one had no construction permit at all because no channel could be found. I was not particularly pleased with the prospect of building seven out-of-core channels that I knew would have to be rebuilt with in-core channels at some point in the not-too-distant future. I was most concerned with the one translator that didn't have an assignment as it serviced Ottumwa, Iowa which has a fairly large population and supports IPTV. In case you're curious, the residence of fictional character Walter "Radar" O'Reilly did not factor into our concern.

When I hired consultant Greg Best to look into the situation at Ottumwa, the situation was bleak. The local ABC affiliate in the area which had been assigned our analog translator channel had fired up at low power and our signal was unwatchable. I asked Greg to see if he could find us a channel that was in-core and if possible, one we could eventually flash cut to digital on at some point in the future. I was pleasantly surprised when after a very brief analysis, Greg reported back to me that he had found a channel and then further stunned me by asking how much ERP I wanted as he believed we could do slight north of 100 kilowatts on the channel he had located. Suddenly I was not just looking at restoring service to Ottumwa but now providing service to a larger audience.

This unforeseen windfall caused me to reconsider our other seven translators that had out-of-core construction permits at the same low-power levels as their displaced channels. Could the same thing be done for them so that IPTV could improve and grow service to the audiences in the most remote sections of Iowa while simultaneously providing an inexpensive path to digital conversion? We contracted with Greg to look at the other translators to see what could be done. Not only were we able to accomplish the same thing at the other seven sites as far as power was concerned, but at three of the sites we were able to stay on our current analog channels by employing directional antennas.

We proceeded to contract for translators for analog operation at the new increased power level with all of the components and services necessary to convert them to digital operation in the field. We contracted for new antennas on the new channels and began the process of systematically retooling the plants. Top priority was given to our Ottumwa facility which is located in the southeast corner of the state, which was completed and went operational as an analog facility in October 2006 and was converted to digital in December 2009.

BACK TO THE DRAWING BOARD

IPTV's translators are located in three of the four corners of the state. Four are located in the southeast corner, two in the northeast corner and two in the northwest corner. Since work had been started at the Ottumwa site, located in the southeast corner, we decided to focus on completing the retooling there and then tackle the northeast and then northwest corners. Equipment had been ordered, antennas where in fabrication, tower work was scheduled and we were making good progress when the FCC announced the maximization plan and several of our translators had to have new channel assignments as maximized full-power DTV stations precluded our use of the assigned analog channels for digital operations. Fortunately we were able to minimize the financial impact of the required changes, but it presented delays in delivery of hardware which when coupled with Iowa winters and the now firm analog shutoff date taking all of the available tower crews out of the mix, the projects slowed again.

So after more than a decade of planning, implementing, delays, revisions, and a myriad of other bumps and hiccups, the last of the IPTV transmission facilities in Decorah, Iowa has converted to digital. Iowa Public Television is once again providing all of its services to virtually all Iowans at no charge. Although there is a great deal of satisfaction within IPTV's engineering department and the station as a whole that we have finally completed the conversion, we keep our eyes focused on the horizon. We are already investigating the upgrades necessary to do Mobile DTV and are watching the storm clouds brewing under the banner of the National Broadband Plan. We're closely watching the developments with ATSC 2.0. There will also be ongoing changes as the ATSC planning team 3 looks into integrating services with Web-enabled television. Planning team 1 looks into the potential for delivering terrestrial 3D services. And just over the horizon, planning team 2 is considering the replacement for the existing DTV standard that at the station may result in beginning the process all over again.

So in fact, what we have completed at Iowa Public television is phase one in an evolutionary process that in all likelihood has no end date. So for those of you who thought that converting to digital was the destination, it was just a milestone or a mile marker on the highway. Enjoy the journey because the destination is over the horizon, obscured by clouds and possibly on the dark side of the moon. And if I can quote Roger Waters, "there is no dark side of the moon really, it's all dark."

Bill Hayes is the director of engineering for Iowa Public Television. You can reach him via TV Technology.

JOHNSTON, IOWA
At IPTV we have been going through our strategic planning for the last few months. As we were distilling our visions, one of the items that bubbled to the top was Mobile DTV. The strategic goal is not to turn on Mobile DTV by some fixed date but rather to develop a business plan for deploying the service. There is a not too subtle difference between the two concepts that is not lost on me.

The first thing we look at is the budget. In our case the expense is not just what it will cost to purchase the hardware necessary to deploy mobile but also the impact to our existing services. Currently we broadcast a full-time HD service as our primary channel and two standard definition services. Since the State of Iowa specifies that we provide free service to all Iowans, we have to carefully examine any reallocation of bandwidth that would either degrade or reduce our services. We have to be able to demonstrate that any service reduction has a corresponding service improvement. This is one of the primary reasons we didn't jump on the bandwagon for datacasting when it first came out. The services that we evaluated didn't really offer any value to our audience that was in line with our mission; nor did they appear to have a business plan that offered any real indication of sustainability. The fact that most of them have since failed is evidence that we were correct in our initial evaluation and further strengthens our resolve to make sure that if and when we move into Mobile DTV we'll have a sound strategy that meets our objectives.

LEFTOVER SPACE

One recent event has had some impact on our plans for a Mobile DTV service. While working with Harmonic to upgrade our encoders and statistical multiplexer, we discovered that the statmux still had our third and fourth standard definition encoders in the pool—and even though they were disabled, they were still taking up almost 2 MB of data space. Some additional changes to the filtering and preprocessing of the active encoders generated another 300 to 500 kilobits of bandwidth. These changes coupled with the overhead we already were seeing prior to the modifications means that we now have about 3 MB of bandwidth that we could use without requiring us to give up any of our current services or make any significant sacrifice in the quality of those services. We are definitely going to do some experimentation to verify these numbers and confirm this assumption. The rule of thumb for planning bandwidth requirements for the most robust service is about 4:1. Using that as a planning factor and assuming a total of 3 MB being available, IPTV could conceivably broadcast a 750-kilobit service and at that rate, the service would look quite good on virtually all of the mobile and portable screens coming on the market.

Hardware costs are also a factor that need to be fully developed. According to a recent presentation on Mobile DTV given by Marcus Alexander, NAB's Executive Vice President of Television, I learned that the estimated average cost for a station to upgrade to mobile was in the $50,000-$100,000 range.

While I agree this estimate is probably a good ballpark figure for a single station to get started in Mobile DTV, it doesn't present a real sustainable planning figure. For this amount, a station could add the necessary hardware to incorporate Mobile DTV data into their data stream and upgrade a single DTV exciter in a transmitter to broadcast the Mobile DTV data. Many stations have two exciters within their DTV transmitters to provide backup in the event of exciter problems as well as accommodating software upgrades. Not too many of us are comfortable with upgrading an exciter and having problems develop and not having a fallback. Upgrading the primary exciter to incorporate Mobile DTV capabilities without upgrading the backup exciter would mean that a failure in the primary exciter would result in the absence of mobile service despite the restoration of primary broadcast service. This assumes that the transport stream that has mobile data multiplexed into it can be used to drive a non Mobile DTV-capable exciter. This is a question that I have not yet received an answer to. If this is not the case, then the station will have to have the facilities to revert the stream back to a traditional non-Mobile DTV state. This might be acceptable for an operation that is experimenting and trying to develop a Mobile DTV strategy but it would be risky for an operation that depends on reliable mobile services.

TRANSMITTER ISSUES

Many stations have a primary and a backup transmitter, which presents even further challenges. At six of IPTV's nine transmitter sites our primary transmitter is an Axcera Visionary transmitter and the backup is a Harris Diamond. Both Axcera and Harris incorporate into their exciters dynamic control of the output RF signal to correct for linearity and power. Both use different methodologies and although we can and have used one manufacturer's exciter to drive the other manufacturer's transmitter, it required that we disable the auto-correction circuitry.

Depending on the amount of correction that typically is applied and the stability of the passive RF system and the environment, the absence of auto-correction may be problematic and would definitely not be a good long term solution. Conceivably we could upgrade one of each type of exciter at each site and just do a wholesale transmitter switch in the event of a primary exciter failure. But that assumes that the backup transmitter system has enough output power to provide adequate market coverage. At our sites this is the case but at many commercial broadcast facilities, their backup transmitter is a lower-powered DTV system that was used to provide coverage to their city of license pending the end of analog and the installation of a full-power primary DTV system. Dropping 7 or 8 dB would have a noticeable effect on the primary DTV service and might make Mobile DTV unreceivable.

None of the figures take into account the addition of circular or elliptical transmission facilities. How much additional vertical power is needed is debatable but a station running its DTV transmitter at its maximum capability will either have to add additional transmitter power or sacrifice some horizontal power to drive the vertical transmission system. This may mean risking audience at the fringe to try and gain coverage for mobile services close in. With IPTV's mission being to serve all Iowans, this could mean putting viewers at risk for whom we are the only terrestrial service available. That would be a tough position to justify.

These are some of the fundamental elements that we are just now beginning to analyze so that when we do develop our Mobile DTV plan, we have as full an understanding of all of the costs. I have been around a number of people and projects for whom deploying the technology is the strategic goal but the real success comes when the technology is deployed to either augment or create a successful business. There is no doubt about the fact that the technology works and that once it is deployed the performance will improve—just look at what has happened with terrestrial DTV. Technology is a manageable challenge, but I think the real substantive challenge confronting the fledgling Mobile DTV industry is finding a working and sustainable business model.

Bill Hayes is the director of engineering for Iowa Public Television.

JOHNSTON, IOWA
I was recently reading a thread online regarding a broadcast program feed that had a couple of problems. One of the problems included a breakup based on the localization of the stations; it was a weather-related downlink rain fade.

A number of stations experienced the problem but the majority did not. Traveling with the same notification were additional reports from stations that, although they did not experience the breakup, their recording of the program was down-cut because the timing of the show provided to them was incorrect and their automation systems stopped recording when the clock reached the end of the scheduled recording time. Some stations dealt with the timing inaccuracies by programming a pad at the start and end of their automated recording processes. My favorite comment was from a station that pointed out that they are not automated and thanks to the fact that they use humans to perform their recording, they don’t push the stop recording button until they see the program end. They closed their comments with “Humans-1, Computers-0!” My first thought was to contact this person with the message that the timing error was probably the result of a human operator entry mistake on the front end of the process and the poor computers were only doing what they were told. To me that makes the score zero to zero and although a tie, everybody actually lost.

But there is a fact here that cannot be ignored. In this particular case, a human was able to look at the data and at the actual feed and make a more correct decision than the computer. How is it possible for a human to make a better decision than a computer? Simple; the human had access to more real-time information than the computer and was therefore able to adjust the decision process in accordance with the real world situation, not the theoretical situation that was programmed.

COMING UP SHORT

This is one of the oldest problems in automated systems. Since my earliest days in broadcasting and dealing with automated workflows in both radio and television I have envisioned a time when the program/traffic log would seamlessly drive the automation controlling the hardware in real time. Content would flow into the system from the network, the syndicators, the advertising agencies and local production. It would report itself to the automated workflow system with all of the pertinent data necessary to allow the traffic component to schedule it accurately and let the automated playback system find it and after playing, log the exact time and duration that it played and create an as-run log that reflected accurately how the content aired. Virtually no human intervention would be involved in the process under normal circumstances. Only during live events or when there was an actual equipment failure would people, with their natural ability to make decisions based on current conditions be called into action.

Every few years I hear about, or become involved in a project that ostensibly promises this kind of automated workflow and so far every attempt has come up short. My experience has been that when concerns are raised about the actual implementation versus the promised system’s goals or target performance specifications, they are met with phrases like managed expectations, implementation issues or next version solutions. As an example, I was recently involved in a conversation where the system providers declared that the system performance criteria had been met and when one of the test users of the product pointed out that only one small part of the criteria had actually been satisfied there was considerable discussion and backtracking to clarify what the provider actually meant. As it turned out, the end user’s point was well taken and the provider did agree that although progress on the entire system had been realized, it was premature to announce success. I have no doubt that had this user not raise a fuss about this overstatement of performance, a lot of unnecessary grief would have been generated as other potential users proceeded along with their planning under the assumption that everything was working fine when in fact there is still much more work to be done.

For me, these types of issues are what differentiate automation from automated workflow. In the good old days of isolated systems, we could autonomously automate a process and the change to the workflow was compensated for by the humans that acted as the interfaces between the processes. Because they could make decisions based on the situation rather than just on the data, the humans would adjust the input and output between the systems. In essence, even though all of the systems within their silos were being automated, humans were driving or providing the interface between the automated processes.

Another significant change is the business that we’re working in. Many of the products we deliver are available from other sources. There are many other sources of similar products. The products we create must now be delivered via other mediums. The old assembly line model that was broadcasting has changed and the infrastructure must change to support it. This environment is much broader than our original business and much more dynamic and requires a level of flexibility and adaptability that has not been required in broadcasting.

SERVICE ORIENTED ARCHITECTURE

I think this new reality is what is driving our industry toward the service oriented architecture. Depending on whose book you read or what vendor you talk with, the formal definition of SOA has some subtle difference. For me, I like to look at it as a “shock absorber” between automated systems that smoothes out the road that content takes on its journey from creation to consumer.

However you want to look at it, SOA is a methodology that can be used to decouple the various processes within the system to allow for modifications to existing processes and addition of new processes without shutting down the overall service. I haven’t talked to any station yet that hasn’t had the experience of doing an upgrade or update to one of their automated products only to find that the change has rippled through the system and created unforeseen problems in other systems.

The heart of the issue is finding the solutions that allow for the decoupling of processes and services to permit modifications, additions and deletions while the overall system continues to perform. In the silo world of early automation, I can remember working with systems until they were stable and then never touching them again. As long as they did the job, they were left alone. And when the job was as simple as getting content through the one assembly line that was the station, this worked. In the environment where we are now delivering products through a growing multitude of additional distribution channels, with different needs and dynamics, this process doesn’t work. Service Oriented Architecture may offer stations the ability to compete and stay relevant in a very different and changing media environment.

Bill Hayes is the director of engineering for Iowa Public Television. He can be reached via TV Technology.

JOHNSTON, IOWA
Here at Iowa Public Television, we typically do two types of electronic field production (EFP): long-form documentaries and live or live-to-record productions such as sporting events and concerts. Each type of EFP production has different staff and resource requirements that test our limited budgets.

IPTV’s remote vehicle can be operated by existing staff and produce network quality programs in high definition from any venue. Long-form documentary productions are generally shot in pieces at various locations and assembled in an HD edit suite. With live or live-to-record production, we capture the event as it happens and present it so that the audience has a sense of being there. Many of the same skills and collaborations required for long-form production are needed, but the opportunities for experimentation and refinements are limited. Once the action starts, whether a sporting event or a concert, the die is cast. If the orchestra makes a mistake, the audience sees it just as the live audience did. If the production crew makes a mistake, the viewing audience will see it, even if the event audience didn't. The opportunities to correct errors doesn't exist, so pre-production planning and rehearsals are crucial.

MORE OPPORTUNITIES

During our conversion to digital over the past decade, we saw an increase in the opportunities for live productions. But because of the relatively low number of HD-capable trucks available, we once again looked into purchasing our own production truck. We had our own production truck at one time, but due to an earlier budget crunch (prior to my arrival), the number of productions had declined and it was cheaper for us to rent.

As we began to explore the idea of a local HD production truck, we had a wealth of experience and expectations from the past which we had to balance against the new economy of broadcasting that we are all dealing with. Cost of ongoing ownership had to be factored in and that often went counter to the expectations from the previous experience.

We developed and documented a basic set of capabilities that the truck had to have in order to do the type and quality of productions that we typically undertake. We also factored in some limitations on the size and type of vehicle. Initially the plan was to try and build a mobile production platform on a truck frame that didn't require any specialized driver licenses or training. One of our initial plans was based on a motor home chassis, and since Winnebago is an Iowa company, we met with them on several occasions to refine designs. Ultimately that path was abandoned because the limitations on capabilities was greater than our production needs could tolerate.

We used the documentation and plans to create an RFI and distributed that to all of the companies that built remote vehicles to see what they would recommend for a vehicle. Although we were on track with the one-piece vehicle, all of the vendors came to the conclusion that the weight of the vehicle would require the driver to have a CDL license.

FAMILIARITY

After reviewing all of the information we received from vendors and some additional meetings with the local production team, we created an RFP to begin the formal purchasing process. From that procedure we selected Frontline Communications to build the truck and worked with them to finalize the design and select equipment. Since we did not have specialized remote production staff, we determined that as much as possible, the hardware in the truck had to be the same as the hardware we used for studio productions—local staff would have to be familiar with the equipment. For the types of productions we do, many of the graphics and stills can be pre-produced. The truck is equipped with the same Sony 1550 cameras, Chyron graphics engine, SSL audio console and Ku uplink equipment that we use on a daily basis in our studio productions. The only primary piece of equipment we had to compromise on was the switcher. At the studio we use a Grass Valley Kalypso but the control surface was too large for the truck so we installed the GVG Kayak, which has the capabilities we need for production and the footprint for the truck.

The completed truck has now been on the road for almost two years and overall we have been very satisfied with the performance. Though not as easy to roll as we had initially envisioned, the vehicle still doesn't require the effort and maintenance of a big rig. Packing the capabilities of a six-camera remote production truck into a two-axle vehicle does require some compromise, especially on creature comforts. But the end result is a remote vehicle that can be operated by our existing staff and produce network quality programs in HD from any venue.

Bill Hayes is the director of engineering for Iowa Public Television.

JOHNSTON, IOWA
I was recently talking with a friend of mine from the United Kingdom about our Utah Scientific router. When I called it a router, his response was to ask me if I meant "router," pronounced rooter. I asked him if he pronounced "out" as oot? According to him, the silent "e" is what made the difference. How can a silent "e" have any impact if it is silent I asked? The reality is that the British changed the pronunciation to differentiate the A/V router from the woodworking router. At this point he reminded me of one of my favorite truisms: The British and the Americans are a common people separated by a common language.

I discovered the validity with my first car, a 1961 MGA. It is also one of the primary reasons I decided to really learn the basic theories for electronics. Ask anyone that has ever owned an early British sports car and they will certainly regale you with tales of Lucas Electric components and jokes like "Why do the British drink warm beer? Lucas refrigerators!" I even had to convert this car from positive ground to negative ground so that I could install a cassette tape player. In that era, virtually all British sports cars came with a very thorough shop manual that explained everything about the vehicle from routine maintenance through rebuilding the engine. They recognized that in order to keep the vehicle running properly, the owner would have to be able to perform many of these tasks or the vehicle would spend inordinate amounts of time in the shop.

So what has that got to do with routing? Sitting down and reading the MGA shop manual was a bit challenging for the uninitiated due to the common language that separates us. What we call fenders, the British call "wings." The hood is the "bonnet," the trunk is the "boot," an adjustable wrench is a "spanner," the transmission is the "gearbox," and the one that always brought a smile to my face was that the high beam/low beam control was the dip switch. So on a first read through, it was easy to misinterpret what something meant and then do the procedure incorrectly.

IT VS. BROADCAST

In broadcasting we're dealing with that now as IT infrastructures become the norm and more and more traditional broadcast engineers are required to install, operate and maintain IT equipment as part of broadcast operations. Like the Brits and the Americans, IT and broadcast engineers are at times separated by a common language, the difference is that rather than the pronunciation being different while the definition is common, in the modern world the definitions are different while the pronunciation is the same.

Most broadcast stations are hybrid plants made up of both traditional and IT infrastructures. They need to be, because there is a great deal of legacy content that still has value and while it will move into the IT file based infrastructure over time, the two will have to coexist for considerable time. Let's consider the router-whichever pronunciation you use. Most hybrid broadcast plants are actually going to have routers from both the IT and broadcast world and although they share the common pronunciation, their definitions are very different.

I don't want to offend the manufacturers but for the most part, the broadcast router is a pretty dumb device. It is a matrix of inputs and outputs (audio, video and control) that essentially provides the ability for any source to be sent to any destination within the facility. There are always exceptions but for the most part, their function is simple. If we want to actually manipulate the material we'll then employ the more powerful and flexible switcher. Therefore, within the video switcher exists the capabilities to blend and manipulate sources. So for the broadcast engineer the router is basic and limited while the switcher is powerful and flexible.

When you look at routers and switchers in the IT infrastructure there is a slight change. If an IT engineer is setting up a simple network, they will probably use switches and for the more complex and flexible networks they will employ routers. This is virtually the opposite definition for the same term in the broadcast environment. In some of my first implementations of hybrid plants I ran into problems when specifying capabilities and requesting information on products because of the language differences.

This is a fairly simple and easy to correct difference and fortunately, I have worked in both the broadcast and IT environments and recognized the potential for misunderstanding a long time ago.

BOTH SIDES NOW

Unfortunately, not all of the engineers working in the broadcast industry have had that opportunity and many now find themselves in positions where they are being required to implement and maintain technologies that are completely alien to them. So at many broadcast facilities there are two camps: the IT camp that believes that everything should be based on the IT infrastructure and that the whole process would move right along if the dinosaurs of broadcasting would just get out of the way; and the traditional broadcast camp, that wishes these IT know-it-alls would recognize that just because something is digital doesn't mean that the same technology that works in one area will work in another.

I certainly fall more into the traditional broadcast engineer area than IT but I remain fortunate that my position at IPTV requires that I oversee both areas. I not only get to evaluate the technologies involved from both sides but I am also responsible for the planning, implementation and budgeting. Among the oddities that I see is the somewhat extremist viewpoints that I often encounter when researching projects. Take routing for example. When researching the core routing/switching requirements for our HD plant, I talked with a number of system designers who showed me completely IT-based infrastructures utilizing Cisco switching routing and had virtually no traditional broadcast routing anywhere.

Now while the designs were sound and workable, the amount of complexity required to interface with the content creation areas and legacy materials was so high that I found myself asking why we would do that when the hybrid solution we came up with actually met the station needs better and could be maintained by the existing staff. Not everything has to be IT or digital for that matter and saying that out loud shouldn't be viewed as heresy. It appears that digital migration will continue and over time, the vast majority of systems will be digital. But we have to remember that real life-the pictures and sounds we capture-are being stored and presented to people that have extraordinary analog systems, their eyes and ears, that they will use to consume the content we present.

To make sure that we do the best job we can, what will be required is an expanded level of understanding and the creation of a new breed of hybrid engineers. I call them "media engineers." The idea is that they understand the unique needs and requirements of the broadcast industry and they have the ability to implement and maintain the proper technology to effectively provide the services required. My colleagues and I at the IEEE Broadcast Technology Society have been studying this issue and we have spent the last couple of years developing a curriculum to help educate and train media engineers. The idea is to span the divide between the skill sets of the IT and broadcast engineers; thus the course is called "Bridging the Gap." It has been an ambitious undertaking and has occupied more time and effort than any of us originally thought it would but we recognize that meeting this need is a vital component to insuring that broadcasting continues to flourish and grow. For more information on the course, please contact me at hayes@iptv.org.

Bill Hayes is director of engineering for Iowa Public Television.

JOHNSTON, IOWA
I have recently been evaluating video over IP technologies for Iowa Public Television. I mean if anyone should embrace IP technologies, who better than IPTV?

I've been gathering as much material as I can from various manufacturers to review and determine what devices or strategies best fit our application. I often find in the material information that actually modifies my thinking and shapes the direction. If I am trying to get video from one point to another, my first thought is to run a dedicated circuit and often, that is the best way to do it—but not the only way. So when someone suggests that the job can be accomplished by using the existing connectivity and network, I want to explore the possibility. Thus my research project and the plethora of data sheets, applications notes and white papers regarding video over IP that I am currently reviewing.

90 PERCENT?

I reviewed one data sheet from Rivulet that mentioned the use of dynamic synchronization technology which, as with all things digital, was given an acronym, DST. The acronym stuck out for me because not only am I more familiar with its use meaning daylight savings time, but it was also used by Ampex as the acronym for their Data Storage Technology, a 3/4-inch tape format which also became the form factor for the Ampex Data Component Technology (DCT) tape format. Clearly we're running out of acronyms and we may need a standards committee to work on adding more letters to the alphabet to deal with the crisis. Think of it at the IPv4 to IPv6 upgrade for TLA's!

One of the simple truths that I have discovered in working with data networks is that once you have established how much bandwidth you require, construct the system with at least twice that much and budget for doubling that every two years for the foreseeable future. This is especially true when dealing with networks that will be carrying IP video.

The data sheet noted that when load planning for conventional IP networks, less than 30 percent of the capacity should be for real-time services, which is pretty standard based on what I have seen. So when I read that based on their DST performance, they could get to roughly 90 percent utilization, I wanted to know more. Unfortunately, I found out while speaking with their engineers that their HD video input option is not yet available and when it is, it will only be a 720p version and I am in a 1080i house. They didn't mention any plans for 1080p. This is still an intriguing product and probably worth further investigation.

The 90 percent utilization number really piqued my interest so I started talking to some networking experts I know from Cisco and asked how realistic this was. Of course no one wants to say it is impossible because as we all are told constantly, "digital makes everything possible." But the term that got bandied about the most was "managed expectations." Some see the concept of managed expectations as manipulative and seedy but the reality is that ex-pectations either need to be managed or they just happen and the end result can be very bad.

In the 90 percent utilization example we were discussing, the networking experts all agreed that 90 percent utilization was doable but that there would still be a performance impact and in this case, it would probably be on the non-real time services. How significant that would be depended on the non-real time service users. Typically those users are accustomed to brief delays in network availability and a minor slowdown for them while gaining a threefold in-crease in availability for real time may be a good cost benefit ratio.

However, if the slowdown on non-real-time is significant or if the non-real time service is mission critical, then the trade off may be less tolerable. Since in most broadcast facilities we deal with a hybrid of important real-time and non-real-time services, we have to look past just the numbers and under-stand the quantity and importance of the services being utilized. I think this is why in many cases I find myself leaning more toward independent standalone systems within my facility and only looking at common network connectivity-based systems for non-mission-critical services or when there is no other choice. The level of complexity, the difficulty in maintenance and the unforeseen interaction between disparate users of the common system need to be considered as part of the equation, not just the dollars for the equipment.

BROADCAST IS REAL TIME

If you think about it, it is one of the fundamental issues that need to be understood as we look at the conversion (or collision) of traditional video and IT infrastructures. Traditional video services have been real time since their inception. They have been transported over dedicated services both wired and wireless for 70-plus years and everyone that uses them has the expectation that they will perform as they always have. The significant changes in the performance over time has been an increase in the quality of the delivered content, whether it was black and white, color, or high definition. Because they were on dedicated circuits, the speed of the content delivered was constant and loading was not a factor.

IT services on the other hand have a much shorter history. They have been delivered over shared and public networks since their inception and the most important and noticeable improvements have been the speed at which they are delivered. Many of us remember the near ecstasy of getting a 28.8 modem to replace our 2400 baud service and suddenly, still graphics with 16 or even 64 colors could be sent from one computer to another. And now many users have computer connectivity at 8 Mbps or higher in their homes and 100 base T or Gigabit Ethernet at their desktops so the significant in-crease in performance for IT has been speed of delivery. Since IT is delivering 0's and 1's, the quality of content has remained relatively stable.

MOVING FORWARD, REGARDLESS

No wonder I'm in such a quandary when working in a hybrid digital facility. On the one hand I am pushing for more quality in the video and audio which increases the number of 0's and 1's needed. Simultaneously, I am increasing the number of users on the shared network that want faster access to this content. HDTV has barely started to catch on with consumers and we're already looking at the creation of content in 1080p and 3D. What will the bandwidth requirements for those be within a plant? At the same time, IT infrastructure is increasing the number of 0's and 1's that can be passed through per second. The increased capacity of IT is fairly predictable while the increase load for video is more tumultuous, increasing in dramatic explosions.

So planning a network that can handle this traffic is a challenge. And while there are solutions, most are complex and difficult to implement and man-age, especially at the station level where budget constraints often lead to understaffing and salary levels often have the brightest engineers looking else-where. It is no wonder that I tend to look at dedicated solutions to specific areas. By keeping them isolated and autonomous, I alleviate the opportunity for implementation issues in the new service from crippling the existing service while my staff and I try to figure out the issues, hopefully before the technology is obsolete and manufacturer support has ended.

I have heard the conversion to digital referred to as "the guaranteed engineer employment act." While that is humorous and potentially true, it could also be the "guaranteed unsustainable business model act." As we navigate through the digitization of our business world we must choose wisely, making sure that we are picking the right tools and technologies to do the job at hand.

Bill Hayes is director of engineering at Iowa Public Television. He can be reached via TV Technology.

JOHNSTON, IOWA
Iowa Public Television made an early commitment to producing local content in high definition and began acquiring and editing local content in HD in 1998. We are now on our second generation of HD camcorders and our third generation of HD nonlinear editors.

When it came time to convert our studios, we determined that all content would be produced in HD and if needed, downconverted to standard definition and lower for analog and Web distribution. Converting our primary production control room entailed the replacement of our very reliable Grass Valley 250 switcher and supporting analog devices with all new HD components. Since we were still an analog composite facility, virtually nothing in the existing control room would be kept in service after the HD conversion so we were starting with a clean slate.

IPTV's new Grass Valley KalypsoLONG TERM VIEW

At the center of the control room system is the production switcher and we began evaluating the HD capabilities of switchers very early on. What I tried to bring to the process was the long term view that whatever was selected would need to have a life expectancy of 10 years or more. The design had to be proven so that we didn’t spend the first few years of operation trying to make the switcher do the functions that we required.

I also had to be certain that the system was reliable and that support would be available over the life of the equipment. My team and I spent many hours at NAB, trade shows and visiting facilities looking at switchers and listening to the end users as we gathered information for our specifications. Once the research was completed, I had winnowed the field down to three contenders. All three systems were brought in to IPTV facilities and set up for user evaluation. Since all three systems met the performance criteria and were price competitive with each other the users’ evaluation ended up being the deciding factor. After test driving each system for a week our users selected the Grass Valley Kalypso. Now after more than a year of operation we have revisited that decision to determine how satisfied we are with the selection and to uncover any surprises, good or bad, that we have discovered.

EASE OF USE

There were a lot of pleasant surprises, although some of them it is sad to call surprises. From the pure engineering point of view, the Kalypso worked out of the box and although it had a few glitches and infantile failures, those were corrected quickly. As we have converted facilities and moved from analog systems with 15 and 20 years of reliable service to new digital systems we have found all too frequently that reliability is taking a hit. The Kalypso on the other hand has proven itself to be very reliable.

Another strong point has been the ease of use. Virtually all of our local productions are produced live to record and some events such as the presidential debates and live pledges require on-the-fly changes based on the dynamics of what is happening with the talent. The Kalypso’s control surface allows the operator complete control over the most complex capabilities of the switcher while still providing straightforward access to deal with last minute changes. All too often the need for basic control is overlooked in the push to provide flashy and complex effects. Grass Valley did a great job in providing the right combination.

One of the more clever things that we are doing with the Kalyspo is that we are using the onboard machine controls to access timelines within our Avid nonlinear editors. This allows us to jump to points within the timeline and roll that specific clip on a project that has not been outputted to the on-air server.

Not everything worked out as well as I had initially hoped. One feature that has been a little disappointing is the KlipCache, an 800 frame still store within the Kalypso. Our initial hope when purchasing this option was that it would eliminate the need for a standalone still store in the production control room. Once loaded, the KlipCache does work well but the interface to our graphics systems turned out to be so slow and limited that for many of our productions we could not rely on it, so we ended up with an external still store and load the KlipCache with more permanent stills and logos. Since the limitation wasn’t discovered until after the installation, it did make for some interesting adjustments in the control room layout as we had to accommodate an additional control panel for the still store.

Overall, I would have to say that IPTV is very satisfied with the GVG Kalypso switcher selection. The system has been reliable and met all of the needs and requirements we have and appears to be designed to last and in the digital age, products that are still performing at the ripe old age of 2 (ancient of days according to Moore’s Law) are refreshing.

Bill Hayes is director of engineering for Iowa Public TV.

JOHNSTON, IOWA
When I started at Iowa Public Television a little over 10 years ago, I inherited a conversion plan for the station's eight full powered and eight translator stations. The challenges and changes that we faced in implementing the plan for the full power stations has been well documented in this column. Because of the federal mandate, the changes in the mandate, the bumps in the economy and a myriad of other factors, the focus—out of necessity—was on full power television.

Prior to coming to IPTV, I worked for New Mexico Broadcasting, which like IPTV, was another statewide television network, only it was CBS rather than PBS. Another difference was that the New Mexico Broadcasting network was made up of only three full-power television stations and utilized almost 100 translators to reach a pretty significant number of people in geographically isolated communities throughout the market. All though the FCC deemed that translators were not a significant factor when setting up the digital conversion plan, there were a lot of broadcast engineers in the southwestern United States wondering how they reached that determination. So when I moved from New Mexico to Iowa where the reliance on translators was significantly less, I still focused attention on translators and what their future was within our system.

RADAR WOULD NOT BE PLEASED

The translator plan that was in place for Iowa on my arrival was unacceptable. All eight of our translators had been displaced by digital television assignments. Channel searches had been performed and out-of-core CP had been granted for seven of the eight translators with the largest market, Ottumwa left with no service. I was greatly troubled that at seven of the sites, the plan called for moving to an out-of-core channel and then moving again to an in-core channel. The costs associated with this double move were certainly not inconsequential. Equally troubling was that the one translator that had an audience potential as large as the other seven combined had nowhere to go.

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FCC protected contour is the red circle, yellow to red wash is the Longley-Rice predocted contour. Priority one in translators was getting Ottumwa a channel as it was on UHF channel 33—this was the DTV assignment for KTVO, the ABC affiliate in the Ottumwa-Kirksville market. The idea was to find an in-core channel that could be used for analog service and then flash cut to digital if possible. IPTV worked with consulting engineer Greg Best on this project. Greg was not only able to find an in-core channel that met the requirements but also noted he could get us a significant power increase if we wanted. This was an unexpected benefit and we moved quickly to file the CP and get the station on the air.

Even though I had construction permits for the other seven translators, I asked Greg to look at the other sites to see if he could come up with in-core channels that met the same criteria as the Ottumwa project. Much to our surprise, he was able to find channels for the remaining seven sites; curiously, three of the sites didn't actually need to change channels at all. This led to a modification of the translator plan which included the purchase of eight new translators for the sites from Axcera. The translators were to be supplied analog broadcast-ready with all of the materials and components necessary to flash cut them to digital when the FCC mandated the conversion of low-power services.

The analog translators were installed at all of the sites and now the process of conversion begins but of course, no plan is fool proof.

MORE DELAYS

One of the challenges involves our two facilities in Decorah and Lansing in the northeast corner of the state. The original filings for these sites were done almost eight years ago and were negatively impacted by maximization filings of full-power DTV stations. This led to another channel search at these locations which resulted in two different in-core channels. Unfortunately since the translators had been purchased with the filters for on-channel flash cuts, we had to purchase new filters for the new channels and modify the antenna orders to change channels. This has resulted in a delay on these sites which may mean that their conversion doesn't happen until next spring. But that is a minor problem and certainly pales in comparison to the prospect of converting seven sites to out-of-core channels for analog followed by conversion of seven sites to in-core channels for digital service.

The first site that will be completed is Keosauqua, Iowa. When I started at IPTV, Keosauqua was operating on channel 54 using a 100-watt translator with an effective radiated power of approximately 640 watts. Fig. 1 shows the projected coverage of the site. The FCC protected contour is the red circle while the yellow to red wash is the Longley-Rice predicted contour. I recognize that many question the accuracy of Longley-Rice but one of the beauties of Iowa is that because we are so flat, even the FCC contours are pretty accurate and our experience is that they tend to under predict as opposed to over predict coverage. Since the conversion to digital mandated changes to our facilities, we decided to look at them as opportunities to improve service, especially in rural areas where the choices are more limited and the disposable income tends to be lower.

Fig. 2 shows the coverage predicted by moving to channel 24. We installed a 5 kW solid state translator at the facility and a directional antenna which gives us an ERP of approximately 114 kW. Clearly there was significant service improvement for the site, even to the south where the directional null was placed. Based on 2000 census figures, we estimate an increase of about 400 percent in population coverage. Now obviously not all of those people tune in but at least they have options that don't require a monthly subscription. Additionally the population that was tuned in are seeing a more robust and reliable service.

Fig. 3 is the projection for the station once the conversion has been completed. The translator stays on channel 24 and the digital ERP drops to 15 kW. Based on projections it appears that the digital coverage will be even better than the coverage of the analog service on channel 24. Since this will be our first translator conversion we will be doing field measurements once the site is operational to compare the projections with measured data. Based on our experiences with our full-powered stations I expect that we will be pleased with the performance but this will be the first UHF station we have had the opportunity to measure and compare the on-channel analog and digital service performance.

Why are we so focused on converting our translators when there is no mandate to make the conversion? There are a couple of compelling reasons. One is that in hybrid markets like Ottumwa where there are both digital full-power and analog low-power, it is difficult for the viewers to deal with the differences. This is especially true for the majority of viewers that have converter boxes because even if they purchased boxes with the pass-through capabilities, the viewer is still required to use two tuners to watch services and no matter how you slice it, that is detriment.

The more important reason is that we offer services on our digital channels that aren't available on our analog translators and we are all about service to the audience. We don't believe that anyone should be disenfranchised or made to feel less important because they choose to live in a rural area as opposed to a city. Providing access to Iowa Public Television to all Iowans is part of our charter and since their tax dollars support the network, we don't think they should be required to pay a subscription to get all of the services we supply.

Bill Hayes is the director of engineering for Iowa Public Television.

JOHNSTON, IOWA
I recently had breakfast with an acquaintance from college who is now a cinematographer. He and I have always done friendly sparring since he went to work in the big screen industry and I went to work in the small screen industry.

This time our breakfast took on a different tone as we were both lamenting our respective industries' transitions to digital technology. The transition paths have been rocky and both of us have seen what we believe are compromises to the quality of the end products for the sake of saving dollars. We have both gone through the agony of a budget cut or staff reduction based on capabilities of new technologies that are finally realized after a year or two of waiting for the software developers to catch up with marketing and sales. In the lag between promised benefits and delivered capabilities, shrunken staffs are forced to do more with less. It is no wonder we lament how things have progressed.

COMPARING NOTES

HyperGamma, a feature in the Sony PDW-700 camcorder, provides a set of correction curves that allow for more accurate color representation and tracking within images that have wide dynamic range. The screengrab on the left depicts a scene before selecting HyperGamma, on the right, after HyperGamma has been applied. It was in that context we started discussing digital camcorders and CCD cameras in general. Since CCD cameras and digital recording have been deployed longer and more widely in television then in the movies, most of the "problems" have been dealt with. I had my first experience with CCD cameras when I had to replace three ancient RCA TK-44's with three Sony BVP-7A's while I was at KHON in Honolulu. It was great to be able to tell that news anchor Joe Moore was actually wearing a pastel colored shirt because the BVP-7's didn't clip the chroma and make everything pastel look white. Of course the true tests for any camera on a news set are the sports anchors who always show up in a sports jacket with a hideous pattern/color combination. That's when we discovered that we had traded moiré for fix pattern noise.

As I implied above, in the 20 plus years since, a whole lot of progress has been made. I was glad to be able to share my experiences up to and including our most recent purchases at Iowa Public Television, which included 11 Sony HDC-1550's—five configured for use in our studios and another six that are used on our HD remote truck—as well as four Sony PDW-700 XDCAM camcorders for field production.

We really started comparing notes on the PDW-700's and the PDW-F800 that he is considering. Since the PDW-F800 is an extension of the PDW-700 he was hopeful that I could offer some assistance. Not being a videographer, I could only relate some of the anecdotal comments from conversations I have been part of regarding the camera's operation and strengths. I was comfortable talking about the benefits of the 2/3-inch imagers being able to actually capture 1920x1080 rather than the 1440x1080 that was the standard with 1/2 inch imagers. I also know that our folks like the Blu-ray media format not only for its ease of use but also because it is a cost-effective medium.

CORRECTION CURVES

It was when he asked me about "HyperGamma" that I was at a loss. Somewhere in the past I remember reading something about HyperGamma but it was related to Sony's CineAlta line of cameras and I didn't really look at it all that carefully. My friend noted that he thought HyperGamma was a feature in the PDW-700. I told him that it might be but I was not at all familiar with it or what it did. I was so curious about it I started to do some research and discovered that HyperGamma is indeed a feature of the PDW-700 but on some early models it required a firmware update. I had to check with folks back at the station to see if we had the right firmware and as it turns out, we do.

So what is HyperGamma? In its simplest terms, it is a set of correction curves that allow for more accurate color representation and tracking within images that have wide dynamic range. In the standard video camera we typically adjust the camera knee point and knee slope for the best compromise between light level performance and color tracking but even at its best, we have all seen people's skin tone shift in color as the overall light available changes or on an outdoor shoot as clouds cross the sun or in a darker scene where mobile light sources move in and out of frame. The reason for this is the wide frequency response across the color spectrum causes the image circuitry within the camera to respond differently based on the color/luminance relationship. Within reason, adjusting the knee point and slope can restore the proper relationships but the adjustments would need to be made continually and would still result in unsatisfactory performance because in many cases, the fight to keep the color true would result in loss of details in low and high luminance areas of the frame. The HyperGamma curves incorporated into the PDW-700 allow the operator to pretty quickly select an intelligent performance curve best suited for the conditions at the shoot and the look desired.

This type of control has always been a big deal within the film industry as cinematographers are virtually always shaping the look of the final content. They have done this through the use of optical physics with lens selection and lighting and with chemistry through film selection and processing. With over a century of film making history behind them, the techniques and processes are pretty well understood.

With video cameras starting to make their way into film production there needs to be ways to allow for similar types of control and HyperGamma is one of the tools. This wasn't such a big deal for broadcasters in part because our final product typically ended up on a television screen with less than stellar resolution, and bad lighting after traversing a number of modulation and demodulation cycles pretty much removed any of the subtle and some of the not-so-subtle shortcomings of inaccurate image reproduction.

But now everything is digital, including the home display. It may still be in a poorly lit room but it is bigger than it used to be and it has a dynamic range that really shows off the subtle qualities of the images. It may therefore be in the broadcasters' best interest to take the steps necessary to ensure that the images they create (even for news and local commercials) are at a high enough quality to fit well between the cinematic content that they air.

Bill Hayes is director of engineering for Iowa Public Television. He can be reached via TV Technology.

JOHNSTON, IOWA At Iowa Public Television, we are committed to using digital technology to improve workflow as well as deal with the challenges of creating content that will be delivered to a variety of end users and devices through a multitude of mechanisms. We are just completing the conversion of our studio origination facilities from analog to high-definition digital. To that end, we are evaluating ways of making content that can span delivery systems. One that I have really just started investigating is video over IP.

What does video over IP really mean? In most applications of video over IP we are talking about streaming content to the end users. Internet Protocol (IP) is used for sending data over a packet-switched network like the Internet typically using the transmission control protocol (TCP), thus the term TCP/IP or TCP over IP. Video, on the other hand is the visual part of television—or the images on a visual display—and isn't really required to be digital; but anything sent over an IP network has to be digital. So when we're talking about video over IP we really mean sending extraordinarily large data files that contain video and audio content over IP and typically some variation of the real-time transport protocol (RTP) being used.

A DIFFERENT DYNAMIC

One of the basic challenges faced when sending video/audio data files over an IP network is overcoming some of the basic limitations of IP networks themselves. Even the best designed IP networks deal with packet loss, network delays, network latency and congestion. In the non-real time data delivery work that these networks were originally designed to enable, all of these problems impacted the network performance but the nature of the data being transported was more tolerant to delayed or missed deliveries. Files being transported were typically small and if packets arrived out of order or needed to be resent in order to recreate the total file, the problem was manageable. Who cares if it takes a half a second longer for the spreadsheet to open?

Video/audio data files create a very different dynamic. Even simple video files are huge when compared to the data files that the IP networks were originally designed to handle, so the time required to transport a complete file is extremely long. Add to the mix the desire to deliver higher resolution long-form content such as high-definition feature films and the files get even more enormous. Couple into this the expectation from the end user that the content will be available instantly and in real time and the challenges are even further exacerbated.

istockphoto/Olaf Loose As we transform the image and audio content into digital files we can take advantage of some of the tools to help alleviate the challenges. Compression technologies provide methods for reducing file size by eliminating repetitive data. IP networks work based on packetized data so that the files are broken into small packages and the packages are shipped independently and then reassembled at the other end into the complete file. Working with small parts of the file allows the use of techniques like forward error correction to help overcome problems like packet loss.

Other IP network limitations like latency and congestion require additional correction techniques like the use of RTP control protocol. RTCP is, in essence, a separate data connection between the content origination and reception points that provides both devices with a methodology for monitoring the quality of service on the path between the two devices. This provides near real-time feedback so that adjustments can be made to help dynamically improve the real-time delivery of the content. Most systems also employ some buffering of the data to also deal with limitations inherent in shared packet switched networks.

However, there is no free lunch in all of this. All of the technologies that are employed to force the packet switched network perform in ways that it was not originally designed have a corresponding cost. Compression, buffering and the like add delay and impact the quality of the content passing through the system and introducing them add another level of complexity that must be properly managed.

SET REALISTIC GOALS

So what's an engineer to do? Well the first thing that I suggest is to take a long hard look at what the end goal is and then evaluate the capabilities and appropriateness of the technologies that are vying for implementation. One of my largest frustrations with most things digital is that products tend to be oversold or under developed depending on your point of view. Regardless, what tend to be delivered are systems that need a significant amount of tweaking and adjustment just to perform the basic functions that were required. Don't get lost in the visionary future of the product at the expense of the present requirements. I have seen a number of systems that show great promise for video over IP applications that are still unstable at the base level functions.

My second suggestion is to never commit to a system without first seeing it in operation at several other independent facilities. Go to the facilities using the system and talk with the people actually working with it. I have passed on a number of applications after seeing them in operation at other facilities and realized that the technology may not be bad but it may not be the right technology for the job. Don't fall in to the thinking that any one tool is appropriate for every application. We all know that one size does not fit all.

My third recommendation—and this one comes from several very painful first-hand experiences—is to avoid implementing any new or cutting edge technology in mission-critical areas. Whereas this used to be very challenging in the good old days of non-digital proprietary hardware systems, it can rapidly become a nightmare in the software-driven digital systems of today. You discover that software manufacturers are as jealous in the protection of their intellectual property as any movie maker and the levels of communication that have to take place in order to track down and correct problems may never happen in the Moore's-law-driven product life cycle that vendors operate under.

Finally, count the costs associated with any system prior to commitment. Include the purchase price and ongoing maintenance contracts and don't forget to look at the underlying support systems. One of the downsides to digital systems is that they are manufactured and sold by companies with a commodity-driven economic plan. That means that the vendors' futures rely on the buyers' continued ongoing purchase of support and upgrades to the systems. Depending on your budget and the economic outlook for your organization, it is very easy to build an infrastructure that your revenue stream cannot support. Making good strategic decisions rather than employing the latest and coolest technology is probably the best way to ensure the future of your organization and yourself.

Bill Hayes is director of engineering for Iowa Public Television.

JOHNSTON, IOWA Anyone who has undertaken any project that impacts how a product or service moves through the supply change has probably run into issues related to workflow.

In order to actually do a workflow analysis, it is important to understand the basic fundamentals of systems. Systems are defined as anything that has independent parts that either interact or are interdependent—and workflow is the path or flow of work within the systems. Virtually all systems go through what can be thought of as "lifecycles," which are created based on needs; over time they evolve as the needs they were created to meet change.

Workflow analysis is the process by which we observe the entire system to understand the processes and interaction of the components and workflow management involves taking what is learned from the analysis and using that information to modify the system to improve workflow. Improvements are typically ways to streamline processes to reduce costs or improve throughput. So ideally, workflow analysis and management should be an ongoing process that is constantly looking for ways to improve existing systems or replace systems with ones that better meet the needs.

Many of us have heard the statement "If it ain't broke, don't fix it!" I personally have heard this statement when suggesting a change in the way things are done. Typically the statement comes from one or more of the people that will be most directly affected by the proposed change. Their initial reaction is to resist, causing conflict and stress. If the system in place is doing the job, it is "better" or "easier" to put workflow analysis and management into the "too hard pile" because the hassle factor outweighs the perceived benefit.

The analysis itself can be somewhat disruptive and unnerving for the people involved. For example, in the early 1990s when I was the manager of engineering for WSAZ television in Huntington, W.V., we had an interesting opportunity present itself to us. WSAZ is an NBC affiliate and at the time we were pretty much a manual operation with master control operators sitting at the Grass Valley 1600 switcher pushing buttons and loading tapes. There was a tremendous amount of very repetitive and easily automated work in this system but unfortunately budgets were typically very tight. One of our senior master control operators was promoted to technical director for our newscasts.

Another senior master control operator had an opportunity to become a full-time paramedic which was his real career desire. Doing some basic workflow analysis, I was able to come up with a plan to automate the master control operation and reduce the required staffing by two positions and use the funds from those positions to demonstrate a very short payback for the capital investment needed to automate. From my point of view we had an absolute win-win situation because we were able to automate and no one was losing their job and within the master control system, I was correct.

But there are systems within systems and as we started to plan for automation the impact on traffic received a lot of pushback. As I analyzed how commercial spots moved through the system I found many convoluted and unnecessary steps. When I suggested changes, there was a little panic in traffic and some of the staff thought they might be at risk; and since traffic wasn't under engineering "I really had no authority to change our way of doing business," I was told. I remember leaving that meeting after making a statement that change was coming and the traffic folks could either participate in planning for the change or get run over by it. I was much younger and less tolerant then.

So changing one system can have ripple effects and while some of the consequences are predictable, others are not and the villain in all of this will be the person responsible for the initial change; and not many people want to be the bad guy.

So in the end, the primary reason workflow analysis and management is so difficult is not that the process is hard to do, but that people involved on both ends have concerns like self preservation and how they are perceived. As a result, it is not uncommon to hear and see stations where they do things the way they've always done them because they are not convinced that the change is worth the effort. Add to that fact that many of the workflow changes being proposed are driven by enhancements in technology that may indeed improve workflow but may require people to change their behavior.

As another example, a few years ago IPTV changed traffic software from Scout to Protrack. Changing traffic software is always a challenge and this was no exception. What made it even more difficult was that until just a year or so from when the software change happened, IPTV had on staff an extremely intelligent code writer who had—with Scout's permission—decompiled the software and wrote custom applications within Scout. This allowed maximum flexibility but unfortunately also meant that we had an application that was completely different than any other Scout installation. When the code writer left the station, we ended up with an unsupportable mission-critical application but it was something that the users were very familiar and comfortable with.

In comes Protrack which like all off the shelf systems was purposely written with rigid structure to ensure basic compatibility for support and commonality of operation which is essential for good computer-based workflow. The problem manifested itself when the operators had to change how they worked and some resented the need to change. It was only a problem from the operator's perspective because they were accustomed to a traffic system that would have its behavior modified to meet their needs and now they were working with a system that required them to modify their behavior.

DON'T WAIT

If there is any blame to assign for letting workflow analysis and management become this albatross, it really rests in the leadership, me included. We tend to let things go until the point where change is required and by that time the issues are generally so large and numerous that the required changes are generally dramatic and all-encompassing and as a result, are very disruptive. If instead we make the analysis and management an on-going process, bite the bullet and recognize that we're not in a popularity contest, recognize that our organizations and systems don't exist to keep us employed but are to meet needs of others such as viewers and customers we would make many minor course corrections and very few major ones.

The end result is that we would all be a lot more comfortable with the future and a lot less stuck in the past. When Gary Sgrignoli does his seminars on 8-VSB and digital measurements, he is frequently in a room full of fairly cantankerous engineers that are pretty well set in their ways and not always open to embracing the change that is required in the DTV workflow. He quotes retired Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki who said "If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less." Stay relevant!

Bill Hayes is the director of engineering for Iowa Public Television.

LAS VEGAS


(click thumbnail)Dolby demonstrated its Dolby Volume technology at CES2007. While attending the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I stopped by the Dolby booth to see what was new. I was really interested in the Dolby Headphone product more than anything else. It was brand new at last year's show and the demonstration that I had was quite impressive and I wanted to see how the technology rollout was going. I am pleased to say that there are now a number of manufacturers incorporating Dolby Headphone into their products including a number of laptop manufacturers. There were several multimedia laptops on display that incorporated Dolby Headphone technology in their audio circuitry which can be a great asset as more and more nonlinear editing is moved from the dedicated edit suite at the station to the remote location.

Another product that included Dolby Headphone technology that really caught my attention was the JVC SU-DH1 surround sound headphone adaptor. Though designed for the consumer market space, I can see uses for this at the station level as well. At IPTV we've had many discussions regarding desktop editing options. I am a firm believer that in the not-too-distant future, the majority of our editing will be done at the editors' true desktops and not at desktops built into an edit suite. This arrangement allows the editor to take advantage of the creative moment as opposed to having to wait for a room to become available. I have been in many sessions where much time was spent sitting around waiting for inspiration while many good ideas are lost because they happen outside of the room. The chief concern that I have heard expressed about editing at the desktop is the spillover of audio in and out of the workspace. I have always maintained that headphones are a viable solution and the addition of an adaptor like the SU-DH1 allows the editor to make creative decisions regarding surround sound audio without the need of a true sound booth. Now I am not claiming that Dolby Headphone is the perfect substitute for true surround sound but it does provide a very accurate representation and with a suggested list price of $129.95, the SU-DH1 is a good alternative.

DOLBY VOLUME

At this point, I honestly thought I was done with Dolby but the next morning there was a press release announcing a new product for the consumer market space called Dolby Volume and thus started a small maelstrom. I didn't see the original press release but I did read a newsletter story that described the Dolby Volume process and seemed to imply that since Dolby's dialog normalization has not found industry-wide acceptance, this was a different approach that Dolby was attempting. Regular readers of my column may remember about a year ago I did some tests on the terrestrial DTV service in the Des Moines area and measured the loudness of all the DTV stations in the market. The results were that only IPTV and one other station were adhering to dialnorm and the other stations were all over the board when it came to volume between each other as well as their own local and network sources. Could Dolby Volume actually fix the problem of loud commercials, level variations between channels and eliminate the need for dialog normalization? It sounded too good to be true and I believe it is too good to be true.

The beauty of dialog normalization is that the intelligence for how to handle it is included with the metadata in the audio. It maintains a consistent audio level for dialog while allowing more dynamic departures for music and effects. From what I could tell, Dolby Volume is a completely single-ended technology that acts as an intelligent limiter but I couldn't see how it would negate the advantages of dialog normalization. I set up a call with Jeff Riedmiller from Dolby to see if I could get the full story. I have been acquainted with Jeff for a few years and he has presented at the Iowa DTV Symposium and quite frankly, if there is something here that is revolutionary, I wanted to see if he'd present it at the next DTV Symposium. Jeff and I spoke briefly and a few days later he and I were on another call with Rocky Graham, also from Dolby. Here is what we discussed on those two calls.

A FAILSAFE

The first question was, Does Dolby Volume make dialog normalization unnecessary?

The answer is no. According to Jeff, the best way to maintain accurate volume control and pristine aural quality is to use metadata and dialog normalization. The handshake that is inherent between the content creator and the content presentation system provides the best quality audio possible. Dolby Volume is a single-ended technology designed to be placed in the consumer device and compensate for non-metadata and analog services. The examples we discussed were gaming, analog services and MPEG 1-Level 2 audio systems.

How are the two systems different? Aside from the differences above, Dolby Volume acts as an intelligent limiter but it does do some dynamic range compression. In the absence of metadata, the idea is to keep the perceived aural spectral range consistent and provide for balance when the levels abruptly change; like when a loud commercial appears or the viewer changes channels.

Will the two technologies be able to coexist? I was curious to know what a device equipped with Dolby Volume and dialnorm would do in the presence of metadata. The examples I gave were if the signal has metadata and dialnorm is set, does the audio pass through the Dolby Volume system unmolested? What about a signal that includes metadata where dialnorm is incorrectly set either through oversight or design? According to Dolby, both technologies can be implemented in the same consumer device and will be able to work in harmony but ultimately it depends on how the consumer product manufacturer implements the technologies and how the home user applies them.

It would seem appropriate that the implementation would first choose the metadata and then apply Dolby Volume only as a safeguard to prevent system overloads, speaker tears and shaking the trailer off the jacks. The consumer will have the ability in a Dolby Volume-equipped device to set a reference level. It is my understanding that as overall volume is raised or lowered, the spectral balance is maintained based on human hearing characteristics.

In summary, to maintain the best aural experience for the end users, continue to accurately apply dialog normalization (or start applying it, it drives me crazy when switching between football games). Don't think about Dolby Volume as any kind of a substitute for accurate audio processing but as a failsafe.

JOHNSTON, IOWA: On Aug. 19, 2005, Iowa Public Television turned on KHIN-DT in Red Oak, Iowa. This station operates on digital Channel 35 with a companion analog station on analog 36. Over a few years, IPTV has replaced the original RCA Channel 36 slot antenna with a new Dielectric two-channel slot antenna.

Last summer we completed construction of a new digital transmitter building adjacent to the existing analog transmitter building. In this building we have installed our "new" Harris three-cabinet Diamond transmitter with its associated test and measurement equipment rack and three port Gysel combiner. Also installed in the building is the new 2-channel transmitter combiner that combines the DTV and NTSC transmitter outputs into a single transmission line run.

HEATING UP

Fig. 1 The DTV transmitter only recently went to full power due to some missing components that had to be fabricated, so although it's been operational since August, full power operation began Oct. 21. On Nov. 20, the DTV transmitter went off the air and engineers at the site discovered that the problem was in the transmission line between the three-port Gysel combiner and the N-1 channel combiner.

Fig. 1 shows the transmission line stack coming out of the Gysel combiner that is made up of the low-pass filter, a line section with a monitoring probe and then a cut transmission line piece to the horizontal run over to the N-1 combiner.

Fig. 2 shows the probe section removed from the output stack. The additional section of inner conductor is the low-pass filter inner conductor. Due to the extreme heating that had occurred, the inner conductor sections were fused and could not be separated. The failure was the result of excessive heating at or near the flange. Given that this particular DTV transmitter is a three-cabinet unit and that after the Gysel combiner, we are generating approximately 21 kW average power, our primary concern about this failure was whether it was due to some reflection or moding in the transmission line.

I have seen similar failures in UHF operations when the 6 1/8-inch or larger transmission line is used and an elbow is inserted in the circuit prior to the low-pass filter. In the 1960s, Bill Smith at Harris wrote a paper on some lab work he did to explain some odd behaviors at various UHF installations. It appears that when a transmission line diameter reached approximately six inches, a UHF signal could generate modes in an elbow, unless the signal was first routed through a low-pass filter.

These modes would then travel with the coax acting as a waveguide. Since a coax low-pass filter works only on a signal traveling on the center conductor, the low-pass filter has no predictable effect on the modes. These high-order modes are typically beyond the frequency range of the monitoring and measuring equipment used at a UHF site and therefore can go completely unnoticed.

Fig. 2 At least that is until they cause a failure. Unfortunately, that does not appear to be a possibility at this site since all of the transmission line feeds coming from the three cabinets are smaller than 6 1/8 inches and the low-pass filter is mounted directly on the output of the Gysel.

ISOLATING THE FEEDS

Another possibility would be that the probe section actually caused the problem. In theory, the actual probe element could have been too close to the inner conductor and set up a resonate circuit, which caused the heating. I have a hard time visualizing how that is possible. Given the obvious indication of how intense the heat was in this area and the relatively small amount of metal that makes up a transmission line probe, I would have expected that the heat would have destroyed the probe element long before it caused the level of damage that is obvious in the pictures.

The third possibility is that the problem is in the Gysel itself. In my efforts to understand what happened, I did some research on the Gysel combiner and quite frankly, the circuit is so simple I would be surprised if the problem is in that device. As I understand it, the basic Gysel design at this site takes the outputs of the three transmitter cabinets in phase and feeds them on equal length transmission lines to the combiner.

Fig. 3 Each of the transmission line inputs splits the signal. Using one-quarter wave line sections, the inputs are fed to a common point for the full-power output. The other one-quarter wave sections feed the reject loads. The loads are also all tied together using one-quarter wave sections to a common point. By doing this, the combiner uses the phase relationships in the signal paths to cancel out any signal in the loads. This provides isolation between the feeds as well as predictable performance when an amplifier is offline or disconnected.

We sent the Gysel and damaged line sections to ERI for repair and diagnosis. Their post-mortem was not really conclusive. The most likely cause is shown in Fig. 3. This close-up that ERI supplied shows a suspicious bulge where the Gysel output mated to the directional coupler section. Since the coupler was added after installation, we cannot determine if the connector was damaged during the install or if it was a result of the size differential between the Dielectric and ERI supplied line sections. Evidently, there is some small difference in the diameter of the inner conductor between these two manufacturers.

REPAIRING THE DAMAGE

In any case, our best course of action is to repair the damaged components, reinstall the hardware and monitor the line section for any further problems.

If you're interested in learning more about the moding work done by Bill Smith, I believe that Harris can still supply his white paper, although I rather enjoyed having Bill explain it to me while working on a UHF transmitter project on Sandia Crest in New Mexico. If you're interested in getting more information on the Gysel combiner and your German is up to it, http://home.zhwin.ch/~gys/ is the home page of Ulrich Gysel. There are also several of his papers available from the IEEE Web site at www.ieee.org.

Bill Hayes is the director of engineering for Iowa Public Television.