LOS ANGELES—“As above, so below” may be an apt theme for two presentations this morning on the first day of SMPTE 2017 Annual Technical Conference & Exhibition in Hollywood, Calif.

One dealt with the steps NASA engineers working with digital cinema camera vendor RED and AWS Elemental took to deliver a live 4K UHD transmission from the International Space Station 250 miles above earth. The other offered a proposal for a new TV panel calibration method that takes into account the dynamic nature of HDR to provide a predictable panel state without limiting innovation on the part of vendors. While in quite different orbits, both shared the mission of finding a way to deliver the highest possible viewer experience.

CAN YOU SEE ME NOW?

Rodney Grubbs

First up was NASA program manager Rodney Grubbs who described the engineering involved in delivering live 4K UHD video via a RED Epic Dragon camera from the space station to an audience attending the 2017 NAB Show in Las Vegas. The days of NASA building its own custom solutions for imaging from space have passed, and the space agency now relies on commercially available products, which it might modify to meet its unique needs, said Grubbs.

Grubbs co-authored the “Engineering a Live UHD Program From the International Space Station” paper for SMPTE along with Sandy George, an engineer at SAIC, which contracts with NASA.NASA met with RED at the 2016 NAB Show and together they decided to use a RED camera as the source for a live UHD downlink from space, he said. However, the RED Epic Dragon is not a broadcast camera, so it lacked embedded audio, Grubbs explained. 

To overcome that hurdle, NASA decided to use audio from its existing HD camera onboard the space station and marry its sound output to the 4K video on the ground. But first, NASA had to settle upon the full tech package that would be delivered to the space station in December 2016 on Japan’s Logistics Carrier for the UHD live transmission in spring 2017. It included the RED Epic Dragon, Redcast, a module for the camera that provides four 1080p HD-SDI outputs and a one-off 4K UHD H.265 encoder, which AWS Elemental working with RED built specifically for the space agency, he said. The 18 Mbps UDP stream out of the encoder would then be sent to earth from the ISS, which is fully internet-compatible and is “an IP node” in space, he said. 

Testing revealed an offset of about four seconds between the 4K UHD video and the HD-camera-originated audio, Grubbs said. On the ground in NASA’s audio control room, both the 4K video and audio from the HD camera where taken back to baseband, synced and re-embedded as HD-SDI to create another UHD stream via another custom AWS Elemental encoder.

To get the live stream to Las Vegas, NASA would route the UDP 4K H.265 stream out of the encoder to the NASA TV hub at Encompass in Atlanta. From there, the stream would be decoded in Atlanta and uplinked to Las Vegas for the live 4K UHD stream at the 2017 NAB Show. As a backup, AWS Elemental put in a terrestrial link from Atlanta through Dallas to Las Vegas, he said. The end-to-end latency between the space station and Las Vegas was 10 seconds, which required a lot of planning, but proved to be manageable with practice, said Grubbs.

DETERMINING NATIVE GAMMA CURVE

The second morning presentation “Proposed Measured Display Characterization File for HDR Consumer Displays,” by Tyler Pruitt of SpectralCal in Seattle, Wash., examined a method that bypasses high dynamic range during calibration to determine the native gamma curve of a consumer display.

HDR masters in almost all cases have a higher performance than consumer TVs, said Pruitt. At the same time, there is a major display performance delta between the highest-quality HDR consumer TV and the lowest. This requires color mapping in many cases to preserve the creative intent of the content producer. Some of the approaches include static metadata that accompanies content, dynamic metadata and in higher-end displays GPUs and CPUs that analyze frames in real time.

However, most content is viewed on lower-end, less costly sets that do not include these processors, he said. So, the challenge is finding out how to make those sets more accurate. At the same time, any calibration method should not interfere with the algorithms TV manufacturers use to optimize the performance of their panels, said Pruitt.

“If we start adjusting stuff after [the TV manufacturer’s color mapping] happens we are essentially deviating from what the picture-quality engineers at the TV manufacturers have decided is the correct tone map,” he explained. What Pruitt proposed is disabling all HDR mapping and conversion to gamma during calibration. That way, the panel would be measured in its HDR mode with its native gamma response, he said. 

In response to a question following his presentation, Pruitt said: “Most of these color management [modes in the set] are done with a 3x3 matrix, and they just put it to unity and give you the panel native vivid mode,” said Pruitt. “Put your 3x3 matrix that controls the color gamut into unity, and let’s measure what the actual primaries are,” Pruitt said. Then a consumer set can feed that data back to itself and calculate a new 3x3 matrixes from the actual measured data rather than an average of all panels, he said. 

Describing this method as “radical process” for calibrating HDR, Pruitt said this technique would be appropriate for home theater displays, televisions and theater projectors. He urged SMPTE to take up the proposal for standardization.

WASHINGTON—By 2030, NASA wants films like “The Martian” to not be science fiction, but science fact (though probably without leaving Matt Damon stranded). In the build up to landing on the Red Planet, the public agency is continuing to test imagery equipment so that it can effectively record data and share it with the public, as mandated through its charter.

Rodney Grubbs

On day two of the 2016 Government Video Expo and National Drone Show, Rodney Grubbs, program manager of NASA’s Imagery Experts Program at the Marshall Space Flight Center, didn’t have to look too far to find some stuff that could be useful for NASA when he gave his presentation, “More and Better Pixels: How NASA Plans to Use HDR, 4K, VR and Other Technologies to Take Everyone Along for the Ride to Mars.”

“There are technologies that are on the floor here that solve problems for us,” Grubbs said. “And with a few tweaks we can make them useful for us to go on the ride to deep space and take all the rest of us who don’t get to fly along for the ride.”

So much of the technology that is at the forefront of the industry right now—VR, HDR, UHD, HEVC—has potential applications for current and future NASA missions. HTC headsets are being used to train astronauts for situations on the International Space Station. 360-degree cameras are replacing older, more expensive pan-tilt systems. HDR is replacing film for getting as much detail as possible in videos from things like rocket plumes. HEVC helps send higher resolution videos and images in smaller bit-rates.

Grubbs even shared during his presentation news that Japan was going to launch a cargo vehicle from the U.S. to the space station carrying a new RED camera with a REDCAST device delivering live 4K video, as well as an HEVC encoder to speed up the process. “It will allow us, hopefully if everything comes together and works right, to do the first live UHD downlink from a spacecraft,” said Grubbs.

Back in the 60s and 70s, developing this type of technology fell almost entirely on the shoulders of NASA. But as the commercial industry has grown NASA is doing a lot more collaboration outside of its own walls. “We’re not creating from scratch a lot of imaging and visual technologies so much any more,” explained Grubbs. “It’s mostly taking commercial products and figuring out other ways to use it or tweak it.”

Getting to Mars is going to be a massive effort, and as Grubbs knowingly admits, there is no such thing as a perfect system. So NASA is open and willing to work with anyone that can help with creating the ideal imagery equipment to bring the journey to Mars to the world.

WASHINGTON—Rodney Grubbs, NASA Imagery Experts Program Manager, will present “More and Better Pixels, How NASA Plans to use HDR, 4K, VR and Other Technologies to Take Everyone Along for the Ride to Mars” at 1 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 8, at the Government Video Expo at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. 

Grubbs will discuss how NASA is currently developing plans for human exploration of Mars by the 2030’s. Between now and then, excursions to the Moon and asteroids will provide opportunities to test all the technologies needed for Mars missions. Motion imaging will be crucial to these missions to provide situational awareness, document system performance and share the adventure with the public. The development of High Dynamic Range, cameras with 4K and higher spatial resolution, and Virtual Reality cameras and viewing technologies are all relevant for supporting these NASA missions. Grubbs will present recent VR footage from Mars as well as programming from the NASA’s new UHD Channel and take questions from the audience.

“In the 60’s NASA had to create the technology that took us to the Moon and provided the iconic imagery that allowed us to all experience it live,” Grubbs said. “Our next journeys beyond low Earth orbit will utilize commercial technologies being developed now or on the technology road maps of companies and start-ups.”

Erisa Hines, a driver for the Mars Curiosity rover, based at JPL, talks to participants in "Destination: Mars." (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Microsoft)

As NASA’s Imagery Experts Program Manager, Grubbs is responsible for NASA’s imaging architecture to science, human spaceflight, and public outreach. Grubbs is also chairman of the NASA DTV Working Group and has been a principal investigator for flights of HDTV cameras and related experiments on the Space Shuttle and International Space Station, including the first-ever live HDTV program from a spacecraft and first digital cinema camera flown in space. Grubbs chairs the Consultative Committee for Space Data Standards Motion Imagery and Applications Working Group to set standards for video interoperability with other space-faring nations. Grubbs recently led the development of images.nasa.gov, allowing the public to search over 60 NASA imagery collections via a single on-line library.

The Government Video Expo will take place Dec. 6–8, 2016 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. Designed for video, broadcast and AV professionals, Government Video Expo features a full exhibit floor, numerous training options, free seminars, keynotes, panel discussions, networking opportunities, and a new educational series of panel discussions.

For more information, visit www.gvexpo.com.