[opendtv] Re: NHK demos UHD TV broadcast
- From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 31 May 2006 09:31:28 -0400
This is all rather silly to me, but there will always be someone out
there trying to push the limits in order to make existing
technologies less appealing.
At NAB, the UHD demo used a bank of four projectors to tile together
the UHD image on the very large screen (it looked to be about 20 foot
diagonal). This is most definitely a technology that will appeal to
the "special venue" crowd, however, some people do not seem able to
fully understand the realities of physics as it relates to the
distribution of video content to the masses.
Unfortunately, some of those people are FCC commissioners. There were
several exchanges at NAB that demonstrated just how clueless these
people are about major issues - I left NAB with the keen sense that
the Chairman and three Commissioners who attended, had provided more
than ample evidence of why the FCC has outlived its usefulness and
should be abolished.
At the FCC chairman's breakfast, Chariman Martin called into question
the earlier FCC decision on Multicast Must Carry. He noted that
having more channel choices might give the OTA laggards an incentive
to buy a DTV set-top box or a new integrated receiver. There may be a
grain of truth in this - for example, we now know that Bert has
watched a simulcast of one channel he can receive as a sub channel on
another channel he can receive.
The absurdity of Chairman Martin's comment about multicasting, is
that there is NOTHING stopping broadcasters from offering more sub
channels. obviously Sinclair understands this and is now beginning to
offer an additional channel in the Baltimore market. What is
especially revealing about this is that Sinclair managed to gain
carriage of this new channel on cable and eventually FIOS, through
voluntary negotiations.
Somehow the chairman seems to think that multicasts make the FTA
product more attractive, yet broadcasters can only see a business
there, IF cable and DBS are forced to carry these multicasts. The
notion that FTA could become a viable competitor to cable and DBS is
non-existent in the U.S., even as terrestrial broadcasters in the UK
are bidding up the price for a slot on Freeview, where the ONLY
revenues they can generate are from advertising.
Clueless...
But Martin seems well informed compared with some of his fellow
commissioners. I was particularly unimpressed with Commissioner
Deborah Taylor Tate, who seemed incapable of answering any question
with a meaningful answer - I guess she just needs time to get up to
speed.
One of the questions for the commissioners panel at NAB, was: "What
was the most interesting thing you saw on the show floor?"
Tate was all bubbly as she related her experience at the UHD demo.
She said she though she was going to get wet when the whale jumped
and splashed - no doubt she has been to Seaworld. She then went on to
talk about how she can't wait for UHD to be broadcast to our homes...
To which, Commissioner Jonathan S. Adelstein responded. "Yeah, this
is why we will all need high speed broadband in our homes...
Worse than clueless...
Meanwhile, the buzz at NAB was mobile video, and WE ARE NOT TALKING
ABOUT HDTV. Finnally, the light bulbs seemed to be turning on in some
broadcasters heads...
"Hey, we need different products at different resolutions to satisfy
all of the different viewing venues and devices that will have access
to our content in the future. One size does NOT fit all!"
Welcome to reality. The world of video is FINALLY beginning to break
free from the one-size-fits-all mentality that has driven mass market
TV for the past six decades. Ironically, one of the biggest hype jobs
at the show was for a product that seemingly will break through the
glass ceiling of resolution, allowing virtually any content producer
to shoot at better than HD resolution. That product and company was
RED, which announced a new CMOS based digital cinema camera with
resolutions beyond 4K x 2K. I was immediately reminded of an NAB a
decade earlier which had a booth with a bright shiny RED Honda sports
car and a redhead who kept crossing and uncrossing her legs Sharon
Stone style. But we grew to know and love Kiki Stockhammer, even if
the Video Toaster was just a toy...
In a decade, we have grown to expect our content production toys to
deliver flawless video quality at SD and HD resolution. Now the ocean
of young video professionals that fill the South Hall of the
convention center are getting excited about a crude mock-up of a
camera that costs less than a decent HD lens...
Go figure.
I ran into an old friend at NAB who was in the trenches with me as we
fought to build the "Desktop Video" industry. The first think we
talked about when we ran into each other was to the effect:
"Everything we talked about and predicted a decade ago has happened."
Swanni has a long way to go to equal the accuracy of what we
predicted.
The modern reality is that video content producers and distributors
now have a new palette to work with. They can choose to create on a
huge HD canvas, or to paint their images on a tiny cell phone.
UHD is interesting. 22 channel surround sound sampled at 192 kHz is
also interesting, as are cars that can cruise at 200 MPH. Sooner or
later bigger numbers no longer create the perception of added value;
sooner or later we are able to surpass human limits, and focus only
on what is needed to meet the quality and budgetary goals for a
project.
Thankfully we are moving into a new multi-resolution world of video,
one that is not unlike the world of still imaging and audio. UHD will
have a place in this world, and I can assure you that it is NOT in
the home of Commissioners Tate and Adelstein.
Regards
Craig
P.S. The article that started this thread and the discussion that
followed, failed to take into account a fundamental attribute of
digital video compression. Compression efficiency is directly related
to the correlation of information in the image. Increasing resolution
typically allows for much higher levels of compression efficiency due
to the improved correlation of the samples, and the ability to
restrict the content in a coding block to samples that are highly
correlated. To explain by example, consider the content of an 8 x 8
block in a 160 x 120 image delivered to a cell phone, versus an 8 x 8
block in a 7680x4320 UHD image. One pixel in the cellphone image
corresponds to a 48 x 48 block in the UHDTV image. It is MUCH MORE
DIFFICULT to compress the image for the cellphone without introducing
compression artifacts.
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