As IP technology continues to mature and the industry gains a better understanding of how IT-centric infrastructures work, many broadcasters are now eager to migrate away from the limitations of SDI to grow their businesses and make them better able to support increased production demands and multiplatform distribution.
Recent international events have overtaken normality causing us to take an even closer look at how we make television. Physical isolation is greatly accelerating our interest in Remote Production, REMI and At-Home working, and this is more important now than it ever has been.
The dominant reason for the adoption of color difference working is that it allows the color difference signals to be reduced in bandwidth without obvious loss of picture quality. Only the luma signal needs to be retained at full bandwidth. There are various ways in which that can be done.
In the last article in this series we looked at how SDI has developed over the years to reach an incredible 47.52Gbits/sec for quad-link 12G. In this article, we dig deeper and uncover the technology enabling SDI and its advantages.
Sometimes to understand the big picture of modern television broadcasting, it is helpful to understand its history. After the medium’s live formative years, it was the use of video tape beginning in about 1958 that permanently changed television production forever.
In parts 1 and 2 of this three part series we discussed the benefits Remote Production has over traditional outside broadcasts, and the core infrastructures needed to make this work. In the third and final part of this series, we look at the challenges and costs associated with making live sports work effectively on Remote Production models to employ less equipment and crew on site, and to logistically cover more events using an IP infrastructure.
Since SMPTE formally standardized SDI in 1989, it has become the dominant video, audio and metadata transport mechanism for virtually all broadcast facilities throughout the world. Technology advances have not only made SDI incredibly reliable, but the specification has continued to progress, embracing ever increasing data-rates and video formats.
The deciBel is a logarithmic ratio that happens to express quite well both the signal loss in transmission lines and the subjective sense of loudness in human hearing.
