THEWALL WITH IT ALL
Lawo’s theWALL software makes it easy (and even fun) to manage and control multiviewers. With theWALL’s intuitive design, users can configure any monitor wall, route signals, change mosaic layouts or save and load user presets via an intuitive app. It also allows teams to instantly fire up multiviewer presets customised for different shows or individual team members. Using the GUI-based HTML5 interface, teams can automatically calibrate multiviewer resolution and aspect ratios, and access sophisticated user management for individualised presets. With theWALL, it ’s easy to tailor each individual feed if necessary, down to being able to create a custom appearance for each individual item shown.
Game Creek has generally stuck with smaller monitors displaying fewer PIPs (picture-in-picture) – usually using four-by-four PIPs, or eight-by-eight at the most. With higher-density UHD displays on the horizon, the company is ready to expand the number of images it can monitor simultaneously. “IP is still a brave new world. Every time we put a new OB truck out on the road, it’s a learning experience. We’ve found the IP trucks are as capable as the SDI trucks. There’s a steeper learning curve for our staff, but in general our clients aren’t even aware there’s IP behind the scenes,” Taubman explains. IP BEHIND THE SCENES Lawo’s V__matrix ecosystem is a premier IP broadcast video core infrastructure platform that offers virtualised real-time routing and processing infrastructure.
if need be, but the majority of signals arrive via an IP stream through dual 40Gb Ethernet interfaces. In short, vm_dmv can provide as much monitoring capacity as a production could ever need. In an IP-based system, all available signals are accessible anywhere on the network, because they share the same physical interconnections, regardless of their format and bandwidth. The number of signals can grow and shrink. Unlike in the SDI world, where each destination requires a separate, physical patch connection, the multiviewer hosted on the V__matrix platform can, in theory, consume as many unique signals as its physical link can carry. Every new IP video signal brought into the multiviewer consumes more bandwidth. As the source resolution increases, so does the amount of bandwidth required, and the increase is non-linear – two UHD signals take up massively more bandwidth than two HD signals (see graph, pictured right).
CAREFUL IP STRATEGY But Lawo is careful to think about its IP ecosystem holistically, developing solutions that plan for the limitations of IP in order to fully leverage all it has to offer. The secret sauce of the vm_dmv IP multiviewer is the ability to manage the bandwidth issues, regardless of the size of the incoming video signal. “While the processor can create a staggering number of PiPs, that alone will not suffice. The number of unique signals
INCREASING THE BANDWIDTH RAISES THE HEADROOM SOMEWHAT, BUT THIS APPROACH REALLY ONLY PROVIDES SOLACE FOR SD AND HD SIGNALS
V__matrix is built on a software-defined architecture. Instead of connecting modular hardware products in elaborate production chains, it employs flexibility, fabric computing and COTS economics with a single, generic FPGA-based processing blade that can host different types of software applications. Lawo’s vm_dmv is a software application for building multiviewing heads. When loaded on to a V__matrix blade, the processing engine can create four 3G multiviewer heads with up to 64 PIPs each (256 potential PIPs) or one 12G UHD head that can output an enormous 128 PIPs. The feeds for these PIPs can be input using the blade’s rear BNC connections
that can be displayed simultaneously also depends on the multiviewer’s input bandwidth,” explains Stephan Türkay, Lawo’s senior product manager of media infrastructure. “Even though increasing the bandwidth raises the headroom somewhat, this approach really only provides solace for SD and HD signals. In a 3G or UHD environment, the number of additional streams will still be insufficient for typical multiviewer applications.” Lawo’s solution to this conundrum relies on splitting and distributing the multiviewers’ input scaling and head processing stages over multiple networked V__matrix processing blades. These work together in
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