RF
Demodulator
OUR STUDIO FOOTAGE LOOKS MUCH BETTER WHEN UPCONVERTED TO 4K/UHD, AS DO THE COMMERCIALS
TSoIP
Satellite decoder
ST2110 (12G)
ONE FOR U, ONE FOR HD Most of the sports rights held by TV 2 are available in UHD at the source: the Premier League, Champions League, Euro 2020 and so on. This sparked the idea at TV2 to pamper its premium subscribers – most of whom are avid sports consumers – with UHD productions for its OTT offering. Launched in October 2020, it’s found in the standard premium subscription fee. As TV 2 produces content in HD, only the matches are in native UHD. TV 2’s studio content, commercials and promos are upconverted for the UHD service with Lawo’s vm_udx up/down/ cross converter app for the V__matrix platform. “This strategy adds serious value, because our studio footage looks much better when upconverted to 4K/UHD, as do the commercials. It ’s a really important lesson to learn,” says Svein Henning Skaga, TV 2’s solutions architect. TV 2 initially wanted to deliver its UHD service as an afterthought, to
workflows. The approach was located around two facilities: one in Bergen, and another smaller one in Oslo. “At first, IP was not the focal point. TV 2 just wanted to avoid long cabling in the new buildings, and IP followed from that,” says Eivind Halle, one of the original architects of the IP project. The Norwegian private broadcaster treats its facilities in Bergen and Oslo no differently than any other remote location, as nodes of one giant network. Operators in one city use resources in the other – to change settings on an mc²56 mixing console located over 290 miles away perhaps, or transmit video streams from Bergen to Oslo and back – if the only free EVS machine is in Oslo. The system relies on Nevion’s VideoIPath SDN approach, with a northbound interface to Lawo’s Virtual Studio Manager (VSM), which provides intuitive and comprehensive command over all control rooms and galleries, in Bergen and Oslo. The system has been evolving from the first production from Bergen in 2018.
ST2110-20
V__matrix (C100-1-1) UHD–HD HDR–SDR Audio de-embedder
V__matrix (C100-2-1) Video delay Audio delay
AES67 ST2022-6
ST2022-6
V__matrix (C100-1-2) Backup
V__matrix (C100-2-2) Backup
ST2110-20
see how it went. This explains why no special UHD gallery was set up – it would have been TV 2’s first. Instead, they looked for a highly automated, low-maintenance approach. Once clear that the HD footage derived from downconverted UHD signals had more sparkle and detail than HD-native material, the team decided to ‘work the other way around.’ For its regular sports content, TV 2 now downconverts incoming UHD signals to HD whenever possible. “The HD signal for our productions is actually a UHD signal downconverted using vm_udx. We collaborated with Lawo to fine-tune the vm_udx app, and both the downconversion and the upconversion towards the end of the signal chain produce excellent results,” explains Skaga. UHD PREMIUM WORKFLOW The satellite signal received from the host broadcasters is internally passed on via IP. This is already a novelty, as most European broadcasters handle incoming 4K/UHD signals via SDI, using four cables per UHD signal. An HD gallery is used for the standard HD production. TV 2 leverages the Kahuna video switcher ’s ‘salvo’ feature, and the VSM broadcast control system, to have the UHD production run – almost completely automatically – in the background.
CONTROL ROOM Facilities in Bergen and Oslo are like nodes in a giant network
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