n 2020, IP production took centre stage for media production. The need for flexible, remote workflows during Covid lockdowns – with talent and crew often working from their living rooms – pushed companies who had been sitting on the fence to finally embrace the scalability and flexibility offered by the Internet Protocol realm. IP means more feeds from more sources, which is an amazing resource to have – better to be swamped with too many choices than stuck with one locked-off camera with rain on the lens. Even small productions now have the facility to pipe in video from a huge number of sources. But this cornucopia of options – especially when a good percentage of them might be in remote locations – requires better monitoring systems to keep teams from being overwhelmed. But getting the right multiviewer solution for the IP world also means solving some technological problems. According to Jason Taubman, the senior vice- president of technology at mobile production company, Game Creek, the move to IP has been driven by hardheaded business decisions. “One of the things that pushed us to IP to begin with was the ability to expand the capability of our OB trucks without expanding the weight or size. We now have clients asking for 4K HDR productions at scale and, in order to pull that off, we need to look to technologies
that provide a lot higher density in terms of the infrastructure,” he says. When shopping for multivewers to monitor these new higher-density productions, the most important quality for Taubman is low latency. The SDI world, despite its limitations, was capable of delivering virtually zero latency. Tackling latency issues has been one of the fundamental tasks in developing IP technology for broadcast. “For the longest time we were doing discrete, stand-alone multiviewers, rather than a matrix-type multiviewer. The processing time in the matrix multiviewers was just too long. We like to keep our multiviewers to sub-frame latency in the live environment,” he adds.
WE WERE DOING DISCRETE, STAND- ALONE MULTIVIEWERS. THE PROCESSING TIME IN THE MATRIXMULTIVIEWERS WAS JUST TOO LONG
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