Wide-Area Networking &Remote Production
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WIDE-AREA NETWORKING & REMOTE PRODUCTION PATRICK WARRINGTON TECHNICAL DIRECTOR, CALREC AUDIO LTD, HEBDEN BRIDGE, UNITED KINGDOM, EMAIL: [email protected] The use of wide-area audio handheld device. These young people may the point where manufacturers can start networking makes possible the be working in broadcast and beginning to to make products for remote production remote production of live TV events, shape the future of the industry within the that are more than laboratory experiments where large geographical distances next five years — an interesting thought. that don’t constantly require expensive, separate the production facilities and specialised IT support. Perhaps most the events that are being televised. Despite the instant accessibility enjoyed importantly, such products are now not There is growing interest in this by the modern consumer of so many only within reach but also reliable, and area from broadcasters, both in the forms of visual and audio content, it’s still broadcasters stand a chance of being potential for significant reductions widely accepted that there are certain comfortable using them. After all, a in production costs as well as events whose excitement is best enjoyed product based on entirely sound theory improvements in production quality. live — or if not live, then captured live that nobody wants to use in practice is But there are difficulties to overcome in detail and watched in near-real time. unlikely to gain wide acceptance. if this is to become practical in Big sports fixtures, news stories or state a wide variety of circumstances. occasions all fall into this category. Here, This paper discusses some of the This paper explores some of the broadcast has as important a role to challenges of remote production, and technical challenges, in particular, play as ever, because not everyone can some possible solutions. But not everyone the transportation of audio, and the squeeze into a baseball stadium to watch reading this will have a broadcasting issues of reliability, redundancy and the World Series Final, occupy the front background, so we’ll begin by offering synchronisation, and briefly looks at pew at Westminster Abbey at a Royal a brief overview of the kinds of audio a variety of relevant technologies and Wedding (or Coronation…), or see over- connectivity that you find in broadcast standards. salaried football players literally tearing environments. chunks out of each other from a few feet Introduction away. Knowing Your Onions The world of broadcast has come a Native English speakers will be familiar long way since the first state-controlled Of course, remote broadcasts are not with the above phrase, which means networks flickered into life in the new. In the UK, the first official outside ‘knowing your chosen specialist subject 1930s for a couple of hours of didactic, broadcast was the coronation of King in detail’. Metaphors are popular in tightly planned live-to-air content, to be George VI, which was handled by just communications technology anyway, transmitted once and then lost forever. three cameras. Needless to say, since the but in this case, an edible alium is a Today’s broadcast consumers are well 1930s, things have become a lot more particularly apposite reference, and thus on the way to being able to watch what complicated; at the wedding of Prince the diagrammatic representation of the they like, whenever they like, via a wealth William and Kate Middleton, the BBC world of broadcast audio above will be of top-up, pay-to-view and free-to-air deployed over 100 HD cameras. And with referred to throughout the rest of this services. increasing complexity comes increasing paper as the onion model. Not because cost. Even small outside broadcasts are it makes people cry, but because it’s And in this era of lucrative DVD boxed expensive, and this puts a limit on the layered. set releases and consumers downloading number of events that can be covered. and/or watching whole TV series at What this diagram is trying to show times of their own choosing, the non- This paper will explore the concept of is that there are different types of commercial attitudes that allowed reams remote production, and how close it is to audio interconnections within a typical of recorded programming to be erased in a practical reality. By remote production, broadcast plant, all of which have different the 1960s and 70s (including, famously, what is meant is the idea of live remote characteristics and map to different all of the original 1960s master video broadcasting, where the creative part applications. tapes of the BBC’s Doctor Who) on the of audio production, with a skilled audio grounds that no-one would ever want to operator sitting at a mixing console, does The centre is where much of the audio see programmes again after their initial not take place at the event site, but at content is generated and routed, with transmission — these attitudes truly seem a studio facility some distance away — microphones in studios and on people’s to belong to the Paleozoic Era. But never perhaps in a different city, country or lapels, connecting to a mixing console mind the 1960s — already, there can continent. along low-latency paths. In other words, be no-one under the age of 15 who can this layer is about signal acquisition and recall the pre-YouTube era before 2005, This is quite a new concept that is only transporting signals from the studio floor a time when one couldn’t simply dial up now becoming possible with the evolution to control rooms and mixing consoles. In video of practically anything from a of the necessary technology. We are at the middle is the audio operator 1 THE BROADCAST AUDIO ’ONION’ MODEL who creates programme feeds, as well connect and share resources seamlessly, by the facilities manager, from a control as monitor feeds for presenters and and making it easy for any given panel. performers, often destined for in-ear programme to be made in a different devices. Signal latency is critical — if a studio or control room without any Moving to the second ring of the onion monitor feed containing some element manual repatching of signals, and thus in the above diagram, we find that this of the performers’ own voices is delayed giving clients a lot of flexibility in their does not directly concern itself with signal more than a few milliseconds, it becomes management of studio resources. The acquisition; rather, it is concerned with a distraction and may lead to talent- protocol developed at Calrec carries the communication of signals between related tantrums. thousands of low-latency audio channels, different broadcast equipment, for and also control information that allows example from the audio mixing console In analogue days, all of this was very port parameters to be controlled, such as (in the inner ring), to communications simple, consisting of mics plugged microphone amp gain. The Calrec solution systems like those from Riedel and into consoles directly or through tie- also monitors the network, and offers RTS, to video routers like those offered lines and patch bays. Nowadays, other other services, for example the protection by Evertz and Grass Valley. We may interconnection technologies are used. of routes to prevent accidental interruption also see connections to other mixing It is more common to find stage boxes or over-patching of critical signals, and consoles, perhaps for backup or sub- located inside studios which contain integration with other broadcast control mixing, and to DAWs (such as Pro Tools the mic amps and converters needed to systems. or Pyramix) for recording. We also digitise the audio, close to the source, so see connections to master control for that it can be transported with no further Transports used in this portion of the programme transmission. In this ring, loss of quality to a control room that may ‘onion’ are characterized by low-latency, audio connections are likely to involve lots be several hundred metres away. totally deterministic performance, of channels, and they are likely to be far redundancy, and ideally, instantaneous on- less dynamic — they may be set up and All broadcast console manufacturers have demand routing (via push button or salvo) left for years. They are also more tolerant products to do these jobs, operating via that is easily controlled from the mixing of latency. audio networking protocols designed to console surface by the audio operator, or allow control rooms and studios to 2 Because of the large numbers of signals, and/or AVB, in the future we might see case of big remote vehicles, the backhaul MADI is a very popular interconnection hundreds or even tens of cables, as IT audio may be piggy-backed into a video protocol in this ring. We also see SDI, as speeds increase. Very elegant solutions feed that is data compressed into ASI, well as good old AES3. In the future, we will be possible, cost-effective and JPEG2K or an MPEG-TS stream and can expect to see more AoIP, or Audio hopefully future-proofed, but the benefits returned over a leased IP line, via satellite over IP — Dante, Ravenna, and most won’t come for free. It will take some or a microwave link. In radio we see the importantly, AES67 and possibly AVB. design effort to create a network that use of IP codecs and IP audio streaming In fact, this second layer should provide will work under all circumstances. IT staff using ACIP and other proprietary the perfect conditions for use of AES67 may have to be involved in making sure mechanisms, usually employing data and AVB, because of its capacity and the bandwidth is there to meet the traffic compression with AAC or FLAC.