Cutting edge.

[pucho812]

While not the analog goodness we love, this was pretty cool to read about.
An entire broadcast/recording console in the cloud, on a server far away from the action. Locally only having I/o and a control surface.
https://www.sportsvideo.org/2023/01...0FvAmfBCt4baLEvse0prG2FHCERVuvFolzIt1paf_eFDQ

 

[fazer]

It could be a contract engineers dream. The job has a fixed budget. You log in do your part at a fixed rate. The faster you work the more you make per minute. Everybody’s happy. Elements are all in the cloud. Nobody has copies of the master except the hosting production house.

 

[pucho812]

It could be a contract engineers dream. The job has a fixed budget. You log in do your part at a fixed rate. The faster you work the more you make per minute. Everybody’s happy. Elements are all in the cloud. Nobody has copies of the master except the hosting production house.

At the rate I am tinkering with ideas about an analog desk, by the time I get to doing it, won’t exist.

 

[fazer]

I’m thinking more post production, movies long form and short form, commercials and also specific areas like dialogue,sound design, music editing or composition.

An Analog desk is more music directed. Even specialty like that recent thread here on that jazz label studio recently build to emulate bluenote records.

 

[Brian Roth]

Cool for post, but OMG the audio delays for live/real time IEM and IFB!!!

Perhaps the talking heads have learned to deal with the hideous IFB delays, but how the hell can a mix-minus work with anything over a a few mS delay??

OK...ok. the far end is many (hundreds?) mS delayed in real time. Hmmmm...I may be an oddball, but I can clearly hear "itchy coo park" in headphones from my own voice with maybe a few mS latency delay.

Other than that, I recall working on the sidelines of a live TV broadcast with four (?) talking heads going into the control room. One via fiber link, another local, and at least one via a satellite link. Getting the IFB working was crazy (IFB feeding to the remote talkers via cell phone) , and in the final broadcast "Head A" was replying before "Head B" finished the question!! Glad those days are in my distant past.....

I always thought it Would Be Cool to have Sir Paul in London singing in real time with, say, Billy Gibbons in Texas. Can't happen! That's why we used to mail 2" tapes (and nowadays, thumb drives).

Bri

 

[Brian Roth]

Further thoughts about realtime/latency....

I see this all the time...not on only local local TV newscasts but on the Big Network newscasts.....

News desk talker: "We have 200 cars in a crash on Hiway 666. Wanda, what are you seeing there?"

Wanda begins nodding her head around the point at "...Wanda..." then pauses a bit before saying "bodies are all over the highway..."

<g?>

Comms latency!

Bri

 

[JohnRoberts]

I saw a NASA TV program where they claimed to have two people talking via zoom or whatever with one in Australia, and the other in the US. They even mentioned that it was night time for one and day for the other. There was almost zero latency in their conversation... If they were lying about that I decided I didn't need to see any more.

JR

 

[Tubetec]

Considering Marconi transmitted across the atlantic 100 years ago in near realtime all this new cloud based stuff with seconds of delay has taken away that basic quality . During covid a lot of reporters set up home studios in a shed out back , sound quality took second place , many reporters hadnt a clue about miking technique .

Nasa probably has lots of allocated bandwidth on tap, not to mention the ISS and other satelites to relay signals to/from as well as a network of ground stations dotted all over the planet , if anyone can do it its them .

 

[pucho812]

Well, I have experimented with some of this. In the case of the op IFB’s were handled locally iirc.
We have had a mixer who has been experimenting with proof of concept stuff. Can run audio from his servers to us in l.a. through one of our digital live desks and back to Arizona with an average of 20ms round trip time. Being how we estimate an average of 60ms from stage to front of house desk, 20ms is not bad. Now where it gets even more crazy, is if we add a video feed, we can get it as slow/fast as 500ms. While that is far from good for live, it does show possibilities and shows that for a broadcast it could be done.

 

[user 37518]

Funny thing about digital/Satellite communications is that the time delay does not come that much from the wave round trip, yes of course, light has a finite speed, but the vast amount of the delay is due to error detection/correction algorithms. A lot of effort is being put on improving this.

However, one of the biggest issues is the amount of symbols being transmitted per baud (number of 0's and 1's transmitted at once). With the current modulation schemes like 4096 QAM, and so on, symbols can be easily confused by the receiver if there is not a good reception, relying on error detection/correction algorithms to correct them, or the system's ability to switch to a simpler modulation scheme to avoid errors. The latter is not a good solution in today's era where data demands require more and more sophisticated modulation schemes. So currently we are bound to the extra delay times that these error correction codes produce.

 

[JohnRoberts]

If that nasa TV show was using their standard in house coms, then I'm impressed. Indeed its not purely transit time... coms to the moon was something like 2 second delay for 250k miles or so each way...

I will defer to people here with hands on experience.

JR

PS; Video may be a little more wonky due to frame rates that could add another 30 odd mSec, per full image.

 

[AnalogPackrat]

Aren't most comms satellites in geo-synchronous orbits? That's 45-50k miles round trip or around 250ms.

 

[user 37518]

Aren't most comms satellites in geo-synchronous orbits? That's 45-50k miles round trip or around 250ms.

See my previous post

 

[AnalogPackrat]

See my previous post

I saw it. If using geo-synchronous links, that will set the minimum achievable latency. Encode/decode adds more and is subject to laws other than physics.

 

[user 37518]

I saw it. If using geo-synchronous links, that will set the minimum achievable latency. Encode/decode adds more and is subject to laws other than physics.

Geo-synchronous orbit is 36,000 km (22,400 mi), light speed is 299,900 km/s (in vacuum). Round trip is 72,000 km, which translates into 240 ms. So you were very close.

 

[AnalogPackrat]

Geo-synchronous orbit is 36,000 km (22,400 mi), light speed is 299,900 km/s (in vacuum). Round trip is 72,000 km, which translates into 240 ms. So you were very close.

I practice the art of rapid approximation (a.k.a. the lightning empiricist). Now do your math where the transmit and receive stations are separated by approximately one earth diameter (we wouldn't want to use geo satellite for local comms when transmission latency of ground-based or radio would be lower).

 

[user 37518]

I practice the art of rapid approximation (a.k.a. the lightning empiricist). Now do your math where the transmit and receive stations are separated by approximately one earth diameter (we wouldn't want to use geo satellite for local comms when transmission latency of ground-based or radio would be lower).

I used to do those sort of problems during my undergrad years, I had to look for the coordinates of real satellites, and given the coordinates of the transmitter/receiver, I had to calculate elevation and azimuth angles of each antenna, as well as losses due to path loss, and others... and then calculate the required gain of the receiver antenna, amplifier, noise specs, etc.... Fun times...

 

[Brian Roth]

I will say I'm impressed how far the State of the Art has come over the decades since I first became involved with pro video along with my original pro audio beginnings. However, I ASSume the workflow for a live broadcast (sports, live news shows, etc) has to be somewhat similar even today.

Sidebar: in the 1980's one of my best friends was an engineer at the top-rated local TV station. He was the "camera shader" in the control room; his job was to match the "look" of the multiple Marconi cameras for the 10:00 newscast. Several times, I'd sit in Rick's area when the news went live. What an amazing amount of real-time choreography with director calling camera shots and switcher cuts to the op on the Grass Valley switcher, Chyron operator, teleprompter op, audio guy (they had a custom Neve desk back then) and others like guys in another room running the 2" Ampex VTRs not to mention four guys/gals running the Marconi's on the set. Totally inspiring to watch since they did the same thing every night!! LOL...the main anchor looked so "dandy" on the set with fancy suit and tie...below the desk he was wearing battered jeans shorts and flip-flops....

Anyway...I'm meandering. I later years, I was involved with two "niche" TV news network startups involving two or more remote locations. THAT's when I became acutely aware of the issue of latency...even if the links were fiber. IFB was one of the most complicated to "get right". In one project, I spec'ed a Yamaha PM-5D (???) because I could easily set up 6 or 8 mix-minuses. Some went "back hauled" via fiber, others were set up for Ma Bell dial-in IFB for remote correspondents

Ahhhhh...yes....War Stories! <g>

Bri

 

[Brian Roth]

Followup re. live newscasts.....

Nowadays, no longer ops for each cam. It's a bunch of robotics.

I can't find the video for one of my "Fave Fails", but this works:



Bri

 

[cyrano]

It's all a marketing pile. They weren't the first, nor the first in the USA, so they added "for a sports game". And even in that field they're probably not the first. Running the software in the cloud? That could be a first. But who needs to complicate things by using the "cloud". Can someone define the "cloud"? There's no detail at all about what it means.

The problem of different latencies for different sources is easy enough to solve.

Introduce a buffer that is larger than the highest latency. Then adjust timing on each of the sources. You're no longer live, but a delay of a second, or even five or ten seconds often doesn't matter at all.

It still wreaks havoc on monitoring. So, It doesn't always work for live. No time to adjust anything.

Broadcast has been doing this for years. Without the magical "cloud", I might add. It's what AVB is about.

I mean, I was building server setups for in-house video editing last century. No way I would run such a setup in the cloud. Unless it was my own "cloud". Not even if you need world-wide mobile access, as that would need a separate setup to handle many clients.

A remarkable number of companies have found the cloud to be a lot more expensive than dedicated servers. Especially if you consider safety. I do presume safety wasn't a biggie in this case, but still.

In fact, they're a bit late to start boasting about the cloud. Haven't they heard AI is the thing lately?

So, when will ChatGPT be trained to mix a show?