Producers Decry Plethora of HD Standards as Slowing Content Rollout

Most vexing are the issues of 24 fps, deliberate offsets from 24 fps, the 50- and 60 Hz frame rates and difficulty of converting between them, panelists told some 200 attendees at the “High Definition in Europe: Making Business Happen” conference hosted by research firm Understandings & Solutions. Most problematic for some producers is the 60 Hz video standard used mostly in the U.S., Japan and Korea, and which a BBC executive derided as “minority format.”

Authoring is difficult for the Blu-ray and HD DVD software coming to market, said Will Morley, managing dir. of De Luxe Digital. He said his London authoring center, like its sibling in Burbank, was format agnostic. “But I hope the two rival formats get it together so that people do not become format atheists.” To make the blue laser HD discs, “It takes 45 hours to do two coding passes then manual fixing, often 500 manual fixes. That’s 20 hours extra,” Morley said. “If there are a lot of different audio options it goes chunking into the peak bit rate. We find differences in levels between the DTS and Dolby streams. We don’t know if it is right or wrong or a bug,” he said. “Our quality assurance people find that muxing [multiplexing] can introduce errors. They then have to do a complete re-test. An international disc needs 58 hours of QA. They find a problem and what is their reward? Another 58 more hours of QA. All we can thrown at it is time.”

Stephanie Holm, head of operation for Nat Geographic video, warned “Production companies will promise everything and then not deliver the quality needed. There’s lack of HD experience, lack of technical equipment. Everything HD takes much longer,” she said. “We are dealing with 17 HD-standard production and master formats. That need standards conversion. Rolling credits are an illegible nightmare. My pet peeve is the Dolby coding delay which can put pictures and sound 1 or 2 frames out of sync. The average incremental costs for HD productions are 13% more than SD,” Holm said.

Andy Quested, BBC’s principal HD technologist, reckoned there were at least 20 standards for programs. “What is HD?” he asked rhetorically. “It’s 1920 x 1080, 35-mm and Super 35-mm [film], and HD Cam and DVD Pro. What’s not HD for production? Super 16 mm [film], HDV, sensors under half-inch, 1280 x 720 images except Varicam, because no other camera does what that does.” Quested said 1280 x 720 was “alright for transmission but not production.”

Standards conversion is ubiquitous in the industry, said producer Richard Osborn of Abbey Road Interactive: “There are between 17 and 25 different standards. Abbey Road requires HD Cam SR 1080/1920 at 23.976 fps. We’speed up for film or use 25-p or 3/2 pulldown for NTSC. Not a day goes by when we have to convert a tape.” Osborn later explained that the 23.976 frame rate is derived from the U.S. NTSC standard of 59.97 fps, commonly called 60 fps, to avoid harmonic interference at 60Hz. This 23.976 rates is simply the standard chosen by EMI, Osborn said, and others may choose others.

Another problem for generating HD content is dealing with legacy SD material, said Christopher Walker, head of engineering at replicator Sony DADC in Austria. “Most European legacy material is at 50i, which must now be converted. There is no perfect solution. This is where the problem lies, with all the options for authoring. It is proving a lot more difficult that anyone anticipated, with all sorts of differences not anticipated -- U.S. 24p, over here in Europe 25p and Europe 50i, and conversion problems. Quested chirped in: “The blissful days of PAL and NTSC gone. There are more and more standards. People fear asking, for instance what is 23.98?”

German replicator Sonopress echoed and endorsed the other panelists comments. “Our problem is so many formats, 23.97 etc., said Dieter Schlautmann, Sonopress head of new media development. “How can I convert? What should I convert to? What are the frame rates? “And, there are now several codecs - maybe licensing is different. There are two disc formats. We also prepare for online with up to half a dozen coding formats,” Schlautmann said. “DVD was simple, just DigiBeta to disc. Now we are looking at an HD master video archiving system with uncompressed or mildly compressed material on hard disc, and then access for conversion to all different formats,” he said. Another issue was “what to do with 25 frame-based DVD back catalogue?”

Standards conversion issues are more problematic in HDTV, where the programming often is live. Sissela Andren, HDTV project coordinator for Sweden’s public service broadcaster SVT, warned that conversion issues were making SVT seriously consider dropping plans to broadcast the cross country skiing World Cup from Sapporo in Japan early next year.

“The issue of 60 Hz material is creating a lot of problems,” Andren said. “We have to decide whether to try and convert in Japan on location or back in Sweden,” she said. “The time scale is too short. We know Snell and Willcox is promising new equipment but there is nothing yet that is good enough. What’s currently available just doesn’t work, she said. “We saw this during the World Cup, which was shot in 1080-50i and when we converted to 720p - because that’s what we transmit from the Thor satellite - we inherited the interlace blur. It’s a case of shit in, shit out,” Andren said.

“We are saying that if Sony took some of the money spent on consumer HD and used it to help broadcasters get lower cost technology, then there would be more content,” Andren said. “And the program providers should stop asking for more fees for HD. And the satellite operators should stop expecting us to pay double for simulcasting SD and HD - which realistically will have to go on for years.”

Andren had joined with Quested to rebut criticism earlier in the conference that broadcasters were not providing enough HD material. Both clearly were riled by comments made by Graham Knight, well-known U.K. specialty AV dealer, trade magazine columnist and ex-pres. of retail trade body RETRA.

“My customers complain about lack of HD content,” Knight said. “They buy HD screens and end up watching non-HD material. They are completely fed up of watching the same clips on the BBC’s channel…. In Aberdeen, a center of the oil industry, people are using their big HD screens to watch the Internet site Viidoo.com, which is streaming live video from all round the world. They connect their PC to the TV and watch in low quality,” Knight said of the purportedly- pirate and China-based website. “In the U.K. it was the pirate pop-radio stations that broke the BBC’s radio monopoly. Perhaps it will take an Internet station to make the broadcasters realize that their content is a valuable asset that can be streamed to the world and charged accordingly,” Knight said.

Quested stunned the conference with a slide that asked “Why should we bother with minority formats” -- meaning 60-Hz TV. He went on to argue that “over 75% of the land mass is 50 Hz - so why are we bothering with minority formats”. Obviously aware of the audience reaction and aware that the slide would soon be displayed on the U&S web site, Quested later deleted it from the conference computer.

Afterward, Quested told Consumer Electronics Daily he wasn’t speaking on behalf of the BBC, and reminded that had prefaced his remarks to the open forum by saying it was just “pub talk.” As for calling 60-Hz a minority format, he told us “The BBC has not yet seen a standards converter, either 60-to-50 Hz or 50-to-60 Hz, which it can recommend. It’s in our delivery guide - that we prefer to speed up or slow down from a 25 fps master. Planet Earth was shot at 25p-1080, and we supply 25p masters to co-producers NHK and Discovery to do their own conversion. We just don’t recommend conversion,” Quested said.

“We don’t need to cater for minority formats,” he told us. “China is 50 Hz and going HD. The West Coast of America [Hollywood] makes content at 24 fps. Only the East Coast, and Japan and Korea - which always does what it wants - are 60 Hz. The BBC has held off buying any HD standards converter. We prefer to deal with 50 Hz material and avoid conversion.”