NHK, BBC Team to Make London Olympics a Super Hi-Vision Testbed
LONDON -- The BBC is working with its Japanese counterpart NHK to make the London Olympics a full-scale testbed for Super Hi-Vision, NHK’s system for delivering 16 times the picture quality of HDTV, with 22.2-channel surround audio.
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Super Hi-Vision is “the future of television,” said Matthew Postgate, the BBC’s controller of research and development, at a live demonstration Monday for journalists and other guests at a private viewing theater at BBC headquarters. So impressive was the quality of the Super Hi-Vision demo on a 300-inch screen that an audience of normally hard-bitten technical journalists burst into spontaneous applause at the end of the screenings.
"Super Hi-Vision began as an idea talked about over a dinner at NHK’s Labs in Japan between NHK and BBC engineers in May 2009,” said Keiichi Kubota, who heads NHK’s Science and Technology Research Labs. “Every piece of equipment we have built is now here in London with a crew of 20, and over the next three weeks we are putting it all to the test. What you are seeing now is only the fourth-ever live multi-camera Super Hi-Vision transmission."
NHK’s hardware has been assembled at the Olympic Park in East London for use by the BBC and Olympic Broadcasting Services to render live transmissions and recordings in Super Hi-Vision. The Super Hi-Vision signal is carried by Janet, the U.K.’s research and education fiber network, to public viewing theaters in Glasgow, Bradford and London. International networks are relaying the signal to theaters in Tokyo and Fukushima, Japan, as well as to Washington.
Although 142 cameras were used for conventional HD coverage of the opening ceremony, the Super Hi-Vision version was shot with just three Super Hi-Vision native 8K cameras, made for NHK by Ikegami. The Super Hi-Vision cameras each use four 4K image sensors -- one red, one blue and two green -- with the two green sensors offset horizontally and vertically by half a pixel. Since the human eye is most sensitive to green light, signal processing lets the four sensors generate an image with full 8K resolution, albeit with diagonal resolution slightly reduced. NHK is developing prototype cameras with three native 8K sensors, but they weren’t ready in time for the London Games, officials said.
The Super Hi-Vision cameras in London each operate at a progressive frame rate of 60 frames per second. The BBC had suggested that NHK increase this to 300 fps for greater fluidity of motion, but increasing the sensor’s native speed would have reduced its light sensitivity, we were told. To compensate, this would have required using a larger sensor, which in turn would have decreased the depth of focus field, making the camera hard to use for live sports. NHK engineers told us they're working on future solutions.
Super Hi-Vision’s 22.2-channel surround system uses a stereo subwoofer pair, with the 22 speakers arranged generally in the pattern of three seven-channel horizontal setups, stacked vertically and with an extra speaker directly overhead. The BBC used a JVC D-ILA 8K projector for the screening, along with a Sharp 85-inch 8K LCD display in the theater lobby.
After watching a 25-minute edited highlights clip of the opening ceremony, we were shown a live feed from the Aquatics Center beamed from two Super Hi-Vision cameras. In each case, the BBC had deliberately not added any broadcast commentary, relying exclusively on the live public address feed that spectators were hearing at the event venue. Our immediate reaction was that for the first time, we were able to view a huge TV screen as a landscape, with the eye free to wander over a wide expanse of image. The picture was so sharp, even for nighttime stadium shots, that it was easily possible to identify VIPs in the crowd. The all-enveloping sound was so embracing that during swimming events, it was impossible to tell whether the applause for the contestants was coming from the theatre audience or from spectators at the Aquatics Center.
"You are free to take pictures of the screen,” a BBC spokesman told the assembled crowd. “We have found that some of our senior executives like to stand in front of the screen and get someone to take their picture, because it looks as if they were there at the stadium.”