The Big Picture (video content)

[agedhorse]

Last night, I was the engineer in charge of a national event that took place at my venue. Some of you may have heard of Peter Travers, he is the movie reviewer for the Rolling Stone Magazine, and also wrote for People Magazine. He has started a film series called New York Film Critic Series which hosts an advance screening of a major motion picture in 50 venues across the US. He introduces the film live from New York at a theatre, and hosts a Q&A with the stars, directors/producers there and it's streamed to the remote venues, shown for a premium ticket price. The first film was last night, Nebraska (well worth watching IMO). Here's where the big picture and experience comes into play...

First, I have been workig within the cinema market for ~25 years, so I am familiar with how the personalities work. (Remember, my riding coach was a stunt man from 1939-1997 and world trick riding champion in the late 1950's) When we were approached about doing this event, I asked for all the technical prospectus that was available so that I knew what I was getting into. This was not thoroughly thought out, but the concept was solid and the principals involved were also solid, we agreed to join them as one of their premiere west coast sites. Since we were one of only a couple venues that had a production based tech staff in-house, we were much more involved it testing and verifying components of the show.

Initially, the idea was to stream 2k content (introduction and Q&A) to the theatres, with the feature to be screened either from 35mm, DCI complant media or BluRay media (in all cases the media came with it's own security guard). I started working out the numbers and I was unclear how they expected streaming over the internet (password protected with only a list of e-mail addresses allowing permission) in 2k as to be stable it would require a download speed of a solid (ie. not dipping below) 3M. While we have a 5M down system service, the problem is that overhead and head end traffic can momentarily drop this down to 1M which you wouldn't notice on normal internet work, it brings things to a stuttering halt on real time video (also a problem with streaming audio over networks that you have no control over). Depending on where in the country you are and the kind of service you have, speeds can be WAY below what's promised (as peak speed of course).

The question is how to increase "stability margin" (there's that real world phrase again) to avoid the problem. Well, first of all, everybody in the west 2/3 of the country is 2 or 3 hours behind NYC, so why not quickly render the video and upload it to an FTP site for download by the "west coasters"? This alone eliminates the issue of streaming, but for the east coasters they are still kind of stuck. With the specific content, the absolute quality is not nearly as important as not loosing real time sync (both on the uplink as well as the downlink). Looking at the native resiolution of many of the projectors being used for the pre and post portions of the show, the native resolution is maxed out at 1080i or 720P. This is about 40% less data than 1080P, so obviously dropping down to 1080i/720p takes a lot of stress off of the necessary bandwidth and dropped the effective requirement down to ~2M. Of course, there were some video purists amongstthe host venues that had nothing but a boner for 2k HD without understanding the ramifications, but that's the nature of the business. 

The other issue was how to play the downloaded segments... laptop and a mediaplayer is one option but like any general purpose computer based system is full of potential glitches and issues. Things like displaying the image at the same position on the screen with different clips (out of the 3 clips, 1 was encoded differently). This scaling issue depends on the OS, on the software media player(s) and then on the display driver within the laptop and how it handshakes with the projector. It appears that I was the only one that recognized the value of the firmware based mediaserver that's built into modern Bluray players (the better ones at least). Since our production playback machine is an OPPO, it has a robust media server with seperate preview monitor and a main output DVI-D based video output processors. Why is this important? Because with HDMI and DVI-D signals, there exists HDCP and EDID control signals that control resolution and scaling between all of the display devices and allows or disallows decryption of the video signal. If there's only 1 processor, any issue with one signal path will cause a loss of sync with the other signal path, and any differences in how scaling is handled will not affect the other output. With  the clips loaded onto a USB flash drive (must be formatted FAT32 for uniformity across devices, and the max single file size is limited to 4G), plug it into the BluRay player and it automatically opens the media server, the clips show in the play list, select and go. All of the scaling is transparent and uniform as the output device defines the scaler of each video processor. All clips were packaged as MP-4, QuickTime generated.

So showtime in NYC, everything is good, the first clip appears on the FTP server, download it and test it (we are 3 hours behind so it gives us this advantage) and it plays perfectly. The second clip shows up on the server, it too plays perfectly. 7:55pm our time, hit the sheet with clip 1, perfect registration to masking, finishes up, roll into clip 2, it'slso perfectly registered, transfer over to film and run the feature. While the feature is running, about 30 minutes into it, the Q&A pops up on the FTP server, download it, film is over hit the screen with  the "live" Q&A and it too is perfectly registered, we are done. 

I would suggest that the sites that had trouble struggled with the big puicture because they didn't understand that they were dwelling too much on the small insignificant things (like trying to scale 1080i content to 1080p (why they thought this was a good idea makes no sense to me), or struggled (in some cases massivly) with laptop based video mediaplayers, or did not adequately vet their internet bandwidth AT THE TIME THEY WERE NEEDING IT!!!). 

The point of this post is to show some of the thought that goes on behind a high profile first time video event. It's not what happens, it the hows and whys that make it happen seamlessly, and how it can be easy or unbelievably difficult. In our case, it was a perfect presentation, and it was very, very easy because we understood the importance of the hows and whys.

[Pro Sound Guy]

Good job Aged

My house is hard wired/network and I stream movies from my computer at this desk everywhere in

my house upstairs and downstairs.

I use PS3 Media server/free shareware as my media server /host on this machine, and all my blueray players are DNLA (Digital Living Network Alliance) certified.

The movies are stored on this hard drive.

I can also stream music anywhere in the house from this computer through my home network.

This is what gives me the ability to stream video/movies to all the blueray players.

I can stream to every bedroom and downstairs in high def from this PC

The user simply chooses the movie they wish to watch or video.

 

[agedhorse]

You have more control over what's on your network, and by storing on your hard drive, or buffering well in advance on the "streaming" part of it, you are not struggling with "broadband" issues that you might not have any control over. 

The simpler the network, the fewer the devices, the shorter the network cabling the easier it is to make stable. Stability issues generally only occur when you really need the system to be the most stable.

[Mogwix]

 

I'm a computer engineering student, so naturally large networks are part of my studies.

 

Networks are continually evolving and I'm finding that a lot of people in the industry are falling behind, if they even knew what they were doing in the first place. I've had the pleasure of working with some really well planned and structured networks, and others that are held together with duct tape and bailing twine... hobbled together to "work" and left at that.

 

Some people really make me wonder how they even got through their CCNA.

[DanBAP]

The sort of speeds that Andy's talking about are commercially available even at the consumer level (most home broadband service peaks out well over 5Mbit), but the level of service guarantee that you'd need for an event like this is WAY WAY above what's marketed to consumers and is WAY WAY more expensive than the typical home/small office account. For example, a T1, which is guaranteed 1.5Mbit up/down, is anywhere from $600-$1000/mo and is much more restricted in its geographic availability.

Andy, I'm curious to know why your venue has such a high grade service; I wouldn't have expected that to be economically justifiabl in a theater. Do you regularly do productions that require such high-quality streaming? 

-Dan.