NAB, day 4. Many manufacturers have publicly or privately announced their plan to make 1080p (50/60Hz switchable) production equipment available in the next year. It seems that 1080p/60 is already in use by CBS, and European broadcasters such as BSkyB are planning 1080p/50 production facilities too.
Although it can be difficult to see much difference when just looking at good 720p and 1080p pictures, the main case for changing production to 1080p is to ‘protect the investment’. 1080p will give a larger ‘headroom’ and thus programmes made now should still be saleable in the years ahead when everyone has 1080p displays, and overall equipment performance has improved. The betting here is that 1080p will be the format for ‘premium content’ programmes and it will live side-by-side with 720p or 1080i production for ‘bread and butter’ HDTV programmes such as news.
Once you've decided to move to 1080p, you need to decide how to carry the signals around the production centre. The safest way is to carry them ‘uncompressed’ in a 3Gbit/s network, but this may be costly if it needs new infrastructure. An alternative half bitrate option based on the BBC’s Dirac codec is one possibility that's being discussed here, as is using one of the multitude of different compression formats used for recording and storage in the studio - this is quite a thorny issue. At the same time, delegates are wondering how soon, and how, to move to Internet Protocol distribution in the studio.
Another way to take studio production to the next quality level is the use of a 100Hz or 120Hz frame rate. The 64000 dollar question is then which is more valuable for quality, increased framerate or improving the definition in the picture?
So, the future of production could be 1080p, or even 2048p (the 4K format used for cinema productions), or one of these with 100/120 Hz frame rate? How valuable would each be? Will there be few or many different studio compression systems? - the questions go on and on.
There are no real answers this year at NAB, but with reduced numbers attending, there at least seems more time to pause and ponder these things.