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From SDI Workflows to IP Based Production | The Big Shift · Broadcast2Post by Key Code Media

• 0:00
  Speaker A: Foreign.
• 0:11
  Speaker B: Today, we're digging into one of the biggest shifts in broadcast and live production. Of course, I'm talking about the move from traditional SDI workflows to ip. And while IP promises flexibility and future proofing, the reality is that it's a very different way of thinking, both technically and operationally. And that's where a lot of teams are struggling. And that's of course why we called in the big guns today. Troy English, CTO of Ross Video Now, Troy joined us previously on the podcast and that conversation sparked a ton of feedback from both broadcast and live production teams who are navigating this transition. We'll of course link to that episode in the description. Now, Troy has been deeply involved in Ross journey from baseband and hybrid systems to ST2110 over open standards and the new platforms like Catena. Now, Troy, thanks so much for being here. We really appreciate it.
• 1:04
  Speaker A: It's my pleasure, Michael.
• 1:06
  Speaker B: So Troy Ross recently published two white papers, ins and Outs of Today's Signal Transport and Navigating Modern Day Signal Processing. Now, both lay out a pretty honest picture. Workflows are in flux, engineering teams are stretched, and the move to IP is not just a technology shift, but but an operational one. So let's talk about first customer struggles with IP transitions. All right, now, from your seat as CTO of ros, what are the most common challenges you're hearing today from broadcast and live production customers who are either considering IP or maybe even they're halfway into it?
• 1:43
  Speaker A: Sure. So IP requires a different set of skills and background that not every broadcast engineer has. IP is frankly more complicated than sdi. With sdi, I just plug the cable in. Video Magic. With ip, of course, it is more complex than that. And you add to that that if you've got broadcast engineers who've been in the business for 10 years or more, they understand how to do it. They've done SDI for a decade, sometimes more. That's who they are. So there's a lot of networking technologies that they simply may not know. And honestly, you add to that that IP has a lot more choice in SDI. Again, it's one format 720p 1080i. There's not that many choices. And when we say IP, it's one of the first things we always have to say is what do we mean by IP? Do you mean 2110? Do you mean SRT? Do you mean NDI? There's new emerging standards for IP such as MXL, which are just starting up, which is interesting. There's a Famous saying called the paradox of choice, which means that when you have more choice, it doesn't necessarily make your life easier. And IP is kind of like that. You have a lot of choices to make and you really need to know what you're doing or work with someone who knows what they're doing to get through all those choices.
• 3:03
  Speaker B: Well, there's a couple things you mentioned there, and I want to make sure that we're covering all of them. So you mentioned there's the technology selection, but you also mentioned there's new technology emerging. So that comes down to staffing and operational confidence. So are you finding that there needs to be a lot of re education for today's broadcast and live production engineers to learn this new technology?
• 3:26
  Speaker A: Oh, absolutely. The simplest one and one of the complicated things, system timing. You know, for, if you've been in the industry for a long time, you're used to having black bursts around your studio, you use that. But of course system timing and IP is different. The common one in like 2110, of course, would be PTP, you know, IEEE 1588. And understanding that is different and the challenges are different. And you need someone who can understand those. And you have to learn all of that for, for a lot of people. Again, if you've been in the industry a while, it's relearning things that you know how to do. It's like learning to walk again, if that makes any sense.
• 4:06
  Speaker B: So that we were speaking about broadcast engineers, but when we talk to end customers, right, so maybe folks who aren't the engineering type, but maybe have some management over those engineers. Where do most customers underestimate the complex of these new types of deployments?
• 4:25
  Speaker A: Honestly, one of the biggest ones really is that system timing problem, which is, you know, the simplest example is just lip sync, right? You know, your video and our audio are going through different paths and you need to realign them at some point. And that's a very simple example of challenges that can, can occur. And the next one is diagnostics. So, you know, the big problem is I look at a video screen somewhere and my video is gone. It's like, okay, well why is it gone? Historically you could have just looked and where's my cable? And basically follow the cables and make sure that they're actually plugged in. And with ip, of course, is nowhere near as simple as that because you've got an IP router in the middle of it. And it's not as simple as, oh, is it running? It's do I have every single configuration correct. Does the IP router I have really support the IP standard I'm using? Just because it says IP doesn't mean it's going to run 2110 perfectly or any of the other standards. So there's just a lot more going on. So I'd say the two biggest things would be timing and diagnostics are some of the biggest challenges for people I
• 5:30
  Speaker B: do want to circle back a little bit to, and I don't want to call it retraining, maybe more re education. But you know, one thing that comes through clearly in navigating this new signal processing is that IP based systems require, as we mentioned, a very different mindset, a different way of thinking. Right. Not just different gear. Why is this such a hard adjustment for experienced, experienced broadcast engineers?
• 5:54
  Speaker A: I think it's as simple as again, for experienced broadcast engineers, as in ones who aren't new to the industry, it's just technology they didn't grow up with necessarily and it's training they didn't necessarily receive when they got their education and how to do, you know, again, video work, et cetera. So really it's mostly, it's not skill. They're all very talented individuals. It's mostly just either they haven't taken the formal coursework or had the several years of experience in the network engineering portion of it. I don't think there's anything more complex than that. They can of course relearn. Absolutely. They just need to go and do that, which takes time.
• 6:36
  Speaker B: That brings up a very good question. Thank you for segueing that for me. I appreciate it. Is that who owns that education, right? How much responsibility should manufacturers like Ross take on when it comes to education and making these systems more approachable? Or are we finding that there needs to be a decent amount of self learning from the engineers themselves?
• 6:57
  Speaker A: Well, I'm going to give the cheat answer, which is say both. So people like ourselves, who manufactures the equipment, it is our responsibility to continually try and make the equipment easier to use, easier to install, easier to commission, easier to understand. And that's one of the goals we have all the time. Every single thing we do is trying to advance that to make it simpler for users. But at the same token, end users of course also have responsibility to learn the equipment, it's technology they're using. And be it them or their employers, they certainly need to look into it as well. So I'd say that I think like any technology shift, the imperative is on everybody involved and we all have to do our part and we're doing everything we can on our side to do it, but we can't do everything.
• 7:49
  Speaker B: Can you recommend resources? Obviously Roths has a lot of collateral for education. There are schools or training curricula that exists. Key code media, of course, is key code education which assists in some of these things. But are there any other resources for folks who are looking to learn this new technology, especially when it comes to ip, that you can recommend for folks to go, go and, and read up on?
• 8:12
  Speaker A: Yeah, well, certainly we've published some, some white papers that you mentioned earlier. So those are always good high level overviews. I know that if you're talking specifically, you know, 2110, because I know we talked about 2110 in the intro that SMPTE does have, for example, some 2110 training material and some, I believe they have some courses as well on it, and, and there are others. So I, I'd suggest both of those to start.
• 8:36
  Speaker B: Honestly, Ross didn't rush blindly into ST2110. There was a long period where 12G, SDI and hybrid architectures just simply made more sense. Troy, can you kind of walk us through how ROS evaluated that decision internally?
• 8:51
  Speaker A: Sure. So all companies have to evaluate all new technologies as they appear and choose which ones to embrace and when. The reality is there's lots of new technologies appearing all the time and no company can afford to do all of them simultaneously. So you have to kind of look at the technology itself, see what you believe the pros and cons are. And also you look at market adoption. It's interesting to point out, you know, we talk about 2110 a lot, but 2110 wasn't the first IP standard that was in our industry before that. I believe 2022 was the number. And I won't go through the differences between 2022 and 2110, but the reality is, is when we looked at 2022, the precursor, we didn't see the strengths of it enough to jump into it. So we didn't do quite a lot in it, to be honest. We did a little bit, but we didn't go head on into it the way we have for 2110 now. So frankly, when 2110 came out, we're looking to see if the market adoption and if customers really wanted it. And we are at the stage now, obviously where 2110 is considered commonplace and used everywhere. So we were frankly just looking to say when that tipping point was going to be and what made the most sense for us. And again, we still think that the other forms of video have their place. Again, we're still big supporters of sdi, will continue to be for quite some time. And we are also big supporters of those who want to use both at the same time. You know, it's not, it is not our job to tell customers how to do their business. We are here to support them however they want. And today we have customers who really want SDI and we have customers who really want 2110 and other formats of IP videos, as we mentioned earlier.
• 10:47
  Speaker B: So ROS has made some very deliberate moves to be more open, embracing my favorite things acronyms like NBoss, Dante, NDI, JPEG, XS, which I'm a huge fan of and I wish more, more folks would adopt and of course hybrid workflows. So why is openness no longer optional in kind of these modern production environments?
• 11:08
  Speaker A: Sure. Let me say one of my favorite things is when I get new staff, the first thing I tell them, actually ask them, is when do they know what a TLA is? And then say it's very recursive. It's a TLA is a three letter acronym. And then I, the next thing I tell them is that Our industry loves TLAs and get ready for them. I know this is off topic, but you can cut this. But I think it's funny. I do remember a PowerPoint slide in a presentation that had. The only thing on that PowerPoint was about 20 to 30 TLAs in a row. It made perfect sense to me, but I also thought it was one of the funniest things I'd ever seen. So as far as slides, as far as openness on standards, I mean we've always had standards in the industry. I mean, you know, the perfect example are things like SDI where. And the reason it made it easy is because you knew that if you had a signal, you just plug your cable in and you would get video because everybody involved was using the same standard, the same video flows. And that's continuing. There's lots of organizations out there. Again, you mentioned several and there are several others right now as well. And you have to have interoperability. I mean, I cannot have video flow from one device, not appear in the other. There's. There's literally no point to that. So one of, one of the interesting things going on in the industry right now is there is an explosion of formats right now. And honestly every couple of years there's another and they're all important. So it's not just SDI, it's not just 2110, it is JXS, as you mentioned. Again, NDI, again the new one, MXL, and that's just SRT and there's this huge list. I think that's one of the big challenges in IP that people face, which is why one of our biggest selling product lines, which we talked about last time we did this, which is our UltraX hyper converged, one of its big jobs is to accept video and audio from as many of those as possible and convert between them all. Because honestly, that's one of the biggest challenges today is, you know, you go to different locations and you'll find that they're using completely different codecs, completely different video transports. And I wish I could tell you it was getting easier, but the reality is it's not. It's going the other direction. There is again an explosion of all these formats out there today. They're all standardized, but they are certainly not standardized between different locations and different customer bases.
• 13:39
  Speaker B: Now I've always loved that line. The thing about standards is that everyone has one.
• 13:45
  Speaker A: Right.
• 13:45
  Speaker B: Which is kind of a little counterintuitive. Right. But I will say for everyone out there who's looking to get into the industry is that historically, over the past several decades, it's always been closed ecosystem to each manufacturer and each manufacturer had their own sandbox they played in. And it's only recently, over maybe the last decade or so, that we've been seeing the, you know what, maybe we should open up not just to be a good shepherd in the industry, but also because not everyone is going to have the same workflow, not everyone's going to have the same equipment. And if we can adapt to what they may be using or what they may want to move to, then that just makes everyone kind of come out a winner.
• 14:24
  Speaker A: Right.
• 14:25
  Speaker B: So Katina from Ross is getting a lot of attention for the audience. Katina is an open Source Communication Standard, SMPTE ST2138 for controlling media devices and services across complex, multi vendor, cloud based and on premise broadcast environments. At a practical level, what problem is Catena designed to solve that existing approaches couldn't?
• 14:49
  Speaker A: Yeah, and this one is way more fractured than video formats. So a little bit of history. So at ROS we have a product called OverDrive. OverDrive is production automation as part of OverDrive, I think we're just sub 200 different communication protocols that we've implemented in it to be able to control all the various equipment around your studios. So Catena, what it is, is a way that you can have instead of having 200 in theory, and theory is always, you know, but in theory, you could have one, you could have one communication protocol for software from one media application to be able to control another media application with, with just one, I think it's possible, I think it's doable. We're very early days with Catena right now or ST2138. It has just been ratified in SMPTE and we're publishing the documents now. So we don't have wide adoption yet. We're, we're just starting down, down that path. But in theory it should make everybody in the industry's life easier when one software application needs to talk to another software application. Media application, of course. And it is very common. It's something that happens all the time, every day. There's millions of messages going right now between pieces of video equipment today. And this job is to make all of that easier for everybody, like ourselves, vendors, and also for users. Because all of a sudden, again, in theory, you shouldn't have to ask, can this software control that software? If everybody was compatible with this one overarching protocol, you wouldn't have to answer the question. It just would be. Whatever you had would be able to talk to the other applications in your environment. And it's based on our experience. Many, many years ago we made Open Gear, which was multi vendor from day one. It wasn't all about it's only ROS products. It's anybody who wants to make products can interact with Open Gear. And we designed our previous version of Katina, the Open Gear protocol, to be just that, to be multi vendor. And our goal is at the time we're a lot smaller. We could not, we just didn't have the staff to talk to 30, 40 other companies and to write custom drivers with everybody. So we designed it to be a plug and play so that we could work with another vendor without having to do any additional work on our side. You call it lazy if you want. I would call it efficient and continues following that model.
• 17:23
  Speaker B: So Troy, earlier you mentioned an acronym I'm not entirely familiar with, and that's mxl. I know mxf, but not mxl. Can you kind of educate me and the rest of everyone watching what is mxl? Sure.
• 17:36
  Speaker A: So MXL stands for Media Exchange Library. This is. It is a new work in progress done under the ebu, the European Broadcasting Union and amla, the Advanced Media Workflow Association. So together they've put together a larger item called dmf Dynamic Media Facility. And part of that is mxl, which is the ability to share, share video between software applications. It's really built for software applications as its primary focus, either within a machine or between machines. And the initial SDKs for it have been released and it's continuing to be work on. It has a lot of interesting functions and functionality to it that I, personally, I'm not speaking for Ross now. I'm speaking for AS Troy. That I, I think makes it very attractive and I think that we'll get some headway in the market as it rolls out. So there, there isn't anything really today that supports it. Again, it's a work, it's really a work in progress right now. And, and I'm not speaking for, you know, any of those organizations just for myself here, but I, I do think it will, I, I think it will be impactful. The quick difference is that it allows you to send video again between those software applications within a machine or between machines and asynchronously, which means it's not paced the way video is, the way 2110 is. It essentially is put the video buffer onto the network and you move it across the network as quick as you can and whenever it's ready. So, yeah, I would say for anyone who's paying attention to the broadcast industry, keep an eye out for it because it's, I think it has the potential to be a very big changer, frankly, for the industry.
• 19:31
  Speaker B: So wrapping up. Troy, if you could give one piece of advice to broadcast and live production teams that are standing at the edge of the IP transition, what would that be?
• 19:44
  Speaker A: Certainly, especially if you're talking, hey, I want to use IP video because I believe in the concept and all the pros that IP video gives. I will say, by the way, that we also see, we don't think SDI is dead. We actually see quite a long future for both. And they both got pros and cons and good reasons to use. But if you do want to use IP for the pros that it gives you, the first thing to do is to talk to someone who knows all of the ins and outs and the options. Because again, it's not like when you say hype, if someone says, I want to use IP video, that doesn't mean a lot. It really is, okay, well, which kind of IP video? What are you actually trying to achieve? Like, what is your environment, what makes sense? And, you know, we here at Ross have people to help and I believe you have a lot of knowledgeable staff as well. So my first thing would be is if you don't have a huge background to know the ins and outs of it, that you definitely talk with someone who does because they can save you a lot of pain by not going to in picking the version of IP that doesn't work very well for your application. So you want to do that research and talk to again, talk to someone who really knows the ins and out because there is a lot of choice.
• 20:56
  Speaker B: And for anyone listening out there who does feel overwhelmed, trust me, you're not alone. The transition is real and it's happening in stages. And if you reach out to Key Code Media, we can certainly help you navigate that. And of course we can enlist Ross's help. So Troy, thank you so very much for joining us on your second appearance on our podcast today.
• 21:15
  Speaker A: My pleasure. I hope it's a third than a fourth.
• 21:18
  Speaker B: It has been very enlightening to everyone else out there. Feel free to follow us on the socials and check out the description for more information on Key Code Media and we'll see you on the next video. Thanks for watching. Broadcast to Post don't forget to follow Keycode Media on social and contact us about your projects@kicodemedia.com.