NBC Olympics Team Discusses How HDR Made Leap to Primetime

from SVG SportsTech Journal — Fall 2021

NBC Olympics Reflects on a Unique Games Experience

TOKYO OLYMPIC GAMES: NBC

NBC Olympics Team Discusses How HDR Made Leap to Primetime

Following the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Games, the NBC Olympics team had one goal: to make the move to IP, UHD, and HDR. Initially, HDR would take a back seat, primarily existing in a shadow cut of the HD show. But then the pandemic came, delaying the Summer Games, and closing the development gap with the 2022 Beijing Games.

“When we realized that we only had six months between the Tokyo Closing Ceremony and the Beijing Opening Ceremony, we realized that whatever we did here we would have to do there and that would mean missing out on HDR,” said Dave Mazza, SVP/CTO, NBC Sports Group and NBC Olympics. “So, we said, let’s pretend IP was already a raging success and also focus on UHD and HDR.”

The result was a massive effort at the IBC in Tokyo and back home in Stamford around 1080p and HDR production for primetime, golf coverage, and Olympic Channel linear content. It also required new developments to serve both HDR and SDR viewers without compromise.

First, OBS committed to producing every event in UHD and HDR. Mazza credited OBS for undertaking the Herculean effort to find 65 UHD flypacks and mobile units, let alone get them to Tokyo.

“I don’t know how they did it and got all of that working in true 4K HDR,” said Mazza. “But our 1080p HDR production layer would not have been possible if OBS had not made the shift to HDR. And intermixing the OBS cams with our 1080p cameras is very seamless.”

Many of the Olympic productions involve a mix of OBS UHD feeds as well as NBC unilateral cameras. It’s up to Chip Adams, NBC Olympics, VP, Venue Engineering, and the teams at each venue to bring all this

From left: Dave Mazza, Todd Donovan, Michael Drazin, and Darryl Jefferson in front of the UHD/HDR demo area at NBC’s IBC facility.

together. For example, at Athletics, the team takes UHD HDR split feeds from OBS, converts them to 1080p HDR, and integrates them into NBC’s unilateral cameras running in 1080p HDR.

“That’s a pretty easy transition because it is just resolution, there are no look up tables (LUTs) needed,” said Adams. “We also take the OBS high speed cameras as 1080p SDR and [convert] them to HDR where we normalize them as HLG along with everything else. So that’s been very successful as working in one format is a lot easier than working in three. The NBC Tokyo trucks, flypacks, and edits are primarily working in 1080p HDR.”

At the Tokyo IBC, NBC’s workflow requires taking the 4K HDR feed from OBS and down converting it to 1080p as the plant is built for 1080p HDR. NBC also sends a 1080i SDR signal to the broadcast center back in Stamford as the Stamford plant is in the process of transitioning 1080p HDR capable, but not there yet.

“Due to the many production enhancements, the sheer quantity of feeds to the U.S. (221 feed to the States and 101 coming back to Tokyo), and replay and super mo servers, file-based workflows, RF links, etc.,” continued Adams, “it was not feasible for us to do 4K at the scale of an Olympics.”

So, NBC elected to not reduce the overall storytelling ability simply for the sake of a resolution number.

“The overall picture quality through the entire chain is not only about resolution,” said Mazza. continued on page 26

22 SPORTSTECHJOURNAL / FALL 2021

SMALL

FORM FACTOR

BIG

Software-defined platform with up to 3 app spaces per SFP

IMPACT

IP SDI IP Gateway

MULTIVIEWER 4x1 / 9x1 / 16x1

4x1 / 9x1 / 16x1 Multiviewer

J2K/JXS

UHD

JPEG-2000 / JPEG-XS En- / Decoder

Up / Down / Cross Converter

Audio Router

SOFTWARE-DEFINED

DISTRIBUTED

THE NEW

MEDIORNET MUON

FLEXIBLE

SCALABLE

MEDIORNET VIRTU 32

www.riedel.net

/VIDEO

TOKYO OLYMPIC GAMES: NBC

Karl Malone on the Move to Immersive Audio and Keeping Remote Commentators Connected

Karl Malone, NBC Sports and NBC

Olympics, director, sound design, said the 2020 Olympics was truly the audio Olympics. He jokes that he says that every Olympics, but it’s hard to argue with that this time around: next-generation immersive audio, with 5.1.4 (think regular surround sound with four additional channels overhead to give height to the audio), is the norm at every venue. And remote commentary is more important than ever. Simply put, the efforts are impressive. He spoke with SVG in the NBC Olympics listening room at the Tokyo IBC.

I wanted to start with your sense of the sonic landscape of these Games. Does anything stand out to you?

Going into this, the focus was a lack of crowd and how things would sound, as well as coming in with the newer technologies of immersive audio, along with OBS providing 5.1.4 audio and a paintbrush to do all our venues in immersive audio. But the lack of crowd has tended not to be an issue because we’ve had quite a lot of crowds, especially in swimming and gymnastics, where the other teams come in, and that has been great. That’s not to say that there are no empty-sounding venues, like badminton or weightlifting, but, certainly for the primary venues, it. has become sort of a non-issue.

Michael DiCrescenzo, NBC senior A1 and audio design engineer, has been mixing the NBC Primetime show in Dolby Atmos and creating the immersive mixes to ensure consistency from sport to sport. Peter Puglisi has been mixing NBC golf coverage in Dolby Atmos but out of a truck in Stamford, CT. The technical complexity of this Games has been dizzying.

Sonically, it has been kind of the best of both worlds, where you have crowd and you can pick out the detail of the sport. This was always going to be the Games that was an audio Games, and you’re going to hear these Games like you’ve never heard before. We can hear footfalls in athletics, and that’s not in a silent stadium: there is the PA, and there are people cheering. Everything takes a day or two to tweak, but you’re hearing things that you’ve never heard before, and that has been fantastic.

I loved the skateboarding where you could hear the board riding down the rail.

Yeah, skateboard is good, but we’re sort of challenged a little bit by a couple of sports like BMX. The ramps are soft, and the rubber wheels are soft, so you’re trying to reach for those sorts of sounds. In 3×3 basketball, the court is different from regular basketball courts, where you hear squeaks and ball bounces, so you need to try to pull those [sounds] out as well. With those new sports, you want to promote that sport to people audibly as well as visually.

Michael DiCrescenzo in the Olympics audio-control room at the IBC. Notice the trusses installed to fly the four speakers.

It has been challenging, but that’s the fun part: how can we get more out of this sport and bring it home to tell the story?

Any tips for someone who has not worked in immersive audio about what to expect and how to do it?

We’ve always talked about having a base layer of ambience for the heights. I think that has always been very successful with us, and that’s what OBS has provided us with: a nice base layer to build on.

We’ve gone 16 channels wide with our edits and audio coming from the truck, and we came into this knowing that’s our plan. Sixteen channels of audio gave us the first eight channels for our standard 5.1, plus we do dummy headsets and clean announcer tracks to help edits. The last eight channels are fully immersive: we take the four height channels, and we have a stereo mix for the last two pairs, which we’ve been able to place into certain areas of the stadiums to add to that base.

For example, we would use those pairs to isolate a certain section of fans in the crowd and put that into the heights with the base. That hasn’t been borne out at these Olympics, but — technically and engineering-wise — we’re getting that through the edits, and that has been very successful. Making that 16-channel workflow work and getting editors to edit across 16 channels is something we’ve never done before. And that has been very helpful to us.

When someone is editing with 16 channels, are they hearing the height signals?

No, they are not hearing them in an immersive overhead configuration but rather as isolated tracks, which they can solo and QC. Ultimately, they’re passing them through from the trucks or the venues. The editors are doing their normal 5.1, and everything’s mixed live in the audio-control room for the final mix.

What does it mean to see spatial audio getting its due, even seeing commercials on TV from Apple about it?

I think anything that can add to the experiences is going to be worthwhile. I know I say this all the time, but immersive audio does make the picture look better. If you add spatial audio and the immersive audio to our production, it makes the production overall a much better and more enjoyable production. And it’s not that the pictures don’t look great; they look fantastic in HDR. But it’s all part of that package that you’re providing people: the best-quality audio and the best-quality video give them the best product possible. – KK

This interview has been condensed and edited. To read the full interview, visit the SVG SportsTechLive Blog.

24 SPORTSTECHJOURNAL / FALL 2021

THE PLATFORM FOR AMAZING THINGS THE PLATFORM FOR AMAZING THINGS

Your content.Our network.Game-changing results.

When delivering video is mission critical, Lumen provides dependable, global connectivity and instant transmission control to deliver the experience your viewers demand, 24/7.

See it in action: lumen.com/vyvx

Network. Edge Cloud. Security. Collaboration.

Services not available everywhere. Business customers only. Lumen may change, cancel or substitute products and services, or vary them by service area at its sole discretion without notice. ©2020 Lumen Technologies. All Rights Reserved.

TOKYO OLYMPIC GAMES: NBC

continued from page 22

“We felt we could achieve a bigger win with the 1080p HDR, and the better HEVC compression, without having to compromise or reduce any of our production storytelling abilities. We have all the extra accoutrements that our production teams wanted, and we think our audience expects. And we have at a stunning new level of picture and audio quality for a massively large-scale sporting event.”

NBC also had to create a production process that made it straightforward and easy for the production team to create content that did not have to be compromised for either HDR or SDR. The result was a new test pattern and color measurement process that enabled the creation of a set of LUTs. Subsequently, NBCU made these LUTs available to the entire industry to continue to spur collaboration and interoperability.

Michael Drazin, NBC Sports, director of production, engineering, and technology, said part of NBC’s philosophy is that while HDR gives additional color and dynamic range anything originating from SDR should present in the HDR space perfectly.

“A lot of our commercial content and anything that was created in SDR should map precisely in our HDR world,” he said. “And that’s why you see the consistency between our HDR and SDR deliverables, except in HDR, where you see all the additional dynamic range and color.”

Drazin added that it was also important to make sure that from a workflow standpoint HDR was straightforward for the team to execute.

“It had to work the way we expect it to, from shading cameras to the editors… through graphics and augmented reality systems,” he said. “Using the NBCU LUTs, the team is able to maintain the artistic intent throughout the entire process. It’s been exciting to see the creative team transition to working in HDR and taking advantage of its new capabilities.”

One big goal was to have storytellers focused on the story, not the ultimate deliverable, which could be HDR or SDR depending on which control room it is being delivered to. For example, a project may originally be due to air in HDR but then bumped to an SDR network. The production team wants to make sure the editor doesn’t need to get involved in that conversion process. Drazin said Darryl Jefferson, VP Post Production & Digital Workflow, NBC Sports & Olympics, and his team created a predictive system so that creatives could see how a change in HDR would impact SDR and vice versa.

“They can protect both deliverables at the same time and I think that is one of the most important operational things we’ve learned,” he said.

Mazza said that depending on what folder the content is put in the team knows where it’s headed and can then apply the look up table or up and down conversion.

The 1080p HDR production workflows were only part of the process as NBC also had to figure out how to deliver 4K HDR coverage to viewers, including the local affiliates’ ability to roll their local breaks. The live 4K HDR coverage of the NBC Olympics primetime show would not have been possible without a way to localize it for NBC viewers back home.

“It will be a while before TV stations are able to fully broadcast in 4K HDR,” said Clarence Hau, SVP, Operations and Technology, NBCU. “In partnership with our NBC affiliates, we undertook a major effort on a

The HDR and UHD efforts by NBC Olympics allowed them to take full advantage of the OBS production, which included UHD cameras.

new NBC distribution system that seamlessly integrates local commercials into the NBC Olympics programming.”

The one-year delay provided the time for NBC to figure out how to integrate each station’s local HD signal together with the 4K HDR signal so local commercials are viewed by both audiences — a first for a domestic broadcast network. NBC was able to get this new system deployed at 52 stations in time for the Tokyo Olympics, translating to about 70% of the national market (look for a future report detailing those efforts).

The work that NBC has put in to deliver a 4K HDR service gave plenty of those who own a UHD HDR-capable set a reason to tune in. But watching 4K HDR content can be confusing (think of HD viewers believing they were watching HD when they were really watching stretch SD).

“It should automatically set itself, but it is ‘early days’ and sometimes the flags do not make it properly thru the STBs, receivers, soundbars, and TVs,” said Mazza. “The TV should present an indication that it’s in HDR. On the other hand, I believe that DirectTV emits HLG and, in that case, if your picture is under saturated, it is probably set to SDR, when it should be on HLG. If it’s way oversaturated and very bright, it’s probably set to HDR10. Unfortunately, it is very easy to get wrong.”

The Olympics has provided arguably the widest variety of 4K HDR content to date in the world and Mazza said the outdoor events have benefitted the most from the move to UHD and HDR.

“The contrast in cumulus clouds in a sunny sky are different from the blurry blob of white in SDR,” he said. “And then the speculars in swimming or the shiny outfits in gymnastics are stunning in UHD, HDR, this makes it to the audience with the improvements with HEVC. HDR brought to life the artistry in Opening Ceremony, it provided the audience the feeling of being outside for Athletics and beach volleyball when it’s combined with immersive audio.”

The process has not been an easy one, but it is indicative of the kind of innovation that an event like the Olympics and its stakeholders embrace.

“It’s a really complicated show, but we’re very happy with how the pictures look, the immersive audio sounds and we couldn’t be doing it without a whole lot of very hard working and talented people and innovation between both the NBC and OBS teams,” said Mazza.

– Ken Kerschbaumer

26 SPORTSTECHJOURNAL / FALL 2021