Video Breakthroughs

Delegates to this year’s IBC expo in Amsterdam have been able to sample a variety of future displays and file formats, among them an improved Super Hi-Vision.

The NHK-backed Super Hi-Vision is a project familiar to RAI attendees and one the Japanese broadcaster and its industry partners have been been working on since the beginning of the Millennium.

The year-to-year advances have been plain to see. The Sharp prototype 85″ 8K LCD displays clearly performed much better than the ones shown only last year.

A further improvement on show this year was the doubling of Ultra High Definition (UHD) or Super Hi-Vision (SHV)’s frame rate. The side-by-side demo in the show’s Future Zone was so obvious, from completely blurred fast-moving pans on one screen to a very watchable version shot with the 120 frames per second version from NHK’s 8K camera.

UHDTV was ratified by the ITU earlier this year in both the original 60 fps and the 120 fps variety. The demo at this year’s Future Zone, next to hall 8, makes clear that 120 frames per second is an acceptable starting point.

With UHDTV standards in place, broadcasters are getting ready to tackle new challenges. The administrations of the International Telecommunication Union recently agreed on two levels of Ultra High Definition Television (UHDTV), making it officially a worldwide standard. 

David Wood, who chairs the ITU working group that drafted the UHDTV recommendation, noted that a tough decision would be whether broadcasters would look to start a transition with level one or move immediately to adopt level two. Wood told THR that many broadcasters view the move from HD to 8K as perhaps too great and thinks it is prudent to start with 4K. But NHK, he related, doesn’t see an advantage in shifting to 4K and then making a second jump to 8K.

"We've seen NHK preparing its Super Hi-Vision 8K video since time immemorial. Wouldn't it be nice if the TV broadcast technology was more than just a perpetual research project? If sources for Japan's Nikkei aren't dreaming, the International Telecommunication Union is now 'likely' to declare the format an official standard for broadcasters and TV makers."

NHK has unveiled a new compact Super Hi-Vision camera which will be used to produce regular SHV content by 2014. The camera will not be used as part of the London Olympics test transmissions. NHK says it plan to start using the camera in SHV production by 2014 after further checks on performance and necessary improvements.

The camcorder’s single 33 million pixel (7,680 across x 4,320 high) CMOS sensor and can capture at 60 frames per second.
The SHV signals from the camera are uncompressed and output at a data rate of about 24Gpps for recording variously onto a HDD, SSD or P2 recorder. Recording capacity is 20 to 50 minutes in HDD and SSD (uncompressed), or about 2 hours on P2 (compressed).

Keiichi Kubota, NHK’s Exective Director-General for Engineering, tells 3D Focus that the target date for Super Hi-Vision experimental broadcasting could be brought forward to 2016 and progress is being made with 'true 3D'.

Kubota also said that the engineers have made progress with Integral 3D – NHK’s future 3D format that does not require 3D glasses and allows people to ‘look around’ objects.