InfoComm 2010: The Accidental Live Production Show

InfoComm, the annual confab held annually in June, used to be all about projector shootouts and testing labs for systems integrators.

Yet, over the years, this bi-coastal show has seen significant change: it merged with several other shows, including the NSCA audio show, and added technologies that systems integrators and VARs were interested in pursuing.

In some ways, this convergence has led InfoComm to become the “accidental” live production show, since many of the technologies can be used for both augmentation within a room (such as the range extender products we’ve covered in the past) as well as part of a larger live production delivery solution.

Two sets of technologies have bearing to Event DV Live readers: digital signage and streaming solutions.

Digital Signage. On the upper end of the digital signage market are the command-and-control display solutions, many for mission critical corporate or military applications. Gas and oil companies also use these devices, which are being put to extensive use in Houston during the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, allowing those on-shore to view potential progress in capping the well.

Sharing similar needs with live production equipment, command-and-control digital signage devices require low-latency and very high quality. Processing power goes into delivering all the bits, even from a DVI or HDMI input, with little latency or delay. As such, most IP-based solutions on the market today use proprietary codecs, as low-latency H.264 or MPEG-2 based encoder-decoder pairs often add too much latency to the delivery of high-quality graphics.

Electrosonic ES7100 encoder/decoder by Extron

Extron showcased one such proprietary streaming solutions, essentially rebranded Electrosonic ES7100 encoder/decoders with a PURE3 compression codec.

Somewhat more akin to a digital cinema solution than to a browser-based viewing of video, these streaming solutions use 6 to 150 megabits per second, At these high bitrates, they’re not exactly the kind of content that can be viewed on a local desktop but they are quite helpful for connecting remote locations in a live production shoot, allowing each location to see exactly what is being acquired.

The quality of the compressed content itself exceeds most broadcast standards, so these devices are finding their way into production trucks, as a way to insert a remote computer’s graphics into a live production stream, using DVI to HD-SDI conversion that’s inherent to these digital signage products.

Streaming solutions. The majority of video encoders for the web don’t require the low latencies of the digital signage solutions mentioned above. These streaming solutions are geared toward video capture and delivery, both in standard definition and high definition, and typically have a 2-8 second delay to account for processing and buffering video at bitrates between 700 Kbps and 2.5 Mbps.

Like digital signage, however, there is a move toward streaming not just video but also graphics, by scaling down the high-quality screen resolutions to a bitrate that the average consumer can view. In the past, solutions that encode computer graphics for web streaming have done so by grabbing a still JPEG image every few seconds, then sending that still image alongside the “talking head” lower-resolution video stream.

NCast Presentation Recorder

One example of a product that is tackling the ability to do both “talking head” and computer graphics streaming is the Ncast Presentation series of capture devices.  Ncast has been focused on live streaming of graphics, including full-motion capture of DVI / HDMI signals, for about three years, but at InfoComm, Ncast announced a lectern-mounted capture unit capable of selecting between any two of the input connectors: composite video, VGA, DVI, HDMI and component video.

Ncast moved from MPEG-4 Part 2, which didn’t have significant compression advantages over MPEG-2, to the newer MPEG-4 Part 10, or H.264, codec. Now Ncast can deliver both signals are part of a single raw H.264 stream: one of the signals can be sized to its full frame size, while the other will be in a positionable picture-in-picture (PIP) configuration.

“Our customers don’t need to worry about synchronizing slides, web pages or computer capture with a video stream of the lecturer,” said Hank Magnuski, founder of Ncast. “All the content is already synchronized, and can be delivered as a single 720p video stream.”

Since Ncast is outputting a raw H.264 stream, it needs an intermediate streaming server to convert the raw H.264 stream wrappers to allow playback in either a Flash or QuickTime player. Ncast uses the Wowza Media Server, which means it could also deliver the same content to a mobile device, if a mobile device was capable of receiving the high-resolution stream. Until that point, sending content to a mobile device would require a second encoding session for a second stream, since each Ncast encoder only outputs a single bitrate stream.

These are just a few of the examples of products that were on display at InfoComm that might be of use to EventDVLive readers. This blog post has a brief overview of each; for more detail on these and other products of interest for live production, see two InfoComm articles I’ve written for our sister publication, StreamingMedia.com.

Tim Siglin (tims [at] braintrustdigital.com) is chairman of Braintrust Digital, a digital media production company specializing in training, corporate communication, government, historical preservation, documentary, and business marketing and development. He is a contributing editor to EventDV and Streaming Media.