SuperTennis and 4K, December 2015
SuperTennis is the TV channel of the Italian Tennis Federation and available for free on channel 64 of the digital TV, in HD on satellite platform SKY channel 224 and the number 30 of Tivùsat, as well as simulcast streaming on www.supertennis.tv.
"The Great Challenge 4" at Palapanini of Modena is the event which saw John McEnroe, Mats Wilander, Henri Leconte and Sergi Bruguera challenge, shot in 4K Ultra HD.
The final event - Sunday, November 22, starting at 16 - was in fact broadcast live Ultra HD on two channels, both at 50 frames per second and 10-bit color: 4K1, the popular HOT BIRD at 13E, FRANSAT Ultra HD and the French satellite platform FRANSAT conveyed to the satellite EUTELSAT 5 West A.
Alfredo Nardoni is Head of Production of the TV channel SuperTennis, since the beginning in November 2008.
Alfredo describes his work: "I take care of the choice of technologies to be used in production, both from the operational and productive sides. SuperTennis is edited by an external company, Sportcast, which is 100% owned by the Italian Tennis Federation.
The company produces all tv contents for SuperTennis channel but also for external companies, federations and broadcasters.
Nardoni continues: "Sportcast is born as a subsidiary of the Tennis Federation and is also publisher of the channel SuperTennis.
The production and playout structure is physically placed inside a well known production company, SBP. Here are also a shooting study and the various editing suites.
The ultimate experience in 4K, "La grande sfida" stems directly from the preceding, made last year in the A1 in the finals of tennis in Genoa, again diffused by Eutelsat.
The difference is in the tv cameras at the time which were Grass Valley's; now they are all Sony's.
The production facilities used were those of DBW, Globecast for the satellite segment, NTT encoding HEVC and Eutelsat for satellite distribution.
The requirement was to be able to have the whole chain in 4K, so they resorted to Sony.
Four cameras were in the field "one" and "two" on the short side of the court, on scaffolding; the "three" and "four" instead were placed near the net and opposite to the players' bench. Sony HDC 4300 and 55 F were used, with short lenses, while the two adopted a rather strong zoom since it was connected to slow motion and replay.
Even the video server was Sony, "an EVS style" control panel developed by Sony avoids the operator to learn new equipments.
Shooting in 4K is ideal in tennis because the ball is very small and so the screen resolution is crucial to be able to better follow the match.
The feed in 4K was downgraded in HD to TV SuperTennis channel and, again automatically downgraded even in SD.
The transmission requires a very wide bandwidth but HEVC encoding is very efficient; the signal is encoded to ASI in excellent quality.
In my opinion 4K is having a bit of what had happened at the time of HD when encodings were not definitive and the industry started with the 'HD ready' format and only later we moved to HD. Today apparently 4K seems easy matter, just using two HD signals, but again it seems difficult to agree on what formats to use and people already talks of 8K.
Since in practice it is only a multiplication of lines of the video, someone suggests that we will go directly to 8K, perhaps jumping 4K. Even the name, "4K" or "Ultra HD" still causes disagreement.
Contrary to what happened for the stereoscopic 3D, where they were problems of illumination, depth of field, in the panoramics (to avoid creating visual fatigue in the viewer), there are no problems in 4K, and also fast movements do not create particular issues.
From the home user side, in the case of HD, the bigger the TV set, the better was the image. Today, however, to perceive the most definition of a 4K signal, even with a very large screen (60"), the viewing distance should not be very far. Besides, buying a 4K TV today may be premature, as the coding are always updated and tv manufacturing giants must first agree on the actual code to use."
images from the link
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/gx1s6gqeniv0cye/AAA7-4h-pqdNSwFzXHPpGc3da?dl=0
