Sapec participa en la SMPTE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition

The Spanish company once again had a special role by presenting for the second consecutive year in collaboration with the iTEAM-UPV Institute a technological solution for the efficient use of the HEVC standard in content contribution and exchange services.

One year after its approval, the new HEVC (H.265) video coding standard continues to arouse maximum interest within the audiovisual industry, as has been confirmed at the Annual Technical Exhibition and Conference that the SMPTE It was held from October 21 to 24 in Hollywood, California (USA).

For the second consecutive year, SAPEC, leader in the professional audio and video sector, in collaboration with the Institute of Telecommunications and Multimedia Applications of the Universitat Politècnica de València (iTEAM-UPV), have participated as leading exponents of Spanish audiovisual technology, presenting a technological solution for the efficient use of the HEVC standard in content contribution and exchange services between producers, broadcasters and operators.

innovative architecture

Before a large group of industry experts, SAPEC and iTEAM-UPV showed the benefits that HEVC can provide in the encoding of interlaced formats, especially for the 1080i high definition format. Its relevance lies in the fact that this interlaced format continues to have a strong implementation today both in the area of ​​TV production, where more than 80% of the content is still produced in 1080i, and in the field of radio broadcasting, where it is the clearly dominant format on all HD platforms, and without forgetting the immense and valuable archive of existing HD content, where this format is also the preferred one over the progressive format (720p or 1080p).

Due to the lack of specific tools for HEVC interlaced mode encoding, there is considerable confusion in the industry regarding HEVC's ability to encode interlaced content. As an example of the benefits that HEVC can provide in this area, the DVB has recently approved a new version of its recommendation TR 101 154 with the aim of providing support with the HEVC standard for 1080i interlaced formats in their different frame-rates.

Sapec and iTEAM-UPV presented a novel architecture that facilitates the implementation of the “Sequence-Adaptive Field-Frame” or SAFF model, which allows efficient encoding of interleaved formats with low delay.

With the aim of analyzing the efficiency of the proposed model in an HEVC encoder, the results obtained on a large set of sequences with different spatio-temporal complexities were shown, using the new HEVC profile “Main 422 10b”.

These results confirm that HEVC can reduce the bandwidth currently used by H.264 in its “High 422” profile to values ​​greater than 60%, for highly complex sequences (such as sports sequences) while for less demanding sequences, such as animation content, HEVC continues to obtain an efficiency greater than 30% with respect to H.264 for interlaced formats.

Pioneering experiences

As a final conclusion, SAPEC and the iTEAM-UPV highlighted that the new HEVC “Main 422 10-bit” profile for professional applications can offer substantial bandwidth reductions that can be taken advantage of by TV broadcasters and operators, both for TV contribution and broadcast services with the current high-definition interlaced format.

Sapec is currently one of the first companies in the world to have professional HEVC encoders in real time, in which it integrates this technology to support interlaced formats.

The presentation

With the title 'Evaluation of the efficiency of HEVC for contribution services with interlaced content', engineers Juan José Anaya, technical director of Sapec, and Damián Ruiz, from the Universitat Politècnica de València, presented an avant-garde technical 'paper' to the demanding audience that attends the SMPTE Exhibition and Technical Conference each year.

Last January 2014, a new family of HEVC profiles called “Extension Range” was approved, which is intended to cover the needs within high-quality production environments, such as primary distribution, contribution services and editing/post-production. The new “Main 422@10” profile will become the successor to the successful “Hi422P” profile of H.264/AVC, achieving high efficiency for emerging formats beyond HD, such as 4K and 8K formats. However, interlaced HD content is currently the main content in broadcast production, but HEVC profiles do not include specific tools for interlaced content as was the case with H.264/AVC.

The presentation addressed the issues involved in HD contribution services interlaced under the “Main 422@10” HEVC profile, with the objective of identifying the true effectiveness of HEVC compared to the Hi422P profile of H.264/AVC. The Spanish engineers offered the results of this simulation, reporting bandwidth savings and improvement in quality for broadcasters and network operators when using interlaced HD coding using the new HEVC profiles.