When 4K is not just image: Next Generation Audio

Mickaël Raulet, Director of Research and Innovation at Ateme, speaks at the 4K HDR Summit to share the experiences with Next Gen Audio (NGA) that he has been carrying out for eight years.

He next generation audio (Next Gen Audio, NGA) is having a relevant place on the agenda of the sixth edition of the 4K HDR Summit.

With the recent case study of the last Roland Garros and the 13th victory of the Spanish tennis player Rafa Nadal, the French multinational Atem is showing off its latest advances in coding and immersive audio at the event.

Mickaël Raulet, Director of Research and Innovation at Ateme, focused his speech on explaining how the company has turned the French Tennis Open into its experimentation laboratory since 2012 so that audio and video reach every corner of the planet, with the quality appropriate to the needs of each television.

To frame his presentation, he initially reviewed the great technological milestones of the last decade, highlighting the emergence of the HEVC compression standard in 2013, the first tests in Ultra High Definition (High Dynamic Range HDR + Wide Color Gamut WCG) in 2015, the impact of High Frame Rate HFR in 2017; and finally just two years ago the appearance of next generation audio (Next Generation Audio NGA).

The first experiences in UHD with HEVC encoding with SDR production were carried out by Ateme in the 2014 and 2015 editions of Roland Garros.

The following year he began to experiment in this sporting event with the HDR live production, testing its compatibility through the intrinsic properties of the HLG TF. In collaboration with Dolby, they also tested the possibilities of Dolby Vision technology and its compatibility with the HD10 standard in a live performance with high dynamic range.

Last year, Ateme also actively participated in the Roland Garros broadcast with a France Télévisions UHD HLG BT2020 production that was converted to HDR10 to be subsequently distributed by satellite (DVB-S2) and DTT (DVB-T2) to devices compatible with HDR, SL HDR and MPEG-H. At the same time, the platform Titan Live allowed encoding in HEVC Main10 24 Mbit/s in UHD and 8 Mbit/s in HD, SL HDR, MPEG-H and Stereo HE-AAC (High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding).

Versatile Video Coding (VVC)

In his presentation, Mickaël Raulet introduced an element worth highlighting, the first tests with the numbernew Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard. This compression (ITU H.226) developed by JVET (the team of MPEG and VCEG video experts) aims to be the successor to HEVC (ITU H.265). Since its launch at the end of 2017, the new standard based on intra-frame and inter-frame prediction and entropic coding, has demonstrated efficiencies above 35% with respect to HEVC.

The first real demonstration with VVC has been carried out with a sign of The Explorers, a French production company, specialized in broadcasting in Ultra High Definition documentaries about the natural and cultural wonders of the Earth. With the Ateme Titan VVC encoding, the signal has been distributed via satellite (SES) under DVB-S2 and OTT standard with streaming in Fragmented MP4s (fMP4) sobre HLS.

Raulet concluded his speech by analyzing the new generation of codecs that will allow 8K workflows to be implemented while ensuring that immersive audio allows you to personalize what the viewer receives with personalized and multi-language experiences, offer premium audio services with 3D Sound, and allow accessibility through audio description and dialogue enhancement.