The tech trends that will dominate Amsterdam at IBC2022

The first IBC since 2019 starts on Friday. RedShark will be covering all the news from the show floor in detail; but first Phil Rhodes previews an event that is now about networking in all its senses.

Being late in the year, IBC is one of the last big conventions to achieve a post-pandemic reboot. There had been hopes of running the in-person show even later than usual in 2021, although that attempt was cancelled not much more than a week prior to the event’s planned opening after the Dutch government became concerned about rising cases of Covid.

Returning to a thoroughly-offline world actually comes off as something of an irony in light of the direction technology seems to be taking. A huge number of companies, including those which have long been big names in the big iron of filmmaking hardware, have been announcing various degrees of IT integration. That’s not entirely new, given the fact that JVC has been pushing its Connected Cam infrastructure for years, and NewTek’s practicality-focussed NDI protocol is much in evidence in both hardware and software from people like BirdDog. The rest of the show is likely to be drowning in IP in every form from full-bore SMPTE-2110 broadcast infrastructure and the links between video wall processors and the sorts of LED displays used for virtual production.

Well, that probably was the purpose of a general-purpose networking infrastructure, though it’d be interesting to know what Robert Metcalfe, David Boggs, Chuck Thacker, and Butler Lampson thought.

This sort of thing peaked as networked video was rushed into service over 2020 and 2021 to connect people without having them meet, and without anyone having budgeted anything to put in new facilities. If it seems like there’s a massive glut of remotely-controlled PTZ cameras in play at the moment, that’s probably because a lot of educational institutions which wanted to keep being able to charge students for lectures they couldn’t attend. More generally, the capabilities of networking and computing have outpaced the slower-moving demands of film and TV work that the amount of custom hardware we need has collapsed spectacularly.

The ubiquitous GPU

One company that so far has done very well out of this is Nvidia. The company appears courtesy several announcements by other people, with RED talk about AI-based keying on RTX A6000s and Dell presenting a laundry list of all the things you could do on a Dell workstation, which is such a broad question that any comprehensive answer is doomed to seem vague. One of those things involves rendering the pictures for virtual production walls. Modern workstations in general are often a sort of life support system for a graphics card, which presents public relations people with the challenge of somehow promoting what’s unique about something that’s almost ubiquitous. Nvidia seems to have worked out how to persuade other people to do that work for them.

Zero Density continues the Nvidia-happiness by promoting its Reality series of augmented-reality  tools for broadcast studios, one of which it refers to as RealityEngine Ampere, a reference to the microarchitecture of Nvidia’s cards, and of course, the show will inevitably be full of so many virtual production demos that it might even be possible to forget one is inside the RAI exhibition centre at all, which is as good a reason as any to hang around the stand. So far a pair of A6000s seems to be more or less the assumed configuration for driving virtual production video walls (there they are again).

In desperate hope of finding someone still selling something to the film and TV industry that isn’t built on a piece of commodity IT hardware, we might wander past the lighting exhibits (with their Ethernet-based control systems) and even consider a handy video link from the likes of Teradek (with the Serv 4K streaming system) or any of the less expensive options which tend to include the option to link the video out to cellphones over WiFi. All of that’s custom electronics, but it’s still talking to standard protocols.

Stream on

At the other end of film and TV, it’s no surprise to find the TV viewership statistics people at Nielsen in the USA reporting that streaming viewing – even, crucially, not including YouTube – has now exceeded that of conventional TV. Senior people in conventional TV have often tried to spin this sort of news in that rather identifiable way that captains of industry do when they’ve been very obviously backed into a corner, but people seem obstinately dedicated to the concept of having their TV shows to begin at their convenience rather than the network’s. In the end, though, what we’re actually seeing here is another big success for an application of general-purpose mass networking.

At the same time everything’s turning into a computer, a couple of very identifiable threads of hardware development are, to be as politic as possible, at a crossroads. During much of the career of many current incumbents of movie camerawork, there have been two big technological changes in progress: the move to digital cinematography, and the move to LED lighting. There’s a strong argument that the key battles in both those areas are now thoroughly won, if the huge dynamic range of the Alexa 35 and the now ready availability of LEDs at the small-HMI level means anything.

Things that just work?

Manufacturers will continue to innovate, because they have to in order to survive. The sound side of the production world hit this point some time ago and has been juggling features ever since. Anyway, if it’s ever been time to call the fact that the technology is now good enough to do the job, it’s now, or perhaps it was a couple of years ago in this famously cautious industry. Things might continue to get smaller and lighter, lower in power consumption and even more comprehensively plugged into the general-purpose IT world, but the only thing that’s going to affect the suitability of the gear for the job in 2022 is if the job itself changes. That’s been tried before, most notably with stereo 3D and 360-degree video, both of which were met with studied indifference.

It seems almost strange to say it, given how much we’ve just been talking about the white heat of technology, but it’s becoming reasonable to wonder whether film and TV will ever have the same relationship with the technology as someone does with a set of oil paints, which are simply there, without any great debate over their capability. Isn’t that what it should be like?