Candidate Standard for ATSC 3.0 Video Likely Won’t Include HDR, Boot Camp Conference Told
ATSC 3.0's framers have “multiple degrees of video freedom” in designing the next-generation DTV system, Alan Stein, Technicolor vice president-technology, who chairs the “S34-1" ad hoc group on ATSC 3.0 video, told the ATSC 3.0 Boot Camp conference Wednesday in Washington. The framers have reached consensus on using HEVC’s “Main-10" profile at 8- and 10-bits and frame rates up to 60 frames per second, he said. But after nearly a year of evaluating high dynamic range (HDR), wide color gamut and high frame rates for ATSC 3.0, S34-1 members are still discussing them, with no consensus, Stein said.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
HDR seems a particularly tall challenge for S34-1, Stein said. The “better pixels” argument has begun “gaining favor” among broadcasters over the “more pixels” argument, largely because HDR commands only a 25 percent extra bandwidth drain compared with 300 percent for the move from HD to Ultra HD resolution, Stein said. S34-1 wants to “coalesce” HDR for ATSC 3.0 around HDR specifications that no fewer than six standards organizations and industry alliances are working on, Stein said. “We’re seeing everyone’s trying to come together and find common-ground solutions” on HDR, he said.
“ATSC doesn’t want to be an outlier” on HDR, but ATSC "is under some pressure on the time schedule that some of these groups aren’t,” Stein said. “Hence, the liaisons, hence, the amount of efforts we’ve tried to coalesce around different groups in order to come to a conclusion on what is the need for high dynamic range that will keep ATSC in line” with other standards-setting groups and the Hollywood supply chain, he said.
So elusive is consensus within S34-1 on HDR and wide color gamut that work on those technologies may well stretch into late October or November, while ATSC 3.0' video's other components could be done by the end of the summer, Stein said. “We think that the candidate standard draft for video may not have HDR and wide color gamut included,” he said. “We’re told that that’s OK, that that’s why standards are malleable,” and that HDR and wide color gamut can be added later, he said.
Last year at this time, ATSC 3.0's framers faced “a lot of concepts, a lot of general agreement on some things, but a lot of work was in front of us,” ATSC President Mark Richer said in opening Boot Camp conference remarks. A year later, “we still have an enormous amount of work in front of us, but we have built up a good base,” Richer said. ATSC 3.0's first candidate standard was approved last week, for the so-called “bootstrap signal” portion of ATSC 3.0's physical layer (see 1505070022), and “you’ll see more in the coming months,” he said. “That’s what the rest of 2015 will be like -- candidate standard after candidate standard.”