John Ive

John Ive, an HD pioneer and consultant, speak about his experiences with HD. This interview was conducted by Richard Brooking, marketing manager EMEA, Tektronix and shared exclusively with BroadcastPro Middle East

 How would you describe the HDTV experience?

John Ive: HD, in its basic form, is all about resolution. If people see SD after they have seen the clarity of HD, then that’s when they begin to realise what they had been missing all this time. 

How successful has HD been so far? You could use this outside somehow.

Ive: Tremendously successful no doubt, although it has taken quite a long time for the technology to be ready for HD. For example, HD was introduced at the time of tube televisions, which wasn’t right for HD. It is the introduction of digital solutions and the availability of low-cost flat panels that made HD more appealing. 

With that impetus, the acceleration on HD has been fantastic. It is a technology that can totally replace SD. So, in that sense, it’s on a roll, it’s happening, and is on the way to being the new standard definition.

How long have you been working with HD and what infrastructural changes did you have to make? 

Ive: My HD experience began with Sony. I joined Sony even earlier than the early ’80s, but in the early ’80s, I was working with HD. NHK and Sony, and a few other top Japanese companies were starting to do some of the pioneering work in HD at that time.

How smooth was your migration to HD?

Ive: (about being invited in the European HD rollout): Being part of a new era in television was exciting. We felt we were pioneers so it was a source of great excitement, and quite frankly, the television industry by that time had become very mature on SD. 

We were working on a system of technology that was already very mature so HD offered a chance to make a giant leap and a fantastic opportunity to be involved from those very early days.

Was training important?

Ive: Training is very important, but the nature of training has changed over time. New products were being introduced at that time so there was a lot of emphasis on equipment.

We did a lot of work on cameras, in terms of when you’re planning an image, the de-focusing that you get when you pan a camera. It always existed in SD but became much more obvious in HD.

So we looked at how to get the best balance between things like shutters on the cameras, and apertures, so there was a lot of practical work to make sure you got the best out of HD.

We also looked at how critical focusing was to HD and what you could get away with. A lot of the consulting I did and have done subsequently has been about the transition from SD to HD because people are naturally very concerned that they cannot throw away or immediately dispose of existing equipment. The question, therefore, is, “What can coexist?  How can I transition? Can I start with an investment here and then grow it and build it up into a full HD environment?”

So there’s a lot of work going on in familiarisation, and some of it is training as well, to help people migrate to HD.

HD also brought with it a whole new set of standards. There were some fundamental changes; it wasn’t just a case of scaling up the numbers when we went to HD. We had to make changes in things like the colour space. Aspect ratio was also another important element.

So all of those things had to be, in a sense, educated, understood, and they’ve all been parts of the training package.

How important is training for HD production?

With HD production, a lot of the fundamentals remain the same. We did feel that there would be a major change in shooting techniques and probably, for some programme genres, there would be changes in shooting techniques, but the basics have stayed the same as in SD. 

However, the issues of focusing, framing, panning, and a lot of the practical aspects need to be looked at. 

I did some work when ITV introduced HD, and we had a whole series of training seminars which I was just a part of, but those training seminars included make up, the set design, and so on.

And it was a very good opportunity at that time to see a setup where you got cameras shooting SD and HD side by side, and was surprising what a difference it could make. So you have to say to people to “take care of your set when you pack it, make sure you pack it carefully” because, at the end of the day, the things you could get away with in SD are much more critical in HD.

What were the most important issues you tried to find answers to when working on HD?

Some of the issues that we thought would exist actually didn’t, and some of the questions we didn’t think of came up in the fullness of time, so that was a bit of a mixed bag there.

In those early days, we thought that the technique of shooting HD would be totally different to SD because we got more resolution. We thought we’d have a lot more wide shots, and there would be less cutting between shots.

For example, shooting football is about telling a story, and talking about the emotion of the game. In order to do that, you’ve got to get close up shots of the faces of the players. So just showing a whole football match in wide-angle is not going to be right from the viewer’s perspective.

We are seeing some of the wide-angle beauty shots, because that makes the most of HD, but we were also seeing a step back to some of the traditional methods, which was good because it meant not having to undertake a huge retraining exercise with people to shoot that.

One of the things to look very carefully at was the fact that HD was also being introduced at the time of non-linear, and networked environments. Initially, there is no doubt that the bandwidth required for HD products placed a lot of stress on those early systems.

In that sense, we have to be very careful about planning systems because you can very easily get a bottleneck. There can be a lack of workflow efficiency because you are trying to handle the wide bandwidths. Of course, since that time, technology has caught up and processor power, storage capacities and network bandwidths have improved.

However, it is something we have to take very seriously because, in Europe especially, end users were not prepared to go backwards to tape editing purely for HD and sacrifice the efficiencies of nonlinear working. Therefore, we had to make it work in the nonlinear and networked environments. That was a challenge in the early days of introduction.

 Where did you get your answers from?         

At that time, there were a lot of trial programmes and trial shooting. I spent a lot of my time with broadcasters, going out in the field shooting material.

In those early days because Japan went with HD first, they came around the world doing co-productions with groups like the BBC and other major broadcasters. Quite frankly, a lot of their work was pioneering work and that’s where a lot of the trade was learnt. Then again, BSkyB was very proactive in the UK.

We did a lot of work with Sky at that time, trialling the cameras, and putting them in the hands of the real practitioners to make sure that they were working.

So there was a lot of trial programming in those early days, in order to iron out the issues, and make sure that it was ready for the “big time”.

What’s your opinion about moving to file-based production with HD?

Ive: For many people, the transition from SD to HD has also been a transition from tape-based to file-based. The reality is that file-based systems have proved themselves so much now that if you are going to make a change, you really cannot afford not to move, not only to HD but also to a file-based production.

Now you find that some of the traditional products that you used to buy in SD are not available in HD any more. Or, the major innovations that you would like to see, are being made available in HD but are not available in SD products or they are not being updated in the same way.

There are challenges, but fortunately technology is coming along to help with those challenges. With the bit rates associated with HD, it was a very scary thought that we were increasing the resolution notionally by about five times, and in theory, you might think you’re increasing the data rate by five times.

It’s not strictly like that because compression doesn’t quite work like that it but there have been some great advances in compression, so the bit rates needed for HD are not so severely increased as perhaps the resolution would have indicated. So that’s come a little bit to our rescue.

But I think if you compound that with what we see on networking technology, 10BASE-T, through 200 Mb through to gigabit Ethernet networks now, that’s worked in favour of HD.

We’ve seen storage go up from gigabytes to terabytes, and the processor power with multicore processors. Those are phenomenal changes.

File-based systems are also becoming more practical with HD.

It wouldn’t make sense if you had a video server that could do 10 streams, and then your supplier came along who said, “I know you’re got an SD server doing 10 streams, but now I am afraid that same size server can only do two streams”. 

Operationally, that wouldn’t be acceptable. So fortunately, we don’t have to face that. In terms of the efficiencies that you can get, file-based workflows are more applicable to HD. File-based technologies still have to mature. We’re going to see phenomenal breakthroughs over the next few years in further file-based technology, but it has come far enough to make it an attractive proposition even now.

What advice would you give to broadcasters moving to HD?

Ive: Don’t treat your transition to HD as merely a product investment, where you might say, “I want some new cameras” or “I want a new switcher”. You can’t do this on a piecemeal basis.

The one thing about HD is you won’t get HD from your camera to your own transmission until realistically speaking, you’ve replaced all your SD kit.

So it’s a fundamental system change, rather than just individual spot product change, so that is an important consideration.

But having said that, you’ve got to treat your relationship with your supplier as a partnership because you are going to have issues when you introduce HD and you’re going to have to work through things.

You can no longer say, “I’m going to buy everything on day one, and I’m going to use it for 10 years and then change it”. It doesn’t work like that these days. The technology is moving, and the requirements are changing so fast, that you’re going to be evolving over time.

You can only keep pace if you have a good relationship with your supplier, and you’ve got the ability to have the communication with them that enables you to work through the issues, problem solve, and create ideas about how to achieve your objectives.

And also, make sure that you share with them not just your technology needs, but your business and operational requirements. If they don’t give that support, go to somebody else, because you need a holistic approach as you’re putting in a whole new system.

This is crucial. You could say that some of those elements always existed, but with the change in technology and the move to HD and file-based systems — which for many end-users is the first time they put in a file-based system — those are really critical issues you need to work out with your supplier.

What advice would you give to SIs and suppliers from a customer’s perspective?

Ive: One of the issues is the “A” word. Assumptions are always very dangerous about how you think something is going to work, or what you think you’re going to get when you place the order. So again, unless you have really good communication with your supplier, there is always the risk of mistakes, and they are always more difficult to rectify after the event, so you’ve got to have that relationship, and you’ve got to know that you’ve got good communication.

What’s the next “big thing”?

Ive: We’re going to see some quantum leaps and we can do things that we just cannot envisage today. Start from the point of view of services that either consumers or businesses would want to take on board.

Look at the multiplatform approach. There is going to be a business model around that. A lot of people are struggling to find it, but it is going to happen.

3D is the talk of all the trade shows and I think that is particularly fascinating. I think how far that will go, the jury is still out at the moment, though there is no doubt it is a huge success in the cinema. It is also becoming a success through lots of pay TV channels, but I’m not convinced it will replace the ubiquitous TV that we are used to today. I think 3D could well be vitally important in our lives, but it still may be a kind of “appointment television” rather than regular TV, or a total replacement for today’s 2D TV.  So I think, if that’s a prediction – You’ve got one there!!

Watch where the content goes, and that that will give you an indication of where the next “big things” are going to be.

This interview was conducted by Richard Brooking, marketing manager EMEA of Tektronix, and edited by BroadcastPro ME for publication. 

 

John Ive

John Ive’s career in the TV industry spans 35 years and has included periods with the BBC, the former IBA and Sony Professional. Ive presently runs a consultancy practice helping clients with their strategic, planning and technology decisions. Ive is a member of the European and UK HD Forum and IBC Council. He is also a director of the Professional MPEG Forum and the programme director for the annual HD Masters conference. He works closely with the IABM as director of Technology, as programme director of the IABM annual conference and developer of its training seminars.