The BBC has revealed some of the details behind its UHD HDR stream of the Coronation of King Charles III earlier this month.
The event was streamed in UHD HDR on iPlayer, with the BBC’s Research and Development team working with BBC Events to ensure both the iPlayer and broadcast HD service derived from the UHD production, provided the very best UHD and HD picture quality.
BBC R&D spent the last six months working with the BBC Studios Production team, manufacturers, and its outside broadcast providers, Cloudbass, EMG, Timeline and Vivid on the project, reveals Simon Thompson, senior R&D engineer, in a blog post.
Seven OB trucks covered the Coronation parade route from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey, as well as the events in the Abbey itself.
Thompson worked with the team covering the studio complex near Canada Gate which brought together the six other OB truck feeds to produce the domestic and international UHD HDR and HD feeds. “In addition, we undertook testing of scaling and interlacing equipment to ensure that the images would look perfect on BBC One HD and the world HD feed,” he adds.
The team was also able to reduce its reliance on SDR signals, of the 100+ cameras used on the day, only two were SDR (in the garden of Buckingham Palace).
Meanwhile, editors were recording and editing HLG for playout on the OB truck’s playout servers. They were also importing archive HD and film footage and converting to HLG for inclusion in the three live programmes, writes Thompson.
“During the week we spent time visiting the geographically diverse OB trucks, checking equipment settings against those we created in the lab, speaking to vision engineers and vision supervisors and working with the quick turnaround editors to ensure their process was robust,” adds Thompson.
“We worked hard to ensure they understood the EBU TR 070 workflow (developed through our work on the 2019 FA Cup finals) and that they were happy with the pictures they could produce and the extra detail and colour reproduction the workflow provides.”
More details about the project are available here.
