The Clipster mastering station from Rohde & Schwarz DVS is being used as part of an Ultra HD trial at Sky Perfect JSAT Corporation in Japan.
Clipster has been chosen for its ability to play out compressed 4K at 60p as well as its support for the Raw formats of a variety of cameras as part of the NexTV Forum initiative to realiSe next generation UHDTV. As Sky Perfect JSAT is the NexTV Forum member in charge of the UHDTV workflow verification from content acquisition and production to transmission, it established the test environment at its Tokyo Media Centre, and will be working on UHD workflows in the run up to the Olympic Games in Tokyo 2020.
The broadcaster needed a system capable of playing out a 4K XAVC file via baseband (4x 3G-SDI) at 60p in realtime. As there also was the need for a 4K editing system, it decided to use two R&S Clipster mastering stations.
The hardware and software turnkey finishing system enables realtime processing of material up to 4K uncompressed for conforming and editing, and also supports the Raw formats of many digital cinema cameras, including Sony’s F55 and Canon’s C500. The hardware includes 20 video interfaces, from HD-SDI dual-link to RGBS to DVI and outputs at up to 16 bits.
Since Sony’s XAVC format was qualified and chosen as the final production codec by Sky Perfect JSAT, Clipster also allows bitrates of 600Mbps and 960Mbps to be played in 60p baseband and also offers transcoding capabilities into 4K XAVC, based on any other source file format. It also offers 3D LUT conversion between the ITU Rec.709 (HDTV) and ITU Rec.2020 (UHDTV) colour spaces, as well as supporting Raw data debayering for the F55 and C500.
According to Masakazu Shibazaki, broadcasting and production engineering division team leader at Sky Perfect JSAT Corporation, “4K verification experiments will be conducted in full swing from now on. R&S Clipster has been working well and I expect excellent performance as the experiments go on.”
