Star India gs UHD for Cricket World Cup with 4K channel Vizrt and Alston Elliot graphics

The coverage was Alston Elliots first foray into UHD, in partnership with Vizrt and Matrox.

Originally published by SVG Europe

The recent Cricket World Cup ushered in a new Ultra HD service for Star India, with all the graphics being done in UHD by Alston Elliot. Star India was host broadcaster for the Cricket World Cup in Australia and New Zealand, and wanted UHD coverage on matches played in Australia involving India, plus the Semi-Final in Sydney and the Final in Melbourne.

It was Alston Elliot's first foray into UHD, in partnership with Vizrt and Matrox. Viz were kind enough to loan us a machine - the first time we've been able to get our hands on something suitable for UHD - and Matrox also came to the party with high-spec graphics cards. Both of their assistance was invaluable, said Nick Baily, CEO, Alston Elliot.

We augmented this setup with an Nvidia Quadro K6000 card, which is basically the best on the market, with a vast amount of texture memory, which is key to running those graphics, added Stuart Coles, sales director. We were pleasantly surprised by how it went after that. Building and using the UHD graphics went remarkably well .

Vizrt is Alston Elliot's preferred graphics engine. We've been using it since 2000 and were among the very first in Europe to adopt it, so the workflow wasn't very different in terms of working with 4K. It was just a case of making sure that the core elements we put into it were good enough for that resolution, said Baily. He had been worried that having to increase the resolution by four times would lead to performance issues, but it performed really well.

Style-wise, they were the exact same graphics being used on the standard [HD] broadcast, but the graphics we used on the Cricket World Cup for the world feed were 4:3 safe, explained Coles, but for UHD the graphics could be re-formatted to 16:9 as no one was going to see them on an old SD set. The extra clarity of UHD also allowed them to reduce the size of some graphics.

We had heard some scare stories from other suppliers in the industry about when they tried to use 4K graphics, and the difficulties they had had, so initially we were planning to offer quite a scaled-down service in terms of the number of graphics that we'd make available; it would just be the real key graphics that they needed, he added.

Once they started using them, however, we were pleasantly surprised that we didn't need to cut down the range of graphics. This was partly because the graphics were driven by its own, in-house software applications, which allow it to quickly populate graphics with data and remove the chances of errors. There were also some manual graphics, created using Viz Trio, with these and the software-driven main scene graphics created in different layers on the Viz machine. Which is something you quite often can't do because of a performance issue, but even with 4K we managed to deliver both those types of graphics, added Coles.

Star of the HD firmamentBesides seeing the production live in Adelaide, Baily had been in Mumbai to see the results for himself, and was very impressed with the end-result. Star were very keen to be right there at the forefront [of UHD] and I think they achieved it, he said. It was particularly important as the draw of cricket for Indian TV viewers is huge, with an estimated one billion viewers for the India v Pakistan match in February. Everybody in those countries was in front of a TV set, even if the vast majority were probably 4:3 CRTs.

The graphics were produced as four quad HD feeds, and Baily had been nervous about getting these synched correctly, but I was surprised, it was such a smooth process, and NEP Australia (the facilities provider) were impressed by how quickly the graphics worked. They, obviously, had a lot of firsts in their truck in terms of bringing everything together for a live 4K OB, so it was great that the graphics just worked, and came together with no real issues, he said.

Because the decision to go UHD was taken close to broadcast, they didn't have the creative latitude to go much beyond the HD look. If you approached this now with a decent lead up time I think you'd re-design the graphics for the 4K feed, said Baily. The picture content is so rich, there is so much clarity, you can reduce the size of the graphics. You can think a lot more about the layout, making sure the picture is key and the graphics complement it.

When Alston Elliot and Star India's Broadcast Design department designed the style, it had to be legible not only in 4:3, SD, but also in Hindi typefaces, for which there was a slave feed, originated in Mumbai, taking the data from Australia and New Zealand. Hindi text is less legible on screen than English, so they normally make the graphics deeper to make them easier to read. The UHD broadcast was in English, but in UHD tests Hindi was incredibly legible .

Baily loved the extraordinary clarity that UHD brought to the pictures, particularly for crowd shots, and full-frame graphics could be displayed without any artefacts in the photos. He believes that Star India may now use UHD on other sports, particularly as it has recently been expanding its coverage into new sports, such as kabaddi, which was hugely successful last year, and became the second most popular sport in India in one fell swoop, and the Indian Super League, a Star India-backed football venture that started last year.

They are a very ambitious company, which is great for us, said Baily. We are working very closely with them, and they are pushing us as well. They demand innovation and a high standard from us at all times. They are an exciting client.

Workflow analysis Star choice: Coles and Baily worked closely with Star India on bringing Ultra HD to the Cricket World Cup had a

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