Producing sports in HD is nothing new for the BBC Network, but taking that HD production across the globe to China has created some issues as the countdown to the Opening Ceremonies continues. The BBC’s technical team, however, is up to the task and has found multiple solutions to the problems posed by large-scale HD production.  

“The HD aspect isn’t new to us, but in terms of the impact of HD, the two things that cause the biggest headaches are cable runs and audio,” explains Charlie Cope, lead editor and technical consultant for BBC post production. “We’ve had to put an awful lot of extra fiber to deal with the length of cable runs, but the most complex thing is the audio.”

Cope explained that while a high definition video feed is relatively simple, the audio tends to complicate matters in terms of how to allocate audio tracks to different operations. The audio distribution from the host broadcaster is in 5.1 and while the BBC does not have to spend money to decode and encode it, the network does need to provide a stereo option for its news division.  

“You have to be a bit inventive in how you manage that,” Cope says.

Another issue is a lack of high definition circuits.  

“We have a lot of aspirations to deliver the venues in HD, but we only have SD circuits booked,” Cope explains. To get around that, the BBC is experimenting with Dirac Pro, which allows HD to be carried on an uncompressed SD circuit using motion compensated wavelet coding.

“It can bring an HD feed back into the IBC, but there are monitoring issues, since you can’t pick out problems on a monitor from a scrambled signal,” Cope says.  

The BBC is also splitting its environment, relying on a Split Remote Concept to send the feed to London for editing before transmitting the final version from Beijing, which can create further sound issues.

“The latency between London and Beijing is 380 milliseconds, so that’s one of the big challenges is how you deal with that,” Adams explains. “Worst case scenario, it gets delivered back in SD and upconverted.”