Video: Will UHD and HDR Live Streaming Require Higher Frame Rates?

Learn more about 4K and HDR delivery at Streaming Media West.

Read the complete transcript of this clip:

Ian Trow: One other thing that's coming on is this issue about higher frame rates. At the moment, the UHD industry has become very, very used to frame rates of 50 or 60p, which represents a doubling of what you're used to with HD. That's one other thing that's changing within the marketplace.

Just to put HDR in context, usually when you're talking about HDR, you're talking about somewhere between about 1,000 and 1,800 nits, professional grading happens at about four to 4,000 nits. Now, you compare it to an SDR signal, that's 100 nits, on your home screen that you've got if you've got a five/six-year-old television. Classic film, is 48 nits, and a digital cinema or DCI-based screen is only up to about 108 nits. So no wonder, then, that you're actually watching film in a darkened environment because it just can't cope with high ambient levels like we're seeing here.

One thing that I did say that I'd talk about is concentrating on live streaming. Specifically, UHD and streaming is going to be the primary vehicle by which all new UHD services will be launched. There's good reason for that. Dealing with legacy and dealing with the complex issues of transcoding and transferring material, particularly live material, is much, much more difficult when you've got legacy-HD infrastructure in place. Most of the early services are being OTT streaming services. Very good reason for that is that a lot of cinematic material is readily available in a format that can be streamed as 4K. If you listen, I was very, very careful there, I did not say all 4K material because the secret behind a lot of cinematic material, especially CGI stuff, is actually only 2K. You need to watch out there. It's also a lower frame rate. The real challenge for people when they're actually considering what's going on is how you actually deal with high frame rate sports, how you actually make that scale in applications.