NBC OLYMPICS SELECTS ITS LIVE CAPTURE AND HDR PROCESSING PROVIDER FOR ITS PRODUCTION OF OLYMPIC GAMES IN TOKYO

STAMFORD, CONN. – June 7, 2021 – NBC Olympics, a division of the NBC Sports Group, has selected Telestream to provide media capture and automated processing workflows for its production of the Games of the XXXII Olympiad, which take place in Tokyo, Japan, from July 23 – August 8. The announcement was made today by Darryl Jefferson, VP Post Production & Digital Workflow, NBC Sports & Olympics, and Scott Murray, senior VP of marketing, Telestream.

NBC Olympics will utilize Telestream’s Lightspeed Live Capture and Vantage media processing platform to perform a unique, mixed HDR/SDR workflow. This workflow will save significant time and enable editing teams to work on both the SDR and HDR products during the editorial process simultaneously.

The Lightspeed Live Capture systems will receive 1080p59.94 HDR signals from the events and create media simultaneously to two different formats. As the 1080p59.94 HDR is recorded in XAVC Class 100 HDR (Hybrid Log Gamma or HLG) format, Telestream’s Vantage software, running on an array of Lightspeed G6 servers will process the media as it’s growing. SDR versions will be created in XDCAMHD 422 at 1080i59.94.The HDR to SDR conversion will be done through a new advanced color processing pipeline in Vantage utilizing color processing Look Up Table filters (LUTs) that translate HDR (HLG) to SDR (Rec. 709). In real time, while Lightspeed Live Capture is under record, Vantage will check both HDR and SDR assets into Avid Interplay. The Vantage system provides frame chase editing capabilities of both the HDR and SDR product, allowing Avid operators to edit on the fly from the live files as they are being recorded.

The unique HDR/SDR workflow takes advantage of Avid’s new cross-rate dynamic relink capability. Avid operators focus on editing the 1080i59.94 SDR-based content, which will be consumed by the majority of viewers, and then simply re-link/conform to the HDR assets to finish edits against the 1080p59.94 HDR product.

“It’s truly been a collaborative effort between Telestream, NBC Olympics, and Avid to develop this dual path HDR/SDR production workflow,” said Murray. “The work we’ve done here will enable these types of workflows to be repeated for productions of all sizes in a more cost-effective manner going forward.”

“Simultaneously creating an HDR/SDR product brings with it an enormous amount of complexity and additional workload on all systems,” said Jefferson. “Telestream is enabling us to take on this dual path production workflow without significant additional resources. A cutting-edge production like the Olympic Games is only made possible when organizations work together in true partnership to raise the bar.”

Furthermore, the complexity of producing Olympic Games coverage requires testing and monitoring solutions with the highest level of performance and reliability to ensure high-quality content is being delivered to viewers. To handle this task, NBC Olympics will leverage the complete suite of UHD/4K Waveform Monitors from Telestream’s Tektronix Video product family supporting UHD/HDR formats and ITU-R BT.2020 wide color gamut (WCG), Master Sync and Master Clock Reference Generators, and more to support its coverage.

The equipment, along with Sentry OTT monitoring solutions from Telestream, will be used to monitor and test the quality of video and audio content used in NBC Olympics’ production, post production, transmission, and distribution workflows in NBC Olympics’ facilities supporting a record level of content.