BBC Research & Technology has carried out one of the largest experimental broadcasts in many years, bringing together the NHK Super Hi Vision system, stereoscopic 3D and some of the department’s own 3D projects into the previously mothballed studio TC0 at Television Centre.
The project, designed to help demonstrate to BBC Sport the technologies that will be available at the time of the 2012 Olympics, featured a live performance of The Charlatans, recorded for digital radio station BBC 6 Music. The recording will be shown on the 6 Music website and was also filmed by the BBC’s technology magazine Click.
Writing on the BBC Research & Development Blog, BBC R&D’s Ant Miller explained that the 33 megapixel per frame pictures from the NHK Super Hi-vision camera were displayed around the studio on 4k (4000 horizontal lines resolution) monitors. Even though these were the highest definition monitors available to the BBC team, the pictures still needed to be downscaled.
Alongside the Super Hi-vision was a pair of HD cameras, which were aligned to give a fixed stereo pair to be merged with the Super Hi-vision in post production to create 3D with extremely fine texture, as part of the i3DLive project.
Around the studio was a fixed ring of a dozen HD cameras that allows the action to be shot in ‘true 3D’ from multiple angles. The content is being processed by the BBC 3D4You project.
An internet feed of the test was streamed to Tokyo using parts of the JANET and NTT networks.
