As I’m writing this, I’ve just returned from the whirlwind of the NAB Show. “Should I go to the cloud?” was a question often heard echoing throughout the halls of the Las Vegas Convention Center. I‘d like to press pause on that conversation for just a moment to talk about the many considerations that go into the initial part of that decision. If not carefully thought through, these issues can sabotage efforts during the next phase.

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It’s very easy to get to the point where you don’t have the right steering wheel to drive the car you’ve built. Let's discuss the major decisions that need to be determined before making this determination.

Perhaps the biggest underlying question is: What’s driving you? It’s important not to make a dogmatic decision when it comes to designing a public cloud workflow. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

Even if upper management decides they want to move everything to the cloud it doesn’t mean it’s a good decision for your part of operations or your bottom line. The decision points for the IT organization, for example, are very different from a media firm or any company producing and delivering real-time audio and video. Even in terms of storage alone, an IT organization’s general needs are vastly different than a media workstream.

It’s the same type of decision process when you’re using an existing IT infrastructure, be it on-prem or in the cloud, to produce a special project or handle a workflow that it wasn’t designed for initially. The data points other parts of your organization base their cloud decisions on are not going to be the same data points you use.

Critical Points

Some of the overall questions we start with are: Why do something in cloud as opposed to on premise? What is your goal? Is it financial? Do you require location diversity? Is it because you don't have a place on prem to build a server room? What is the real driving force behind this?

Those answers will drive the use case and become the matrix of what’s possible and what’s not. Once you've established the use case, then you conduct an analysis, which is similar to what you’d look at when starting the design development process for an on-premise model.

What drives the next decision point is the location of your physical audience. In today’s world, our biggest challenge in cloud is not compute power or storage capacity, but bandwidth and latency in signal transport from your premise to the cloud and from the cloud to the delivery point of production. That point of production may or may not be a room in the same building you’re in. Of the two issues, latency is the more troubling. Bandwidth can always be increased; it’s a matter of cost.

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Latency, on the other hand, is a matter of physics. If the entire signal arrives milliseconds after it was sent for delivery from the origination point, that doesn’t matter to the viewer—as long as the audio and video are synchronous. But if I’m handling I-MAG in a venue or playing back videos, graphics, and audio in real time, any inability to have audio and video synchronous with the physical interaction in the room is a potential showstopper.

Live, on-premise audio and video can be synchronized using delays. However, I cannot control the time difference between the latency to go to cloud, signal processing, signal return, and the amount of time it takes for the photons that reflect off the human on the stage for the viewer to see. It’s a very unpleasant experience to have the I-MAG or the audio be milliseconds behind.

The signal could be traveling to a data center across the country and coming back, which is a very big travel difference when compared with a server room 50 feet away from the venue. The question becomes: What can I do to minimize travel and latency that could make it acceptable to go down that path? If video quality can’t be delivered at an acceptable threshold, a public cloud infrastructure is off the table.

Hybrid Infrastructure

Latency on premise is controllable. Latency in the cloud is not. If I’m originating content that’s good enough to be sent to viewers, latency and distance are not an issue.

This can lead to the possibility of a hybrid infrastructure. For example, if you’re doing a corporate production with an audience of several hundred people and you’re streaming the show, you’ll generally have two infrastructures. One will be focused on the in-room experience, with the other on creating content for the broadcast audience (whether that’s a stream, television, or videoconference).

You can split your infrastructure between on-prem and cloud. Often, that’s a very viable use case. If you're looking at it as a venue that you're producing content from, there's always an audience in the room. That's a constant. What might change is the complexity of the broadcast, depending upon the content of the show.

Determine who is your viewing audience and where they are located. Is the audience larger in the room or for the broadcast/stream? How large is the remote audience?

When the audience is larger for the streamed program, that’s a key decision point. If only 50% of the shows are streamed to say 15,000 employees worldwide, perhaps you can use a public cloud infrastructure. Or you may not want to take up the physical space a production control room requires. The streamed show could be run by a virtual production team working from their homes or other buildings.

Power and Cost Considerations

It’s also critically important to know what your computing requirements are so you can engage the best cloud vendor for your application. Otherwise, down the line you may discover the only way to make the system work is to pay the cloud vendor more than your budget allows for a 100 GB line. At that point, you will have wasted money designing a cloud-based system that may perform technically—but is not the best use of your budget.

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Once you've done the analysis of latency and other requirements for content production, then you can begin to analyze the cost. Without those requirements, you don't know what you're charging.

In my next column, we’ll look at how to analyze what’s financially best for your organization. We’ll breakdown the cost of building a cloud, on-prem, or hybrid system and the varying costs of operation. Because how a system is initially designed directly affects how it’s managed for many years to come.

Just Add Power (J+P), a specialist in Ultra HD over IP, announced that it will debut the new 725POE 2GΩ/3G+ SDI Power over Ethernet (PoE) transmitter alongside the new rackmount 3G Ultra HD over IP PoE transmitter and award-winning 3G+4+ Tiling Transmitter at InfoComm 2018, June 6-8 at the Las Vegas Convention Center, in booth N464. The company will also host Luxul, the leading innovator of IP networking solutions for AV integrators, and demonstrate the ultra-low video latency achievement of its 3G Ultra HD over IP Series.

"Our ultimate goal is to allow everything to play anywhere with record-low latency, even as formats evolve and as installation requirements vary from job to job and room to room," said Taft Stricklin, sales team manager at Just Add Power. "To make that possible, we've expanded our award-winning, third-generation line with a new HD-SDI transmitter, a four-input rackmount transmitter, and the industry's first 4K tiling transmitter. These are all building blocks that integrators can mix and match to create a seamless, cost-effective, and custom video distribution system that delivers reliable, high-quality video with 16-ms latency from source to screen — all over an IP infrastructure."

The J+P 725POE 2GΩ/3G+ SDI PoE transmitter adds SD-/HD-/3G-SDI format support to the 3G HD over IP system. The new transmitter eliminates the need and cost for an SDI-HDMI converter and allows enterprise and worship customers to scale SDI sources even to 4K displays. It features stereo output with audio delay, local HDMI loop-out, null-modem-integrated RS-232, and HDMI pass-through.

Also being displayed at the show will be the new 4K UHD rackmount transmitter, the VBS-HDIP-747. It provides the same features and benefits as the budget-friendly, compact VBS-HDMI-707 PoE TX. Both models distribute 4K video with HDR support to seamlessly meet ultra-HD requirements. They also feature HDCP 2.2, optional 4K to 1080p scaling at the display location, two-way RS-232 and IP control, and support for all audio formats up to and including Dolby Atmos and DTS:X.

The J+P 3G Ultra HD over IP transmitters family of transmitters also includes the VBS-HDMI-717HIFI PoE TX, VBS-HDMI-718AVP PoE TX, and rackmount VBS-HDMI-749AVP TX. The 718AVP and 749AVP distribute UHD and 4K video to every zone over a single Cat-5e cable along with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio, and transform the signals to stereo audio for two-channel zones. This complete lineup of devices enables integrators to mix and match J+P devices to fit their hardware and budget requirements on 4K HDMI projects.

Finally, attendees will also see J+P's 4K network video tiler, the 3G+4+ Tiling Transmitter. It's the industry's first transmitter capable of displaying four 4K signal sources on a single screen instantly. Added to the J+P Ultra HD over IP matrix switching system, it enables users to simultaneously watch four 4K video sources in multiple formats, including single-screen, video wall, or tiled video. It is an incredibly flexible device that can be applied to any size commercial installation requiring multiview functionality, providing video support for resolutions up to full 4K HDR compatibility. Once tiled, the video feed can be distributed to an unlimited number of screens, making it the ideal solution for commercial spaces and any size video wall configuration.

Don’t miss a social beat – follow #MyInfoComm2018 and make sure you visit Crestron located in the Central Hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center at booth C2562.

Last year justifying 4K video product purchases was a stretch.

According to interviews we’ve done with end users this year, when it comes time to purchase projectors or flat panel displays many are opting for 4K as the price-point is coming down and the higher-resolution provides future-proofing. Depending on the application, 4K camcorders and PTZ cameras are beginning to make their way into more corporate, medical, and higher education classroom environments. Finally, the “no 4K content” argument is disappearing.

In addition, mission critical video content viewed on 4K displays in applications such as simulation training, medical procedure streams, and in command and control centers demands the highest quality and the least latency possible.

“If you think about these larger spaces where you have more complex AV, those are typically the customers that have higher requirements, because they not only have more sources, they have a higher demand for media in general,” says Daniel Jackson, Director of Enterprise Technology at Crestron. These customers are already investing in 4K because no one builds a room with a two-year lifecycle in mind. “You're trying to build rooms for a minimum of five-years, usually 7 to 10 years or longer, and 4K is expected.”

Customer demand for 4K has increased steadily in the past six to 12 months. Alex Peras, Manager of DigitalMedia, cites key drivers as the release of the Apple TV 4K and MacBook Pro and other 4K-capable laptops. “4K has become ubiquitous,” says Peras. “If you actually want to make full use of the computer that you carry around, you want to support 4K in all your spaces.”

The jury is no longer out: Whether in large or smaller spaces, a 4K ecosystem is a must. The important part is how to put this 4K ecosystem on the network.

91 Times to the Moon and Back

Give or take a few trips to the moon and back, there are more than 70 billion meters of CAT5e and CAT6 deployed throughout the world. Unless an installation is part of a major renovation or a new build, Jackson says, “that’s an absolutely staggering amount of installed cable in buildings that support 1-Gig and soon, 2.5-Gig and 5-Gig Ethernet.” Stepping up to Cat6a or Cat7 to support a 10-Gig infrastructure to every endpoint is a rip-and-replace when it’s not necessary—especially when all of that bandwidth is taken up by a single application—video.

New advanced video compression technologies are enabling the transport of 4K signals over standard 1-Gig Ethernet. The question has to be asked, why wouldn’t you use the existing 1-Gig infrastructure? If you don’t ask it, your CFO surely will.

There’s more than one way to transmit 4K60 4:4:4 HDR signals over a network. No matter how you slice it, the 4K signal that comes across HDMI or DisplayPort connections is a whopping 18 Gigabits per second. “You either say I'm going to compress it a little bit and send the 4K signal around on a 10-Gig network,” notes Jackson. “Or, you say I'm going to compress it a little bit more and send it over standard 1-Gig Ethernet.” It all comes down to what the picture looks like on the other side.

Fuzzy Numbers

There’s no shortage of controversial topics in the AV industry. It’s widely accepted that when reading a video display spec sheet, the stated contrast ratio should be taken with a grain of salt and a pinch of skepticism. To a certain extent, these numbers can be gamed, depending on the ambient light when the contrast ratio is measured, as well as other factors.

Some contend that spec sheets mask a multitude of fuzzy math, especially when interpreting networked video quality. Comparing two products from different companies with the same specs such as 20:1 video compression running on a 1-Gig Ethernet doesn’t present the full picture. “There's no spec you can read for the quality of compression,” says Peras. “You'll get vastly different performance results depending on the type of process used to achieve the compression.”

Jackson agrees, “You can't just read it off of a spec sheet anymore because we're in a world of compression. It's all about what the video quality looks like on real-world content.” The best way to determine if a product meets your quality standards is to ask vendors for a demo in your facility using content familiar to you.

The Latency Discussion

In 2014 a team of neuroscientists from MIT found that the human brain can process entire images that the eye sees for as little as 13 milliseconds. The study appears in the journal Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics. “This ability to identify images seen so briefly may help the brain as it decides where to focus the eyes, which dart from point to point in brief movements called fixations, about three times per second,” says Mary Potter, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences and senior author of the study. “Deciding where to move the eyes can take 100 to 140 milliseconds, so very high-speed understanding must occur before that.”

Anything below 13 milliseconds is considered imperceptible by mere mortals—and numerous terms are used to describe what is nearly imperceptible in the sub-50 milliseconds latency range. Some refer to this as “near-real-time,” while others say “zero latency. Crestron uses “no additional latency.”

Latency is often added because of scaling or compression, thus networked video compression inherently adds latency. “If a manufacturer is not optimizing for it, you could have a ton of latency,” warns Peras. “There are solutions out there that can add anywhere from 50 to 150 milliseconds of latency.”

Acceptable latency matters in many applications. If video is being streamed to an overflow room, then latency hardly matters at all. A couple of seconds of delay might be acceptable. “However, imagine trying to move a mouse around, and it's dragging behind you ever so slowly on the screen,” says Jackson. “It becomes really frustrating.” Acceptable latency in this application is under 50 milliseconds.

Make sure you visit Crestron during InfoComm at booth C2562 to discuss these topics and check out a live demo, so you can learn to judge video quality beyond the spec sheet.

During InfoComm watch for the fourth of six installments of the InfoComm Networked AV Series where Jackson and Peras discuss, “The Single Point of Failure?” With several pieces of AV hardware, various software applications, multiple user access, and more; identifying a single point of failure might be several points of failure. We discuss how to mitigate failure.

InfoComm18 Networked AV Series:

One of Six: https://www.avnetwork.com/insights-and-blogs/networked-av-more-than-a-disruptor

Two of Six: https://www.avnetwork.com/av-network-blogs/why-not-all-digital-av-needs-to-be-on-the-network