COBALT PACIFIC Series provides easy-to-use, cost-effective REMI

Remote production has enormous cost-savings potential.  By minimising travel and utilising the same equipment between events, it is beneficial for both CAPEX and OPEX. However, while the benefits can be significant, it does come with challenges as content must be transmitted between locations without perceptible loss of quality and with very low latency.

Traditionally, these objectives have been achieved by using ST 2110 baseband video-over-IP, either uncompressed or lightly compressed with JPEG-XS.  This requires a private network of suitable capacity; a baseband 1080p signal that takes 3 Gbps, and a 4K signal takes 12 Gbps.

JPEG-XS can bring down these rates by a factor of between 4 and 10, with negligible impact in latency.  It is still a very high bitrate, and dedicated network links capable of such rates are costly.

More advanced compression standards, such as HEVC, can bring down the bit rate by two to three orders of magnitude, but they come with a potential latency impact. However, it is possible to achieve sub-frame end-to-end latency with HEVC —  Ultra-Low Latency HEVC, or ULL.

The same 1080p signal that takes 3 Gbps uncompressed, and between 300 and 750 Mbps compressed with JPEG-XS, can now be carried at about 40 Mbps using HEVC ULL, with similar quality and latency. Cobalt’s COBALT PACIFIC 9992-ENC with the HEVC ULL option supports this process on the transmit side, and the COBALT PACIFIC ULL Decoder on the receiving side.

The lower bitrate requirements open the door to the possibility of using the Internet rather than costly dedicated network links reducing OPEX.  The COBALT PACIFIC 9992-ENC and the COBALT PACIFIC ULL Decoder also support the Reliable Internet Stream Transport (RIST) suite of protocols, which provide the following features:

• Support for seamless switching, if two separate ISPs are being used for added reliability.
• Support for encryption and authentication (with no latency or quality penalty), to protect content in flight.
• Support for adapting the encoder bit rate to the instantaneous network conditions.

The COBALT PACIFIC 9992-ENC encoder also includes support for high dynamic range (HDR) workflows and native streaming to platforms such as YouTube and Facebook.

Finally, if you are using ST 2110 uncompressed flows at the event location, the COBALT PACIFIC 9992-ENC encoder can be configured with the INDIGO 2110-DC-02 module, which gives it a set of native ST 2110 inputs, removing the need for a separate gateway to support a Remote Integration Model (REMI) workflow.

The combination of the COBALT PACIFIC 9992-ENC with the ST 2110 input interface option creates a very powerful integrated solution that can be directly deployed in a ST 2110 facility for local encoding, low-latency transport over the Internet using RIST, or to drive a traditional ASI workflow, without having to deploy separate gateway devices.