The number of over-the-top streaming services (think Netflix and Hulu) is rapidly growing. Broadcasters are starting to integrate technologies like mixed reality to immerse audiences in the nightly news. And AI is bringing unlimited possibilities to enhance consumer experiences and deliver audience analytics to broadcasters. And, attendees at this year’s NAB conference had the chance to experience how it’s all being powered by Nvidia RTX technology.
From the desktop to the data center to the cloud, RTX professional solutions are helping broadcasters and streaming services adapt to the mounting pressures of creating and delivering high-quality content faster than ever. This year at NAB, NVIDIA GPUs are powering demos for over 85 partners.
Keeping it Real
First adopted by The Weather Channel to convey the severity of life-threatening weather conditions, broadcasters are now using immersive mixed reality to put audiences in the heart of the story. With RTX ray tracing, cinematic-quality visuals are possible for ultra-realistic, live on-air graphics and virtual sets.
At NAB, this technology was powered by Epic Games Unreal Engine 4.22, Zero Density, Z by HP and Nvidia Quadro RTX in the StudioXperience booth and in the Brainstorm booth. Zero Density and NVIDIA partnered with Fox Sports for daily presentations in the StudioXperience to showcase the very latest advances in photo-realistic real-time virtual sets and on-air graphics.
For end-to-end content creation and rendering, Dell Technologies showcased NVIDIA Quadro RTX and Nvidia RTX Server.
Go Bigger
8K UHD is quickly becoming the standard for creating ultra-high-quality 4K UHD content. Nvidia RTX supercharged 8K video editing and color grading in real time at full resolution in RED Digital Cinema’s meeting room and in the Colorfront suite at the Renaissance.
With Nvidia RTX, broadcasters can revive archived content, easily up-resing SD or HD content to 4K or 8K using AI, as was shown with Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve using Super Scale technology.
To support super-resolution workflows and faster content delivery, Quadro RTX’s high-performance transcoding uses dedicated NVENC/NVDEC hardware to enable faster-than-real-time encoding and decoding of 8K video.
In other news, Autodesk announced Flame 2020 with a new GPU-accelerated machine learning feature set along with a host of new capabilities that bring Flame artists significant creative flexibility and performance boosts.
And at the Mellanox booth, attendees could see how the company’s intelligent interconnect solutions increase data center efficiency by providing the highest throughput and lowest latency, delivering 4K and 8K content even faster to applications.
Into the Home
Delivering content to the home is no longer just a brute force task — it’s evolved to become highly intelligent. AI has enabled broadcasters and live streaming services to make individualized recommendations to match content to people based on past likes or dislikes, or using a similarity index.
Broadcasters can further improve consumer experiences with AI by allowing personalized content filtering or using new inputs such as mood or specific multi-dimensional parameters (for example, “show me a quirky movie with a female lead in Paris”).
With new AI solutions appearing every day, the possibilities are limitless. Broadcasters can now gain much deeper viewer insights using advanced data analytics with Nvidia Rapids, and then visualize these insights in real time using an Nvidia Data Science Workstation.
In addition, EVS is using Nvidia GPUs as a hardware platform to execute the AI solutions they are developing for smarter and more efficient live production. From automatically steer robotic cameras using action prediction, to creating super-slow motion footage by generating missing frames, EVS demonstrated the power and flexibility of AI at NAB.
Cloud Control
Industry consolidation, geographically dispersed productions and increased security concerns are driving broadcasters to explore desktop virtualization. With Nvidia Quadro Virtual Workstation (Quadro vWS) and Nvidia T4 GPUs, broadcasters can scale compute resources and leverage RTX technology from the cloud, using powerful rendering and photorealistic design tools from anywhere. At the Google booth, visitors could see how broadcasters are using Nvidia T4 GPU-accelerated cloud workstations for everything from content creation to remote video editing.
Teradici’s recent collaboration with Nvidia enhances the PCoIP protocol to support GPU acceleration with Quadro Virtual Data Center Workstation and Nvidia RTX Server to ensure a high-powered physical workstation experience from anywhere. At Microsoft’s booth, showgoers could see how artists, editors and creative professionals are using this technology.