The Ultra HD Forum (UHDF) is the global organization defining industry best practices for the introduction of technologies to facilitate ultra-high-definition (UHD) viewing experiences.
At the 2019 NAB Show, the Forum brings a significant update to its Guidelines, which have been accessed online over 2,000 times at its website in the last year. Madeleine Noland, Senior Advisor, Technology and Standards for LG Electronics, and UHDF Guidelines chair, said, “For the first time, we are releasing a unified guidelines document, illustrating UHD maturity. In it, we describe ‘foundation’ UHD technologies, as well as ‘enhancements’ that are backward compatible so they will add value to setups that support them, but still, look and sound great on foundation equipment.”
The 2019 NAB Show booth N1531 will host multiple attractions:
A universal HDR demo will show how foundation HDR technology and dynamic metadata coexist and work to improve content reproduction on enabled displays.
SHVC will be shown in ATSC 3.0 supporting different displays.
The effect of resolution and frame rate on HDR Content will be shown in a demo comparing HDR content in HD and 4K, and at Standard and High Frame Rates.
A demo pod will show the effect of HDR-to-SDR content switching on TVs and STBs.
Another demo pod presents UHD content from a wide variety of sources, including HDR → SDR → HDR conversions and 8K production for 4K distribution.
The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) will present essential findings on HDR and its relative impact across different screen resolutions.
Yoeri Geutskens of Ultra HD 4k News (@UHD4k) will present an exclusive preview of the latest update to his HDR ecosystem tracker, which will only be made public after the NAB Show closes.
Member companies that power this year’s UHDF demos are: ATEME, BBright, b<>com, Dolby, Fairmile West, Fox, Harmonic, HiSilicon, Huawei, LGE, PBS, Sony and Technicolor.
The Forum acknowledges 8K development as a promising future technology and plans to work on its inclusion within future versions of the Guidelines. UHDF president, Thierry Fautier stated, “8K is not at the same state of maturity as 4K, and not widely deployable without further development and advances in the ecosystem. Our immediate interest is in 4K and HD resolution-based services and technologies, but the Forum continues to monitor the development of 8K video as it may relate to television production and distribution, including leveraging 8K production and display technologies within a 4K distribution system. We will update media and analysts on the booth at NAB Show.”
Through its president Thierry Fautier, UHDF has had its first technical Paper included in the 2019 NAB Broadcast Engineering and IT Conference and published in the Conference’s Proceedings.
About the Ultra HD Forum
Formed in 2015, the Ultra HD Forum is the global organization responsible for promoting market adoption of Ultra HD by defining industry best practices for the phased introduction of the broad set of technologies facilitating the next-generation television experience. The organization facilitates interoperability testing and collaborates with industry standards bodies to align standard development activities. A list of member companies and additional information about the organization is available at http://ultrahdforum.org