One of the key motivations behind our work is the creation and establishment of open, interoperable standards and formats for broadcasters. For Next Generation Audio (NGA) one of the missing puzzle pieces until recently was an open standard for a renderer. With the publication of Tech 3388 (aka the EBU ADM Renderer (EAR)) and the accompanying open-source reference implementation we made a major leap to close one of the last major gaps in the standards domain. This important work was even acknowledged by the EBU Technology & Innovation Award earlier this year.
This award includes promotion by the EBU and a prominent place at their booth during the IBC. So we’ve used this chance to demonstrate the EAR and our vision of an open, interoperable workflow for NGA productions there. For this purpose, we created a short video (3 min) which explains the basic idea behind it.
The video should be watched using headphones!
The feedback at the IBC from the broadcasting community and manufacturers was great and we hope to see the EAR to be used in tools in the next time.
In related news, the EBU published recently a Tech Report about the subjective evaluation which we conducted along with other institutions to evaluate the EAR against a commercially available renderer. This large evaluation was done in 5 different labs and proved the good performance of the EAR.
We are also active in standardisation and try to establish the renderer as an international standard in the ITU-R. Along with the EBU and the authors of the EAR we are working together with manufacturers like Dolby, Fraunhofer and DTS to achieve this aim.
We will continue the work for a truly open and interoperable workflow for NGA and will keep you posted about new achievements!