Sony and National Theatre Live Presents the World’s first 4K cinema broadcast of War Horse

Thursday 27th February 2014, I was lucky enough to be in the audience for an evening which saw the world’s first 4K presentation of an Event Cinema showing transmitted live into a cinema. The collaboration between the National Theatre Live and Sony Cinema saw the ever popular play “War Horse” captured on Sony F55 cameras at the New London Theatre and broadcast directly to the Curzon Cinema in Chelsea, to an audience which was a mixture of invited industry members and the general public, in 4K. National Theatre Live is of course an initiative by the National Theatre to broadcast live performances onto cinema screens around the world, and is one of the most popular Event Cinema shows. Since its first season, which began in June 2009, over 2 million people have now experienced the work of National Theatre Live in cinemas worldwide.

In order to achieve this first Sony needed to work with both of the National Theatre’s long term partners Creative Broadcast Solutions (CBS) who were responsible for capturing the event in 4K along with NEP Visions who provided the Outside Broadcast infrastructure to send the signal via satellite to the Curzon Cinema. Over 1000 other cinemas worldwide will also received a simultaneous live HD feed which was distributed by Links Broadcast.The mix feed were also recorded on a Sony MasterDeck, both for archive purposes and the creation of a 4K DCP master to be sent to cinemas around the world. NEP Visions also recorded 4K ISOs onto two additional Sony MasterDecks for later use.

The  4K signal was uplinked on to SES Astra’s 3B satellite using 36Mhz of capacity in order to achieve the maximum possible video data rate within the modulated 4K transport stream. This 4K signal was downlinked at the Curzon cinema in Chelsea via a 1.8M Links Broadcast antenna and fed in to Adtec RD70 receiver decoders before eventually being delivered to Sony’s 4K projector.

The presentation was flawless in its transmission and technical presentation. Like all new technology and firsts there were technical challenges, around contrast which will be resolved in the longer term. Like all technical firsts the issue was largely around the use of prototype components – namely the 4K live input board.The Sony SXRD projector with the prototype 4K live input board used for the demonstration had a 2000:1 contrast ratio, which is a similar or even better contrast ratio than competitor DLP projector systems. For live theatre performances Sony’s DCinema R515 projector series the additional contrast ratio (between 8000-10000:1) will compensate the theatrical lighting set up very well and will enhance the picture quality. This can already be seen today with this projector series for films in DCP format and for 2K live feeds. Sony tell me that the 4K live input board for the R500 series is due later this year. But there is a wider challenge of capturing content in theatres without all the lighting which a film or television sets would normally have.

 

The higher contrast ratios on the projectors will help in the future. Speaking to members of the general audience they were enjoyed watching the ‘broadcast’ and the image on the screen. Let’s remember that this was the first time this had been done a 4K capture to screen chain, of live content. The move from prototype to release status of boards allowing for use in the R515 projector will see the image improve. This is true of all firsts and it will only improve. So well done to all those involved. I look forward to seeing the next part of this development.