5G key technology enableRs for Emerging media COntent pRoDuction Services (5G-RECORDS)

The project aims to develop, integrate, validate and demonstrate specific 5G components in end-to-end 5G infrastructures for professional audio-visual (AV) media content production. The project, which began on September 2020, takes a business-to-business (B2B) perspective, where 5G becomes part of the AV infrastructure backbone to enhance efficiency and develop new ways of media production. Thus, the project considers the most stringent requirements in content production for content capture using uplink connections, where content acquisition devices, such as cameras and microphones, are connected to a 5G network to convey live content to the studio from a specific event, such as a music festival or a sports game. In this context, reliable and sustainable throughput, latency and synchronization are essential.

The Grupo de Tratamiento de Imágenes (GTI), a Group part of the Information Processing and Telecommunications Center of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), is a key partner in the development of the Use Case 3: Live immersive media production. This use case considers a real-time, end-to-end, Free Viewpoint Video (FVV) system that includes capturing, 5G contribution, virtual view synthesis on an edge server, 5G delivery, and visualization on users’ terminals. The system will generate in real time a synthesized video stream from a freely chosen virtual position (viewpoint). The proposed system builds upon a previous system, called FVV Live, which was the first low-cost system worldwide operating in real time thanks to the brilliant and innovative ideas of researchers of the GTI on lightweight schemes for video acquisition, transmission, and rendering.

However, it was conceived for simple videoconferencing scenarios under controlled lighting. Instead, the use case envisaged in the 5G-RECORDS project targets, among other possibilities, the realtime immersive capture of sport events such as a basketball game. It will be possible to reproduce content both live and offline (replay) of freeviewpoint trajectories around one basket of the court. The content can then be distributed not only to people attending the event (local delivery), but also to third parties. The most innovative part of this use case is the fact that each user can selects specific viewpoints at any time, since all possible angles are available.