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Each year at its Technical Assembly, the EBU presents its Technology & Innovation Award to highlight the innovative technical solutions of one of its working groups.
This year's winner is the EBU ADM Renderer (EAR) software, which works in the field of Next Generation Audio (NGA).
Who is the BTF-renderer, consortium author of this EAR software?
BTF stands for Broadcast Technology Future, a type of tightly-knit consortium, led by the EBU and tasked with shedding light on a strategic technological challenge.
The BTF-renderer is a consortium formed around the Next Generation Audio issue that associates the R&D departments of the following companies : France Télévisions innovations & développements, Radio France et b<>com (France), NHK (Japan), BBC (UK), IRT (Germany) and RAI (Italy).
His achievements
The EBU's strategic audio and metadata projects have commonly established an audio metadata format published in 2015: the ADM (Audio Definition Model), which has since been referenced by the ITU (International Telecommunication Union). The ADM allows to describe any type of audio master, whether it is a classical multichannel source (mono, stereo, 5.1, 71. etc.) but also "object" or "scene" type. These last two types are used in productions for video games, cinema or Virtual Reality, and are beginning to appear in the sound and TV/radio production sectors.
The EBU ADM Renderer sound rendering engine is based on this standard and combines object-oriented mixing with metadata. The advantage: this rendering engine uses ADM metadata and assigns the sound sources to the various available speakers, whether you have a simple stereo, complex multi-channel systems (5.1, 7.2, 9.2+4, etc.) or headphones. This avoids creating a different mix for each listening device.
Last February, perceptual tests were conducted at some project partners to evaluate the quality of the rendering engine, as at France Télévisions.
