Enhancing Broadcast workflows to deliver high quality live content with NVIDIA RTX

Ideapool delivers digital content for the 2022 Spring Festival Gala, elevating rendering and 8K broadcasting workflows with NVIDIA Solutions

Ideapool is dedicated to commercializing, researching, and developing computer graphics and image technologies. As a member of the NVIDIA Inception program, Ideapool implements innovative applications of digital content such as virtual reality, augmented reality, virtual simulation, digital twin, and 3D visualization.

Ideapool has expanded its business to cover pan-media, education, healthcare, industrial internet, and smart city.
Using NVIDIA RTX A6000, NVIDIA G-SYNC, and NVIDIA Mosaic technologies, Ideapool supported the Spring Festival Gala and Lantern Festival Gala, bringing digital content to life for audiences around the world.
With cutting-edge performance and features, the RTX A6000 is a powerful visual computing GPU for desktop workstations. The NVIDIA G-SYNC, an advanced display technology, allowed Ideapool to significantly minimize display stuttering and input lag. And with NVIDIA Mosaic, the team could easily span any application across multiple high-resolution displays or projectors from a single system. This feature enabled Ideapool to treat multiple displays as a single desktop, all without causing application software changes or visual artifacts

Bringing Digital Content to Big Screens

For the first time in history, the 2022 CCTV Spring Festival Gala used LED screens to create a 720-degree dome space—a setup similar to the one used by the Lantern Festival Gala in the same year. During the gala, each
LED screen would broadcast various assorted video content in line with the event theme. The LED screens covered a total area of 4,306 square meters, equivalent to 10 standard basketball courts. This setup shattered the record of all previous Spring Festival Galas in terms of the area and the number of LED screens.

Additionally, the 2022 Spring Festival Gala would be broadcast live in 8K, which required higher picture clarity and color fidelity. Ideapool needed to find a way to synchronize real-time rendering and broadcasting of a massive amount of UHD signals, as well as the ultra-high-speed real-time encoding and decoding of dual 8K video.

The Ideapool team faced the following challenges:

• Encoding and decoding efficiency: The 2022 Spring Festival Gala would last almost five hours, during which technologies like extended reality (XR), holographic scanning, and 8K 3D rendering technology would be applied to heighten the visual effect. The show presented significant challenges in video encoding and decoding efficiency, and a vast amount of UHD video data was involved.
• Render quality and speed: To guarantee the image quality and color rendering of the 8K live broadcast of the Spring Festival Gala, Ideapool formulated a dual 8K output solution, which required extremely high-quality renders and speed.
• Synchronization: For the first time, synchronous broadcasting control was implemented via the 4,306-square-meter LED screen, during which every screen must have the same refresh rate and achieve perfect frame synchronization.

NVIDIA Technologies Heighten Rendering and Broadcast Workflows
To ensure the best broadcast possible for the gala, the Ideapool team prepared a detailed technical solution. This included NVIDIA RTX A6000, NVIDIA G-SYNC, and NVIDIA Mosaic technologies combined with Ideapool’s self-developed real-time 3D graphics and image engine, large-screen intelligent broadcasting control system, and UHD cluster rendering technology to allow for 8K UHD rendering and intelligent broadcasting control. This solution was also used for the Lantern Festival Gala, where NVIDIA GPU and display technology significantly improved the rendering and broadcasting control capabilities.

If decoding is implemented only by a CPU, the real-time decoded video stream must be transmitted to the graphics card before being output to the broadcast channel. This process is long and arduous and often results in hardware bottlenecks. But with joint decoding, some results processed by CPU and GPU can be directly output to the broadcast channel, significantly reducing the load on the CPU. The RTX A6000 notably improves the connection between the GPU and other computer components to speed up encoding and decoding processes.

For render quality and speed, traditional media servers struggle to meet the high resolution and high frame rate demands due to the huge amount of data, thousands of screens, and 8K UHD broadcast images. But to create the real- time 3D graphics and enhance image rendering, Ideapool used RTX A6000 and NVIDIA G-SYNC to create a server cluster with a synchronous rendering architecture. This solution allowed the team to implement synchronous rendering of multi-node distributed UHD clusters.

This technology also improved the render speed and accuracy, and produced images up to 15360×4320 resolution (dual 8K output). The strong performance of NVIDIA RTX fully highlighted the capabilities of 8K UHD video signals, including high definition, image fidelity, and the audience’s sense of immersion, making audiences feel as if they were present at the event.

The combination of Ideapool’s large-screen intelligent broadcasting control system, NVIDIA G-SYNC, and NVIDIA Mosaic ensured that every screen received the same frame without tearing, stalling, or input delay, and resulted in the unified and simultaneous broadcasting control of ultra-large-scale UHD digital content. And by using NVIDIA G-SYNC, Ideapool implemented precise synchronization of and seamless switchover between multiple active and standby servers for the events so that the presentation and broadcast of both the Spring Festival Gala and Lantern Festival Gala went smoothly.

Driving the Future of Live Broadcast
With the help of NVIDIA RTX A6000, NVIDIA G-SYNC, and NVIDIA Mosaic, Ideapool further improved the 8K UHD cluster rendering and intelligent broadcasting control capabilities of the CCTV Spring Festival Gala and Lantern Festival Gala. These advanced technologies provided successful technical support for both events and helped Ideapool reach new levels of graphics in a live broadcast.

NVIDIA and Ideapool continue to work together to further expand innovations in graphics, enhancing both the rendering efficiency and accuracy of digital content and accelerating product improvement and application. Together, NVIDIA and Ideapool will bring the convenience and benefits of digital content to more fields and help more industries thrive in the next digital transformation. Sports Video