Accomodating Pre-compressed Digital Audio in the Modern Television Plant

摘要

Television production and distribution plants are increasingly tasked to handle, manipulate, and transport multichannel audio packages that have been already compressed using one of a variety of technologies. This paper examines the various sources oj impairments and errors in the handling and transport of these precompressed audio packages in video synchronization, processing, and encoding situations. INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND With the launch of high-definition (HD) television services in many countries, there has been a proliferation in the production and distribution of multichannel audio. Multichannel audio productions have been a staple of the cinema industry for many years and increasingly enrich the television viewer experience on all manner of programming. Because of the number of channels, and interchannel phasing and metadata transport requirements, the preferred signal flow in the television plant often involves the transport of these multichannel audio packages in a compressed form, using one of several compression techniques.