Toronto-based International Image has provided technical services for the TV distribution market for nearly 25 years and its new technology initiative Constant Cadence is the latest proprietary service developed by the shop for an evolving TV industry.

With programming being delivered in emerging formats like DVD, video on demand and near video on demand, and with the new standards which have been established for the introduction of digital TV, a whole new set of concerns arises for producers, broadcasters and those who deal with delivering programming to various outlets.

Part of the mandate of International Image, says operations manager Fred van Velsen, is to forecast those concerns and requirements; the company must anticipate and prepare for the eventualities of new distribution technologies and solve the attendant problems waiting to happen.

With initiatives like Constant Cadence, the company is bringing its broad experience in handling standards incompatibilities into the next phase of digital program delivery.

C2 is a fully proprietary system developed by the company’s technical team which includes Mike Ferkranus and Jeff Dewolde.

The system provides a process to facilitate the distribution of programming via technologies like DVD, VOD and the ATSC digital TV standard (set for use in the U.S. and recently adopted by Canada), which, for the most part, entail the use of MPEG compressed material. In these cases, the problem waiting to happen is compromised picture quality when a program shot on film and posted electronically meets an MPEG compressor (for DTV, the problem arises with the progressive scan format).

Transferring a filmed property to videotape, without electronic post twiddling, results in a relationship called the 3:2 pulldown – the association between the 24 frames of film and 30 frames of video – which in turn produces a steady 3:2 cadence in the video.

When the material becomes subject to electronic post manipulation – like editing, dissolves and supers from character generators (and what program doesn’t?) – the 3:2 cadence is disrupted, reducing the ability of an MPEG compressor to extract the original 24 frames of film and make an acceptable final product.

A disrupted 3:2 cadence also means that an NTSC master will not meet DVD PAL specification upon standards conversion.

International Image’s C2 restores the steady 3:2 cadence to material which has been electronically posted, thereby rendering it MPEG-ready for delivery to various formats.

C2 effectively deals with the occurrence of interpolated or soft edits, one of the significant problems in distributing electronically posted programming in the new formats.

‘The issue of consistent 3:2 cadence will become more prominent as program distributors look to repurpose their libraries for new platforms such as DVD, NTSC and PAL and the new DTV channels,’ says International Image director of marketing Louise Cote.

The product was developed based on some of the same principles involved in other standards conversion issues, adds van Velsen. ‘We’ve seen the problem before in PAL mastering.’

International Image president Dan McLellan says the challenge of creating a service which provides a perfect 3:2 pulldown was thrown down to several companies in L.A. and thus far International Image has been the only facility to respond with a workable solution.

While C2 is not in use yet, van Velsen says people are becoming more aware of the issues which gave rise to the development of the product, and he points to the fact that a show like The X-Files is now posting in PAL format to avoid these problems.

The development of the new C2 system comes shortly after the company launched a major new media technology initiative with investment in an MPEG compression facility

International Image began as a standards conversion facility with a staff of about 40 and has since grown in both size and the scope of services offered.

In 1996, the company opened a 20,000-square-foot Santa Monica facility which employs nearly 50 staff and has become a significant player in the ultra-competitive L.A. TV environment.

According to McLellan, the Toronto facility handles 85% of the TV series business generated in Canada, with over 90 series (all 13 episodes or more) currently going through the shop. McLellan forecasts roughly the same number of series will be handled out of Santa Monica this year.

Addressing the changing requirements of TV delivery, International Image branched out with added services, including its Image Plus aspect ratio transfer service and Master Videotape Technical Evaluation.

Last year, the company introduced the Image Plus system, a proprietary solution that provides a cost-effective means of delivering programs in different aspect ratios. The system allows the electronic transfer of a videotape master from its current aspect ratio to another required aspect ratio; for example, from 4:3 to 16:9.

The company’s Image F.I.T. (frame integral transformation) provides a component digital process for producing a PAL master from NTSC (or vice versa).

The huge International Image main studio contains banks of analog and digital converters as well as a number of separate suites which house many of the company’s services.

In one suite, two pairs of eagle eyes scan video masters of programs for any potential technical faults which could cause a program to be rejected by a foreign broadcaster. The company’s Master Videotape Technical Evaluation rates the material on a scale of 1 to 5 according to the ITU Impairment Severity Rating Definitions to ensure the often stringent quality imperatives of European broadcasters are met.

The facility also stores a vast number of tape masters of programming and provides its services to production companies which are investing significant resources into restoring old programs and transferring them from formats like 1′ tape. The company does color restoration and correction of older shows and offers its EWash system, a proprietary digital process for removing film dirt and impairments.

With its mandate to anticipate the emerging issues in program delivery, van Velsen acknowledges that International Image ‘won’t be doing conversions forever,’ but says with new means of distribution, like bit streaming, incompatibilities will by no means disappear.

The company is also looking at different means of transferring data between the Toronto and U.S. facility, whereby a master is delivered to one facility and work shared via a working copy sent over data lines.