IF my cousin in Montreal can be trusted, the downward slide of the NHL’s once-revered Canadiens has many of the city’s youth turning away from Nos Glorieux in favor of – of all things – European football. Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, North American ice hockey is claiming new fans in locales as unlikely as the Netherlands. This kind of globalization of programming has made the technology of standards conversion more essential than ever.

‘With international sports, covering Europe, Asia and South America with the World Cup, you’re putting different format signals all around the world to every continent, and none of them are compatible,’ says Derek Morrison, product manager, converter products, at Snell & Wilcox.

Formed in 1973, S&W, a designer/manufacturer of advanced signal processing technologies, established its reputation on standards conversion products, and has since branched out to service various digital image processing techniques in the MPEG and HDTV world. Morrison works out of the Hampshire, Eng. office of S&W, which also has facilities throughout continental Europe, the U.S. and Asia.

Morrison points to Wimbledon, England’s premier tennis tourney, as a perfect example of an event broadcast live around the world that requires conversion out of mobile facilities.

‘You’ll have lots of OB vans, and they’ll be interchanging pictures between [one another],’ Morrison explains. ‘But within that they’ll be stripping out the audio so they can pass pictures on to BBC and say CBS, and then CBS will want to standards convert it and send it back home to the States.’

With its small size (1RU), S&W’s motion-compensated Mach1 standards converter is particularly suited to this type of environment, fitting easily into an OB van, with an ergonomic front panel for quick key function access. The Mach1 also offers built-in noise reduction to help smooth out satellite signals, and operates back-and-forth among the PAL, NTSC and SECAM formats.

PAL (phase alternation line) is the analog TV display standard used primarily in Europe, whereas the NTSC (National Television Systems Committee) system is used in North America and Japan, and SECAM (sequential couleur avec memoire) is used in France, Russia and Africa. The differences among them are in color definition and the fact PAL and SECAM scan a TV’s cathode ray tube horizontally 625 times to form the video image, whereas NTSC scans 525 lines.

With certain kinds of video material, a converter less sophisticated than the Mach1 can be sufficient.

‘If you’re having a live [interview] between Canada and London and it’s head-and-shoulders shots with very little movement apart from the eyes and mouth, you can get away with a linear converter, which traditionally is a four-field, four-line converter,’ Morrison says.

Motion compensation becomes more of an issue in the frenetic world of sports.

‘Whenever you get fast-moving objects or camera pans, with a normal linear converter the images will break up,’ Morrison explains. ‘In particular, advertising along the billboards will break up and have ‘motion judder.’ It becomes distorted, like it’s shaking, and not only does it look bad to the viewer, but the people paying lots of money for advertising don’t really get a fair deal.’

It is economically imperative for the broadcaster as well as the advertiser to have motion judder removed. Otherwise, the broadcaster’s MPEG encoder will interpret the distortion as movement, which would then need to be translated, increasing the bandwidth required to transmit content, some of which shouldn’t be there in the first place.

Morrison explains the same kind of conversion gear is used regardless of the image source, whether it’s received via satellite feed or directly from a camera output for subsequent satellite transmission or from a 525 DigiBeta tape for conversion to 625.

Despite the complicated technology inside the box, the S&W standards converter is easy to use.

‘You have a single button, which is ‘motion compensation on/off’ and it will always give you the optimum pitch for what it’s analyzing at that time,’ Morrison says. ‘For some other settings you can adjust to different parameters, but those are all ancillary features. For most situations you can just push the button, have motion-compensation on, and let it roll.’

The Mach1 has two spare slots inside the board in which the user can add any one of S&W’s many IQ modular cards to connect directly into the signal path. For example, a logo inserter can be connected so the output signal will include a station ID logo. The two slots can also house equipment that is unrelated to the Mach1 and tied into a totally independent signal path. Morrison says this feature was one of the best received at S&W’s booth at NAB2001.

To meet its customers’ needs in a soon-to-be-high-definition world, S&W offers the Premier series of HD up, down and crossconverters. The Premier HD HD6200 linear Crosconverter is a 2RU box that converts HD film or video inputs to any other HD or standard definition output. Options include downconversion capabilities and embedded audio processing, and the unit includes built-in test pattern generators, aspect ratio conversion, and color space conversion. *

-www.snellwilcox.com