Crystal Vision Supports BBC Studios' HD Upgrade Of Studio Four

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165 Crystal Vision interface boards have been used by BBC Studios, part of BBC Resources Ltd., a wholly owned commercial subsidiary of the BBC, for the HD upgrade of its Studio Four at BBC Television Centre in London.

BBC Studios is investing nearly two million pounds in HD cameras, lenses, vision and monitoring equipment to support its entertainment production customers. Studio Four comprises 8,000 square feet and is home to "A Question of Sport", "The Jonathan Ross Show" and ITV1's "The Alan Titchmarsh Show". The new Studio Four is designed to work in any of the current HD and SD formats, can produce HD and SD simultaneously and includes Dolby E encoding.

The up and down conversion is provided by 20 of Crystal Vision's Up-and-down up/down/cross converters and 13 of the Q-Down123 short-delay down converters. The Up-and-downs will be used to convert existing legacy SD equipment to HD, with ten of them wrapped around the main matrix to provide additional feeds as required. The Q-Downs will provide the SD feeds when the studio is in HD mode. Explained Danny Popkin, Technical Development Manager for BBC Studios: "Much of our output will be simulcast in SD and HD, so the short delay of the Q-Down is ideal for this use."

Distribution of the HD signals will come from 17 of the HDDA105N and HDDA111N distribution amplifiers. Three SYN HD synchronisers will be used for synchronising internal sources that either do not have locking feeds or are unstable. BBC Studios will also use five of the new SYNNER-E HD multi-functional synchronisers - which include an embedder, de-embedder, tracking audio delay, audio processor and special Dolby E processing - for synchronising external sources to the studio and de-embedding the audio to AES. Two CoCo HD colour correctors and legalisers will be used to feed in-vision monitors or colour correct incoming pictures.

For the audio, BBC Studios will use 26 of the TANDEM HD-21 embedders/de-embedders. Explained Popkin: "To simplify VTR plugging, all the studio recording is done as embedded AES so there is an embedder/de-embedder either side of any recording device".

The studio matrix is either SD or HD, and PAL or Y/C sources and displays will therefore use the ADDEC-210, ALLDAC and MON210 converters to encode or decode PAL. Other Standard Definition boards used in the installation include VDA110R and DDA108 distribution amplifiers, SYN102 and SYNNER-E synchronisers and the TANDEM-200 audio embedder/de-embedder.

The boards are mainly housed in Indigo 4SE 4U frames - selected because they offer the highest density of boards (holding up to 24) with BBC Studios having limited space for rack equipment. Control comes from the Statesman PC software, with BBC Studios using the Signal Path add-on - which provides a view of the system based on the way the boards are used rather than their rack location - to graphically monitor its signal paths, because it simplifies fault finding in a complex signal chain.

The equipment was ordered and installed by Dega Broadcast Systems, with the studio going on air in early September.

Studio Four is the third studio that BBC Studios has upgraded to HD. Explained Popkin: "There is an increasing demand for HD content and this investment will ensure BBC Studios continues to fulfil the requirements of its customers, whose creative and editorial visions are increasingly in HD. It will also help the BBC achieve its HD aspirations." Crystal Vision was also selected for the HD upgrade of Studio One in 2006, which included 72 of the Up-and-down up/down/cross converters.

Cool Do-It-Yourself Website

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TV screen resolution

Nearly all of today's HDTVs are "fixed-pixel displays," meaning their screens use a fixed number of pixels to produce a picture. That includes flat-panel LCD and plasma TVs, as well as front- and rear-projection types that use DLP, LCD, or LCoS technology.

All of these fixed-pixel displays have a native resolution that tells you the maximum level of image detail a TV can produce. Two of the most common resolutions are 768p and 1080p, though you may also see 720p.

You may see these same resolutions listed as "1366 x 768 pixels" or "1920 x 1080 pixels." That tells you precisely how many pixels the screen actually has: the first number is the horizontal resolution and the second number is the vertical resolution. Multiplying these two numbers gives you a screen's total pixel count. As an example, 1920 x 1080 = 2,073,600 pixels, which is usually simplified to "2 million." By comparison, 1366 x 768 = 1,049,088 pixels — slightly over one million.

Japan's NHK-STRL New Technology

Take a look on Japan's NHK Science & Technical Research Laboratories new Technology that they are developing. Here is the URL;

http://www.nhk.or.jp/strl/publica/rd/rd110/rd110.html

Some facts about CCD and CMOS image sensors in a digital camera

• CCD sensors, create high-quality, low-noise images. CMOS sensors, traditionally, are more susceptible to noise.
• Because each pixel on a CMOS sensor has several transistors located next to it, the light sensitivity of a CMOS chip tends to be lower. Many of the photons hitting the chip hit the transistors instead of the photodiode.
• CMOS traditionally consumes little power. Implementing a sensor in CMOS yields a low-power sensor.
• CCDs use a process that consumes lots of power. CCDs consume as much as 100 times more power than an equivalent CMOS sensor.
• CMOS chips can be fabricated on just about any standard silicon production line, so they tend to be extremely inexpensive compared to CCD sensors.
• CCD sensors have been mass produced for a longer period of time, so they are more mature. They tend to have higher quality and more pixels.

Computer Memory

Computer memory refers to any recording media that retains electronic data used for computing. Memory can be clasiffied into the following:

1. Temporary or primary - inludes the RAM
2. Permanent or secondary - includes the hard disk, ROM/BIOS, optical and magnetic drives
3. Off-line or tertiary - includes memory media like USB memory, memory sticks,
CompactFlash, SmartMedia, etc.

A better understanding of Interlace

This animation demonstrates the interline twitter effect. The two interlaced images use half the bandwidth of the progressive one. The interlaced scan (second from left) precisely duplicates the pixels of the progressive image (far left), but interlace causes details to twitter. Real interlaced video blurs such details to prevent twitter, as seen in the third image from the left, but such softening (or anti-aliasing) comes at the cost of resolution. A line doubler could never restore the third image to the full resolution of the progressive image.

Note – Because the frame rate has been slowed down, you will notice additional flicker in simulated interlaced portions of this image.

The Ultimate Guide to Anamorphic

http://tinyurl.com/9968

Anamorphic widescreen DVD is all about giving you the most lines of picture resolution (and thus quality), while still allowing you to watch widescreen movies as they were meant to be seen.












Non-anamorphic video as it appears on a Digital 16x9 TV. The gray bars are generated by the TV to fill in the unused portions of the screen. Using the TV's "zoom" mode, you can magnify the image to fill the screen electronically, but at the cost of degrading the image quality significantly.












Anamorphic video as it appears on a Digital 16x9 TV. The "squished" image recorded on the disc (seen at top) is sent directly to the TV, which stretches the video signal horizontally until the correct aspect ratio is achieved. As you can see, the image fills the frame, while retaining its full vertical resolution. The picture quality is stunning.

In essence, as I understand, (I could be wrong, you know), anamorphic is done for the purpose of preserving the whole image as it was produced so that it can be viewed in all kinds of aspect ratios.

For a detailed article on this pls click the tinyurl link.

Cheers,
t2riki

Digital TV Standards Comparison

Please click on table to view larger image.

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