Archive notice: This article was originally published on April 24, 2006. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Broadcasting specialist Snell & Wilcox is showing three new products at NAB that are intended to help prepare material for different distribution channels and formats.
Quasar is an HDTV upconverter with motion analysis. It combines three proven technologies: Motion Estimation, Premium HD Upconversion and Prefix Compression. At its heart, however, is motion-analysis technology that is intended to deliver excellent quality even with mixed film, video and graphics content.
Hyperion is a new type of content-monitoring and quality-assurance system. It not only monitors technical parameters, but is intended to reproduce the capabilities of human eyes and ears through intuitive processes and use them for monitoring. This is intended, for example, to make it possible to identify even individual film genres and thus prevent incorrect broadcasts. This is possible because Hyperion is not positioned at the end of the production path as is conventional, but instead monitors the signal paths before that point.
Finally, Helios is a software-based conversion platform for different distribution channels such as broadcast, IPTV, video-on-demand and mobile video. This makes it possible to distribute content to different distribution channels in real time.
Helios automatically takes the different requirements into account – wide shots look better on a large monitor than on a mobile phone. For playback of the signals on a mobile phone, the software uses image and motion analysis to identify the important image content and displays it enlarged. To display the background, on the other hand, it uses less data, so that although it appears less sharp, the signal to be transmitted makes more efficient use of the available bandwidth. As a result, you can see the ball fly into the goal even on a mobile phone – the fact that the spectators can hardly be recognized in the process is less of a problem there.
Helios runs on standard IT hardware and has an interoperability module that is intended to enable different servers to work together. The first systems it can connect are Omneon Spectrum and Pinnacle Media Stream servers.
Further Links:
- Snell & Wilcox
