Standards Conversion

STANDARDS CONVERSION OPERATIONS

A One Day Course For Experienced Technical Staff

This course can be provided 'in-house' on request

Course Outline
This course is aimed at experienced operational staff concerned with the standards conversion exercise at a professional level.

It reviews the waveform requirements of both PAL and NTSC scanning and encoding standards. An operational overview of techniques such as phase correlation are discussed, and standards conversion artefacts are demonstrated. A practical demonstration of the Snell and Wilcox Alchemist standards converter is performed with particular attention given to accurate waveform levels and timings.

Delegates attending this course should have a basic knowledge of video and audio operations such as that experienced with tape dubbing, transmission monitoring etc.
The JLA course 'Operational Technology Level 0 (OT0) is an ideal entry level for this course.

Course Syllabus

Session 1 - Lecture 1 525/60 and 525/50 Waveform Standards.
525 and 625 CAV waveforms, PAL and NTSC waveforms. Levels and timings. Digital versus Analogue timing standards. EBU and SMPTE Timecode. Field nomenclature etc. Field dominance. Use of Picture Monitor H/V delay, int/ext reference sync etc. EBU and SMPTE colour bars.

Session 2 - Lecture 2 Standards Conversion Principles.
525 versus 625 pixel arrays, temporal difficulties in terms of interlace , interlace versus progressive scanning. Horizontal, Vertical and Temporal conversion requirements. Temporal conversion methods, predictive interpolation, motion estimation. What is Phase Correlation?

Session 3 - Demonstrations Picture and Waveform Monitoring.
Practical demonstration of the use of analogue and digital component waveform and picture monitoring wrt. the standards conversion operation. Standards Conversion Artefacts, Line up procedures, colour bar check out in both standards.

Session 4 - Demonstrations The Standards Conversion Operation.
This session walks through the operational aspects of the Snell and Wilcox 'Alchemist' Phase Correlated standards converter.

In order to ensure that course content is up to date, published JLA syllabus documents are onstantly under review. Thus course content may not be exactly in line with the topics indicated above.