Broadcast Engineering - April 2008 - (Page 15)

DOWNLOAD BEYOND THE HEADLINES important to avoid placing racks and consoles against walls and in tight conﬁnes. Not only will they rapidly overheat, but access to the equipment will be difﬁcult. Signal distribution of HD-SDI at 1.5Gb/s requires signiﬁcantly more care than SDI at 270Mb/s. Cable types and lengths become critical. Fiber will be needed for long connection paths. Observing bend radius speciﬁcations and proper splicing and termination is imperative. A lot of time can be lost tracking down marginally performing equipment only to ﬁnd that the cabling is faulty. Compromised digital signal systems — HD in particular — have the disturbing characteristic of looking great right up until the point that they crash because of errors induced by poor cabling. Many older pieces of equipment will not pass embedded Dolby or vertical interval time code (VITC) and other forms of ancillary data. This will affect the need to support both 608 and 709 closed captions. A broadcast facility will require an appropriate conversion system to support the HD workﬂow and the purchase of conversion equipment. Monitoring systems must support Dolby and non-Dolby audio, as well as SD and HD video. Dolby E and AC-3 will have to be decoded at the test stations. This means purchasing upgrades or new systems and possibly additional interface devices. The HD value proposition Obviously, there is no one-sizeﬁts-all solution for an HD newsroom upgrade. Each station has particular needs and workﬂows that must be carefully analyzed. Every station has budget limitations. Partnering with an experienced design and integration company enables the broadcaster to focus on the HD newsroom workﬂow. Converting to HD news production will probably be more expensive than the optimistic ﬁgures generally put forth. Consider whether these numbers are based on the current cost of SD versus HD equipment, or on the prices of SD equipment from years ago and now adjusted for inﬂation. Your staff will have to learn how to use the new equipment and the nuances of producing in HD. Be sure to allow for adequate training and rehearsal time. HD workﬂows may be different, and the production staff will need to adjust its practices. An infrastructure must perform ﬂawlessly. For this reason alone, the use of an outside partner in the design and implementation process should be carefully considered. BE Phil Cianci is a design engineer for Communications Engineering, Inc. in Newington, VA. See us at NAB08 booth SU11620 3Gb/s modular multi-viewer. Creating solutions. Together. Some of the key advantages of the modular multi-viewer (GQW200): Compatibility up to 3Gb/s Linear expansion - start with 4 inputs, grow to 72 inputs when needed Extreme low latency of the whole system - 20ms for 50 Hz video - 17ms for 60 Hz video Output choice of DVI up to 1920x1200 and 3Gb/s SDI for 1080p www.axon.tv Committed. April 2008 | broadcastengineeringworld.com 15 http://www.axon.tv http://broadcastengineeringworld.com

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Broadcast Engineering - April 2008 Contents Editorial HD Newsrooms Wavelet Compression Mobile TV Audio Processing for HDTV, Part 1 QoE for IPTV End Users NAB Update Asset Management Advertisers Index

Broadcast Engineering - April 2008

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