Snell & Wilcox Breaks Video Platform Barriers, Takes Content Monitoring to Next Level

Exhibiting on the theme “Putting Pictures to Work,” Snell & Wilcox will present groundbreaking new technologies at NAB2006 that ensure the highest image quality on any media platform – regardless of video format, global standard, or display device. In a series of real-world demonstrations, the company will showcase technologies that enable broadcasters, content owners, and service providers to maximize the value of television programming and deliver it at the absolute highest image quality and with maximum emotional impact to viewers anytime, anywhere, in any format, and any form factor.

Highlights include the launch of Helios – a revolutionary software-based conversion platform that eliminates the boundaries between video formats, global standards, and new media display devices – and Hyperion – a groundbreaking new content monitoring system that uses intuitive algorithms that mimic human intelligence to provide dedicated audio, video, and metadata monitoring for all content throughout the broadcast infrastructure, from ingest to transmission.

The company also will introduce Quasar, the world’s finest-ever HDTV upconverter and the first to integrate motion estimation technology. Also on display at the company’s booth will be a host of new infrastructure and IQ Modular products, and IMPAKT, a powerful new DVE option for the Kahuna production switcher.

“In the past year we’ve seen the rapid migration of television programming to new distribution platforms that include iPods, mobile telephones, VOD, IPTV, and video-enabled Web sites,” said Joe Zaller, Snell & Wilcox’s vice president of marketing. “At Snell & Wilcox, we’re using our deep experience in conversion and video signal processing to erase the boundaries between platforms and ensure the viewer receives an optimal image regardless of the viewing device. The concept of ‘master once, distribute anywhere’ is no longer just a dream. It’s now a much-needed reality.”

With Helios, Snell & Wilcox is taking its renowned video processing technology and making it available as a solution that delivers big-screen video quality on any viewing platform – including mobile video, VOD, IPTV, iPods, and broadcast television. Eliminating the boundaries between video formats, global standards, and new media display devices, Helios finally makes possible the long-held dream of content owners and broadcasters to “master once, distribute anywhere.”

Helios brings Snell & Wilcox’s conversion, compression, and signal processing expertise to the file-based domain. Combining the company’s Ph.C motion estimation and FormatFusion technologies, this software-based conversion platform encompasses a complete automated solution that can convert – under user control – video, audio, and metadata to any required format in a single “anytime” pass. “Anytime” means Helios’ intelligent job manager will dynamically scale processing throughput simply by applying the appropriate amount of CPU power required for an individual task.

Helios can be used in both the stream- and file-based domains, and its capabilities include the resizing, reformatting, and reshaping of images to deliver maximum emotional impact for each viewer. Along with delivering superb picture quality, it will also enable the remapping of multiple multilanguage audio tracks as well as provide comprehensive support of MXF metadata.

Unlike traditional transcoders that simply convert images, Helios harnesses Ph.C and FormatFusion to analyze the component parts that make up the video picture, ensuring that users of mobile devices get an equally satisfying viewing experience to that produced on conventional television displays. For content providers, content aggregators, and carriers alike, this is the breakthrough they’ve been waiting for to enable better pictures with less bandwidth.

With unique intuitive processing algorithms that mimic human intelligence and dedicated observation for each channel, the new Snell & Wilcox Hyperion automated monitoring solution is set to change the way content is validated from ingest through to broadcast. Providing comprehensive content monitoring for multiple channels, Hyperion gives broadcasters unprecedented accuracy and enormous gains in efficiency when bringing valuable program streams to air.

Operating along intuitive processes that mimic the eyes and ears of a human, Hyperion effectively forms an educated opinion as to whether content – video, audio, or metadata – is meeting the quality standards of viewers, as well as the legal and contractual requirements necessary for revenue generation. This makes Hyperion different from traditional systems because it monitors not just the technical parameters of a video signal, but also the actual content within the signal.

Sophisticated algorithms at the core of the Hyperion system enable broadcasters to determine and set what “normal” playout should look like for a given piece of content. If the behavior of media does not match up to expected behavior, the system can alert the operator to this situation. The extraordinary ability to monitor the subtler elements of content streams from both a technical and human perspective translates directly to more accurate, revenue-worthy broadcasts.

With Quasar, Snell & Wilcox launches the world’s finest-ever HDTV upconverter and the first to integrate motion estimation technology. The new Quasar platform utilizes motion estimation techniques based on Snell & Wilcox’s Emmy ® Award-winning Ph.C technology to produce dazzlingly clear and sharp high-definition HD outputs from a variety of standard-definition inputs.

Developed from the ground up to deliver the ultimate conversion to high-definition formats, Quasar combines three industry-leading, Emmy Award-winning Snell & Wilcox technologies in a single compact 1-RU package. These include Ph.C motion estimation, premium HD upconversion, and Prefix compression pre-processing for noise reduction and dropout filtering. The resulting images are truly stunning.

At the heart of Quasar is motion estimation technology, based on Snell & Wilcox’s Ph.C, which has never before been available in a product in this price range. Unlike traditional upconverters that employ multi-field apertures, Quasar’s motion-compensated conversion delivers the sharpest possible HD outputs, regardless of the complexity of the input. For example, Quasar is equally adept both at preserving high-frequency detail in action-packed images from sporting events and at converting the fine detail in scrolling text and captions – even when signals contain a mixture of film- and video-originated material.

The functionality of the company’s multiple-award-winning Kahuna production switcher will be significantly enhanced at NAB2006 with the introduction of powerful 3DVE effects and the addition of a variety of new control surfaces.

The new Kahuna IMPAKT is a powerful, easy-to-use suite of 3D DVEs. With IMPAKT, Kahuna now offers up to four twin-channel 3D DVEs that users can apply in either SD, HD, or both, and which work in source-based or bus-based modes, allowing both background and fill-and-key manipulation. Kahuna IMPAKT provides a variety of powerful effects including spheres, slabs, zooms, warps, tiling, ripples, rolls and peels, fragmentation, lighting effects, and corner pinning. All these options are housed in Kahuna’s compact 11-RU mainframe and require no additional connections or extra rack space.

NAB2006 also sees the launch of a variety of new control surfaces for Kahuna. The system already boasts full sized 2-M/E, 3-M/E, and 4-M/E control panels. At NAB2006, Snell & Wilcox will introduce compact versions of the 1-M/E, 2-M/E, and 3-M/E control panels as well as a micro control panel. The new compact 2-M/E and 3-M/E panels enable users to integrate the power of Kahuna in space-constrained environments such as small trucks and studios. The new Kahuna 1-M/E and micro panels provide the ability to have a specialist operator control the output from larger systems during a live event, or to operate specialist equipment such as the Kahuna IMPAKT DVE.

Snell & Wilcox is putting its industry-leading technologies into a series of new IQ Modular products that raise the quality bar for decoding and upconversion in the broadcast infrastructure domain. For example, new Snell & Wilcox IQDEC modules pack a 12-bit Golden Gate premium decoder, synchronizer, and audio embedder with noise reduction all on a single compact card, giving broadcasters the ideal bridge between analog legacy operations and digital environments. Completing the transition between analog and HD video is the new IQUDC synchronizing HD/SD-SDI up-, down-, and crossconverter – the ideal solution for users requiring SD/HD flexibility to handle multirate broadcast operations or variable input/output situations.

Making their debut at NAB2006 are 12 new entries in the Kudos Plus TBS timebase synchronizer and CVR converter + synchronizer series. Equipped to handle embedded audio while giving users a choice of external audio I/O options, six of the new Kudos Plus products additionally include a FireWire interface for DV input or output. All 12 products feature composite, component, and Y/C video inputs and outputs.

Small enough for a fly-pack or a crowded desktop, ½-RU Kudos Plus products perform signal stabilization and standards conversion on nearly any type of video for applications ranging from backhaul monitoring and remote newsgathering to dubbing and duplication. The addition of audio to the range makes these new products ideal for use in teleport and lines-in applications where a wide range of video and audio signals must be synchronized and standards-converted. For example, the CVR600AD standards converter with its analog audio interface can be used to provide a stable SDI NTSC (525-line) output with embedded audio from a composite PAL (625-line) with analog audio input. The DV interface provided in six of the new units makes them the ideal companion in a desktop environment, since now conversion can take place without slowing down any other processing. New noise reduction capabilities and additional enhancements allow these Kudos Plus products to handle a wide range of sources. The standards converters also are provided with a range of preset aspect ratio conversions (ARC) and can be used as a space-saving, stand-alone solution for ARC applications.

At NAB2006, Snell & Wilcox will unveil the new 3-RU version of MEMPHIS, the stand-alone, high-quality SD and HD MPEG-2 encoder that users like Turner Broadcasting are making the cornerstone of a cost-effective migration path toward HD and a file-based infrastructure deployment. The superior compression scheme of the MEMPHIS encoder is made possible by two Emmy Award-winning technologies from Snell & Wilcox: Ph.C phase correlation motion estimation and Prefix compression pre-processing. Along with high compression efficiency, the MEMPHIS technology delivers improved picture quality for the viewer. Affordably supporting a multiphase transition to HD, MEMPHIS can be integrated initially as a conventional encoder into a traditional ingest-for-playout environment and later upgraded into a fully configured ingest workstation for use in an IT-based infrastructure that leverages less-expensive, general-purpose storage devices over current proprietary servers. No other encoder allows a smoother transition path from SD to HD and from baseband to file-based operations.