BBC Studios and Post Production has upgraded its Studio Six to be the UK’s first 1080/p50 HD studio, with Crystal Vision selected as the exclusive signal processing equipment supplier following the purchase of 137 boards by UK systems integrator ATG Broadcast.
Studio Six is the fourth permanent HD studio at BBC Television Centre in London. BBC Studios and Post Production has seen customer demand for HD increase, with the BBC having launched a simulcast of BBC One in HD last month and ITV HD also now running.
The studio includes Crystal Vision’s 3Gb/s up/downconverters and synchronizers. Studio Six can handle and display all HD formats, including 1080/p50 and dual link, with the installation of a dual-link 1.5Gb/s and single-link 3Gb/s HD video infrastructure.
Nineteen of Crystal Vision’s Up-Down-A 3G up/down/crossconverters are being used for upconversion of SD signals to HD. Featuring both motion-adaptive video deinterlacing and Crystal Vision’s proprietary downconversion, Up-Down-A 3G can convert 3Gb/s, HD and SD sources, handles up to four groups of embedded audio, and provides constant-in-format co-timed dual outputs, which makes it easy to output both HD and SD at the same time.
Seven Q-Down123 downconverters are being used for the downconversion of HD to SD, with the SD outputs configurable as flexible mixtures of analog and digital. Ten of these up/downconverters are routable through the matrix, making them available for any additional equipment.
Five SYNNER-E 3G and two SYN102 synchronizers are being used on incoming and outgoing HD lines to and from the rest of the world. SYNNER-E 3G is Crystal Vision’s latest multifunctional synchronizer and combines a video synchronizer, tracking audio delay, embedder, de-embedder and audio processor with optional fiber I/O on one board.
