Snell & Wilcox will provide motion-compensated standards converters for NBC's coverage of both the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece and the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy. The network used Snell's Alchemist Ph.C standards converters in the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Austrailia.
For the upcoming games, NBC Olympics purchased an Alchemist Platinum, which will be housed at the Olympics' International Broadcast Center to convert outgoing signals and some incoming feeds between 525 and 625 SD format, and two Kudos Plus Mach1 M.Sc standards converters, which will convert backup outgoing signals at the IBS and be housed in edit rooms and at certain Olympic venues for conversion of source material shot in 525.
The Alchemist Platform, an upgrade from the Alchemist Ph.C with 12-bit processing, uses phase correlation motion technology for motion processing. The Mach1 offers motion compensated algorithms.
