ST. LOUIS—KMOV-TV Channel 4 is a CBS affiliate broadcasting from the Gateway Tower on Memorial Drive in downtown St. Louis. We cover international, national and local news, along with sports, weather and traffic broadcasts in SD and HD, and we provide a vital source of information for rush-hour commuters on “News 4 This Morning.”
Recently we needed to find a device that could convert the output from our traffic data computer into a signal we could feed to our video switcher to air live during newscasts. The system developers selected Matrox Convert DVI Plus for the task because we had used Matrox products previously and never encountered any problems.
Matrox Convert DVI Plus aids KMOV’s rush hour coverage.GETTING THE CONTENT ON-AIR
In our current production workflow, we use Matrox Convert DVI Plus to broadcast footage from remote traffic cameras in live, on-air traffic reports. Using a traffic computer, we access video feeds from cameras located at main arteries around the city and our Convert DVI Plus converts the computer’s DVI signal to SDI. Since the Convert DVI output conforms to SMPTE 292M specs, it ensures we get a pristine and jitter- free signal with our 1855a coax cabling running a distance of 100 feet to our video router.
Given that the computer feed needs to be synchronized with all our other audio and video sources, we have taken advantage of the device’s genlock feature, which uses horizontal and vertical timing offset controls to ensure the broadcast switch is seamless. We are also pleased Convert DVI Plus has the Region-of-Interest (ROI) feature, which lets us highlight maps of traffic congestion displayed on the computer screen and crop out all other content found on the webpage. The Region-of-Interest scaling options let us upscale the selected content to match the broadcast resolution of our production.
SEAMLESS RESULTS
Since adding Matrox Convert DVI Plus to our production workflow, we have overcome limitations experienced with previous devices. We have also taken advantage of the ROI presets to save time, by setting coordinates for the ROI of an individual website and then using the saved preset for all future broadcasts. The converter’s real-time 10-bit multitap upscaler, built-in RGB-to-YUV color space conversion, flexible aspect ratio conversion and convenient proc amp controls give us the flexibility to seamlessly match the video quality of our traffic camera segment with the rest of our news production.
With Convert DVI Plus, we’re confident when a traffic report goes on-air that viewers will get a high quality newscast—a better broadcast for a better commute. David Collins is a broadcast engineer at KMOV-TV and has been at the station for more than 13 years. He can be contacted atDave.collins@kmov.comor call 314-444-6391.
For more information, please visitwww.matrox.comor call 514-822-6000.
