Advanced Yet Cost-Effective Quality Assurance and Compact Motion- Compensated Conversion Systems Ease Burden of Delivering Quality Broadcast Content
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HAMPSHIRE, U.K. — Sept. 23, 2008 — Snell & Wilcox came away from IBC2008 with two of the show's coveted Broadcast Engineering Pick Hit awards, one honoring the company's QC Station automated quality assurance system and the other recognizing the new Mach HD HD/SD motion-compensated standards converter. The Pick Hit awards, the longest-running technical awards in the industry, are selected by readers of Broadcast Engineering World Edition magazine and working professionals in the broadcast, post, and network and satellite industries.
Products that earn the Broadcast Engineering Pick Hit award are judged to have a positive impact on the intended user's everyday work, offer substantial improvement over previous technology, and feature a price point within the reach of the intended users.
QC Station's sophisticated and highly automated monitoring capabilities ease the burden of performing quality assurance during ingest and playout, while Mach HD provides flexible, high-quality conversion that supports a smooth transition to HD in applications ranging from newsgathering, outside broadcasting, and mobile operations to dubbing and teleport/satellite operations.
"Broadcasters today face tremendous demands with respect to maintaining the quality of content as it is prepared for delivery, whether to other media companies or to the viewer at home, and our QC Station and Mach HD serve as reliable and economical tools that simplify this process," said Joe Zaller, vice president, corporate development, Snell & Wilcox. "We're honored that the performance and utility of these new products have been recognized with this prestigious award, conferred by professionals working in the broadcast industry."
About QC Station
QC Station is an automated quality assurance system that leverages the intuitive algorithms of the company's advanced Hyperion content monitoring technology to provide alarms and on-screen display of faults or anomalies in audio, video, and metadata. A stand-alone system that can be incorporated easily into any type of system infrastructure, QC Station significantly reduces the burden of quality assurance in ingest and playout applications and streamlines distributed operations by enabling remote monitoring from a centralized location.
By monitoring content quality and makeup according to specific content and branding profiles, QC Station allows quality assurance staff to do more with less. Operators can handle additional video screens, oversee reliable ingest of more content, or manage monitoring of remote playout. In addition to providing sophisticated audio and video monitoring, the system features built-in metadata analysis that is valuable in ensuring compliance with the program schedule and with advertiser requirements.
About Mach HD
Mach HD is a compact, low-cost motion-compensated HD and SD standards converter and format converter with synchronization capability. It offers multi-rate HD/SD inputs and outputs and is capable of providing upconversion, downconversion, and crossconversion both within and between frame rates. In addition to motion-compensated conversion capabilities, the Mach HD handles embedded AES (balanced and unbalanced) and analog audio and offers a range of additional features such as aspect ratio conversion and colorspace conversion. The Mach HD has dual redundant PSU capability and is provided in a single-RU housing with remote control capability via Ethernet.
