Optimizing Analog Signals For the Smooth Transition to DTV


Speaker: Virgil Lowe, Founder, President and CTO of Fortel DTV
 

Date & Time: Thursday, 19 June 2003

Meeting organizer: Howard Kirsch
 

Program:

As broadcasters and the viewing public move from analog to digital transmitters and receivers, and TV screens continue to increase in size, problems in picture quality that were masked by the composite TV system will now become highly visible. Viewers will be able to see the difference between digitally originated programs, and those decoded from composite recording if the luma/chroma separation is handled poorly. Additionally, pre-processing of video becomes very important when converting to an MPEG stream or up converting to an HDTV signal. Major advances in comb filter techniques and signal processing have been made over the past couple of years that have helped broadcasters produce cleaner, artifact free signals from the analog to the digital domain. Virgil will speak about the problems with composite to digital conversion, and strategies for solving them.

Join us as we look into the problems and strategies of video ADCing in a digital studio environment.

Vigil Lowe has been a pioneer in video technology for nearly 40 years. Starting as an engineer at Ampex in 1965, Lowe did QC on the VR-2000 series quad machines. He founded Edutron/Fortel in 1976, and designed the first CCD Time Base Corrector as well as the first dub mode TBC, the Y-688. His work with TBC's continued as he developed the first component mode TBC and video proc for RCA's Hawkeye/M1 camcorder. He went on to design the first S-VHS TBC for Panasonic as well as the Microtime's FS-10 synchronizer. More recently he designed one of the first MPEG 1 and MPEG 2 decoders and encoders for Wegener and Comsat. In 1998 he started Fortel DTV and was the architect of the first advanced 3D comb filter, and at this year's NAB unveiled his design of the Quadra Comb 4D comb filter.

Virgil holds 12 patents with three more pending. He has served on several SMPTE committees including component video formats and is currently the CTO of Fortel DTV.
 

Backgound info for tonight's meeting: www.forteldtv.com/technology_wp.asp
 

Welcome:

SMPTEsf  welcomes members and friends to attend without charge. Reservations are not required for this meeting.

Location:

Tech TV
535 York St.
San Francisco, CA
 
 

Tech TV, 535 York St., San Francisco, CA

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