CATEGORY: Video Duplication

The importance of “house reference”

If you’ve played piano, you are proably familiar with the metronome.

Or perhaps you have played in a rock band, you’ve realized first hand the value of a good drummer.

Or maybe you’ve worked on your car.  You are likely well aware of the importance of the timing belt.

In any of those cases,  if you lose the “sync,” things start falling apart.

Same in video . . .

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Some further answers on delivering video around the globe . . .

A client of mine shot me an e-mail recently with a couple of questions regarding video deliverables and standards conversion.

All excellent questions, and I thought I’d share some of my answers with you.

First, let me restate that one of our main services here at Video Labs www.VideoLabs.net is indeed standards conversion. 

Here is my quick-read blog about our high-end SD converter, the Alchemist Ph.C: http://tinyurl.com/6egswq

However, except for vhs, we do not do SECAM.  In my 3+ years here at Video Labs, I have yet to fulfill an order for SECAM.

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Closed captions for HDV?

Hmmm, I received a call about this the other day.  You may have read my blog about how we here at Video Labs are now offering HD closed-captioning services  and we are doing so for HDCAM 1080 masters.  But this was the first inquiry I received regarding cc-encoding for HDV. (further info about HDV format).

Well, our Video Labs engineer, Rodney Hammond, and I both set off to research that.  Rodney talked to Sony, and I searched the web.  Our conclusion: we are convinced that the answer is that the HDV format does not support closed-captioning.

But you may ask, “Well, wait minute, miniDV can carry that info, why not HDV?”

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HD closed-captioning

We here at Video Labs www.VideoLabs.net have now added HD closed-captioning to our menu of services.

Standard EIA-608 (EIA = Electronics Industries Association) is the techical name given to the format that we have all come to associate with closed-captioning over the years.  You know, those white block letters within a black box.  

 If you work in television, you may also know that the 608 captioning information is carried in the vetical interval part of the video signal, on line 21 to be exact.  (You can see the white line data if you have the ability to underscan the monitor screen.)

But there is no Line 21 in digital television (of which HDTV is part of).  Instead, captions are put into a data stream with the digtal signal.  And that data set is called EIA-708 captions.

708 captions offer various fonts, letter colors and a range of option for backgrounds among other features.  But in reality, today’s 708 captions are basically upconverted 608 captions limited to the 32 characters per line standard of 608. 

Now a digital TV user may be able to utilize some of the 708 advantages with that upconverted 608 signal, but as you can imagine, there is a lot more to 708 digital captioning heading our way down the road than exists now.

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