The EBU Technical Committee, chaired by Alberto Morello (picture), met in Geneva this week. It had a large range of issues on its plate. One of them was to analyse the results of a series of tests made of the latest production formats and equipment for high-definition television production.
Good and bad news
The good news is that the new systems produce excellent results, certainly better than the first generations of HDTV production equipment. The bad news is that there is massive fragmentation of systems by different manufacturers.
Today, a professional HDTV programme can be made in any of over 40 different capture/recording formats, and converting between them always has shortcomings.
Thirty years ago, EBU Members refused to buy any 1" analogue tape recorders until manufacturers had agreed on a single standard, which they did. It really is a long way from tape to here...
More information
For more information on EBU's recent HDTV test results, please go to the Publications Library, filter by 'HDTV' and select 2009 or 2008 as the year of publication. Please note that you will have to log in as an EBU Member to see restricted publications, such as BPNs. To learn more about how the EBU helps interoperability and standardisation, please contact EBU Program Managers Dr Hans Hoffmann or Peter MacAvock.