Standards Conversions

Broadcast PAL, NTSC and HD standards conversions

Our in house VT department is equipped with Snell and Willcox Alchemist PhC standards conversion, the industry leader in hardware conversions for broadcast. Many software applications now offer conversion of frame rate and resolution but nothing comes close to dedicated hardware for this task.The big failing in inferior solutions is the inability to interpolate new frames. This is required when converting from a lower framerate (eg 25 fps) to a higher one (eg 30 fps). The 5 extra frames need to be “guessed” and if this is not done correctly then jerky movement results. Going the other way can also be as problematic, but with the motion compensation of the Alchemist these artefacts are kept to a bare minimum. If your content is precious make sure you use only professional conversion to create your international versions.

We can convert from tape or from file and deliver files or tape back. This means that if you have a PAL Digi Beta for example, we can encode to NTSC MPEG2 for use in your authoring suite.
As part of our standards conversion service we also provide Aspect Ratio Conversions (ARC). If you have 16:9 content that needs to be letter boxed for delivery to legacy broadcasters then we can prepare your transmission masters.

Our service also includes HD conversions such as downscaling from 1080 50i to PAL resolutions or converting between 50i and 60i footage.

For a list of each country’s broadcast standard please see World Broadcast Standards