Video Production
Video production equipment is used in television stations, cable, terrestrial and satellite plants, within electronic news gathering vans, and in film and advertisement production environments. Production equipment includes video switchers, routers, and servers, professional video cameras and monitors, videotape recorders (VTRs) and disk recorders (VDRs), editors, and compression equipment.
Studios typically are equipped with means to receive global and local feeds. They also include production equipment for capturing live programming within the studio. The content from the feeds are stored and served for post production involving editing and adding audio visual effects. Finally, a master control room, used to control and monitor the signal sent to cable operators. Within the production environment, video and audio data are primarily transported in uncompressed format using the serial digital interface (SDI) standard defined by the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE). This equipment can support standard-definition (SD) digital video formats, high-definition (HD) digital video formats, or both and uses a 75-ohm connection. SD video is transmitted at SDI rates of 270, 360, or 540 Mbps; HD video is transmitted at the SDI rate of 1.485 Gbps. Recently, a new SMPTE standard was ratified to support 2.97-Gbps data rate that enables higher resolutions such as 1080p (full HD). With its superior visual quality, full HD video represents the future of digital video broadcasting. As a result, there is an increasing need for hardware that can handle the larger data throughput required when transmitting full HD video. Figure 1 highlights the equipment used in a typical video production setting.
Figure 1. Typical Video Production Environment
Altera Programmable Solutions for Video Production Equipment
The feature-rich architecture of Altera’s Stratix® II GX and ArriaTM GX device families provides an excellent solution for digital video production equipment. The Stratix II GX and Arria GX families include up to 20 high-speed transceivers that can run up to 6.375 Gbps, high-performance digital signal processing (DSP) blocks, up to 6.7 Mbits of embedded TriMatrix memory, and up to equivalent 130K logic elements (LEs). Both the device families support SDI protocol and are characterized across process, voltage and temperature. The Stratix III architecture includes high-performance digital signal processing (DSP) blocks, up to 16 Mbits of embedded TriMatrix memory, up to 340K equivalent LEs, and flexible I/O standards. These devices are ideal for enabling 1080p video and image processing functions.
Along with feature-rich devices, Altera also offers reference designs and intellectual property (IP) for implementing standard video processing and compression functions. These solutions provide flexibility, performance, integration, and design resources that are not available in any other solution.
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