Snell will offer 1080p functionality at no additional charge

Starting this year, Snell will offer 1080p processing on its 1080p-capable solutions, as well as future variants, at no additional cost. This will enable Snell customers to benefit from inherent image quality in a cost-effective 1080p production environment.

In order to facilitate the migration to progressive workflows, Snell has announced today that it will offer 1080p functionalities, free of charge, in all its 1080p-capable solutions, thus eliminating one of the great barriers to the adoption of 3 Gbps equipment: its additional cost.

Robert Rowe, CTO of Snell, said: “Snell has helped drive the global transition from SDTV to HDTV, and now we are once again facilitating the transition to 1080p production and distribution because we believe now is the right time, from a technology and cost perspective, as the industry moves away from interlaced formats.”

"Despite the clear benefits of a full 1080p production environment, the perception is that this measure is cost prohibitive due to storage costs and 3Gbps processing. Our research, and that of relevant bodies such as the European Broadcasting Union, clearly demonstrate that compressed progressive signals offer higher quality, with the same file size as their interlaced equivalent, thus disproving the idea that 1080p content requires twice the capacity. Additionally, our decision to eliminate any additional burden for 1080p processing on Snell products addresses concerns about any cost overruns in a 3Gbps processing environment.”

Benefits of 1080p Workflows

In Snell's view, a 1080p production workflow provides significant benefits in terms of image quality and format interoperability. In addition, it often eliminates the conversion between interlaced and progressive formats since images are processed on different types of equipment in the content creation process.

Deinterlacing and re-interlacing of content not only causes image degradation, but also introduces additional workflow complexity, timing, and interoperability issues. The 1080p format offers the best of current high definition formats, providing both the spatial resolution of 1080i formats and the temporal resolution of 720p formats. When used as a capture and production format, 1080p makes it easy to extract 1080i and 720p versions of programming content from a common master with higher quality and fewer defects.

Snell 1080p Products

Many Snell products currently operate internally with the 3Gbps bandwidth required for 1080p formats, including the Kahuna range of production switchers, Sirus routing matrices, and Alchemist Ph.C-HD frame rate converters, KudosPro processors and its IQ modular solutions.

Starting this year, Snell will offer 1080p processing on its 1080p-capable solutions, as well as future variants, at no additional cost. In this way, Snell customers will be able to benefit from inherent image quality in a cost-effective 1080p production environment, while ensuring higher quality results in a variety of distribution formats.