Calibre UK has announced that a massive installation of its FoveaHD motion estimated and motion compensated standards converter will beused for frame rate conversion of live footage for transmission to viewers in countries with 50Hz television standards throughout the highly anticipated world cup Brazil matches during Summer 2014.
“Brazil uses 59.94Hz TV standards but the vast majority of football and soccer nations watch 50Hz television,” said Tim Brooksbank, Chairman and CEO at Calibre UK. “This poses a huge challenge for broadcast of this live content as frame rate conversion of fast moving sports events is particularly challenging.”
“Fast live action sports, especially with long camera pans combined with many moving objects each with complex detail motion can be totally unsuitable for conversion using linear techniques which lead to either substantial motion smear, motion judder, or both.”
Frame rate conversion is notoriously hard to get right with less than a handful of companies offering high-end solutions. Most high-end solutions are prohibitively expensive for many studios and even large broadcasters would find the cost of such a large installation as is needed for the world cup to be eye-wateringly high, but lower cost solutions generallydon’t perform well, especially on challenging content. Football and soccer is particularly difficult to process well.
