Ascent Media opt for Snell & Wilcox Alchemist Platinum

Ascent Media will maintain the highest picture quality in Asia with the help of a set of top-of-the-line Snell & Wilcox Alchemist Platinum Ph.C standards converters.
Delivered by Electro-Acoustics Systems, these converters are the first of their kind to be used in Southeast Asia.
Tan Yee Tiang, vice president, operations and engineering, Ascent Media, emphasised the importance of maintaining excellent picture quality throughout the transmission process. "Providing premiere-quality, fast-motion content such as sports presents a particular standards conversion challenge," Ms. Tan said. "We have chosen Snell & Wilcox's Alchemist Platinum as it is able to meet our stringent evaluation criteria."
The Alchemist Platinum Ph.C uses motion compensation technology to deliver high quality even with demanding content such as wildlife action scenes, slow motion, and fast-moving images together with camera panning.
Mark Parlett, managing director, Snell & Wilcox Asia Pacific Limited, said: "The Alchemist Platinum is absolutely the best standards converter on the market and motion compensation technology is what makes it possible. Whether viewers are watching a cheetah chase a gazelle or a motorcycle jumping over a truck, they want to see the footage exactly as the camera has captured it, no matter what the source. That demands phase correlation motion compensation."
Transparent conversion is achieved using a three-stage, 46-point temporal spatial filter. Internal processing is performed at 4:4:4 resolution and at a minimum of 12-bit precision.
In Singapore, Ascent Media has also purchased two Kudos Plus CVR 550 standards converters from Snell & Wilcox. These converters provide four-field, four-line standards conversion in a compact 1RU size.
The Kudos Plus CVR 550 is designed for a wide range of applications, including mobile applications, news, and transmission.
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