Henninger delivers high-quality HD onlines with Snell & Wilcox

Henninger Media Services is using the Snell & Wilcox Ukon universal conversion platform in a virtual telecine environment to maximise the use of video content by allowing SD footage captured over the course of HD productions to be integrated seamlessly into the final product.
The Mid-Atlantic's leading creative communications company, Henninger has installed the Ukon in its multi-standard finishing suite along with a da Vinci 2K colour correction system to deliver high-quality HD onlines to clients such as Discovery Channel and A&E's History Channel in the broadcast sector, as well as corporate and independent production companies.
Ukon enables engineers at Henninger to bring SD footage into HD for editing and colour correction and to convert media across HD formats for delivery in the appropriate HD format. This capability allows Henninger and its clients to bring useful footage captured alongside HD recording - a 'B' roll shot in DV, for example, that previously may have been discarded - into the final HD broadcast product at a very high quality.
"We use our extensive in-house resources to deliver concept-through-delivery solutions for all forms of electronic media, and we selected the Ukon for our conversion suite because it's the best converter available today," said Sam Crawford, chief engineer for Henninger's Arlington, Va., facility. "It understands every HD format out there and has a setting for each one. Because it recognises different formats and can tell the difference between interlaced and progressive, Ukon is able to identify exactly the right kind of processing to get the best conversion."
Ukon can be configured to provide upconversion, downconversion, and crossconversion (SD-to-SD or HD-to-HD) either singly or in any combination. The system handles different frame rates, image sizes, and aspect ratios, as well as AES and compressed audio formats. Because it also carries out time-code conversion from any SD or HD format to any HD or SD format with exact frame mapping, Ukon is ideally suited for applications in which precise lip-sync and time-code integrity are important considerations.
"The settings for this box accommodate so many formats; Snell & Wilcox didn't leave anything out," added Crawford. "The Ukon handles the whole video stream and everything involved with it. It does an unbelievable job of upconverting to HD, and as a result we can leverage both clients' SD and HD media resources - without compromising quality - to produce a more complete broadcast product."
(GB)