Pro-Bel Assists Fox For NFL’s London Debut

Technology from Pro-Bel has contributed to the success of Fox Sport’s coverage of the first regular-season NFL game to be played outside North America.


Fox Sports required HD Standards conversion to be able to convert the first ever NFL regular season football game between the Miami Dolphins and the NY Giants held at Wembley Stadium, London, to US audiences in October.
Fox produced the game in 720p50 with everything Fox Sports brings to its coverage of the NFL including the 1st and 10 line, Fox Box graphics, HD slow motion replays and 5.1 surround sound. Fox relied on Pro-Bel’s Cifer HD Motion Compensated Standards Converter to frame convert the 720p50 program as produced at Wembley to 720p59.94 for distribution to the Fox HD affiliate stations in the US.

 Fox Sports took delivery of three Cifers, one used in London and two at the Fox Network Operations Center in Los Angeles. This allowed signal conversion from 720p50 to 720p59.94 to be carried out in either the UK or the USA and provided Fox with multiple levels of redundancy.


“With all of the challenges of doing a NFL production overseas,” said Fox’s Senior VP and Principal Engineer Digital Television Technologies and Standards, Jim DeFilippis, “We are pleased that not only was there a full complement of equipment capable of 720p50 but that Pro-Bel’s Cifer performed its job such that the final result was as if we had produced the game in native 720p60.”


Cifer, developed in conjunction with Digital Vision, is designed to meet all of today’s multi-format, multi-resolution conversion requirements. It incorporates Advanced Sub-Pixel Motion Compensation, a proprietary motion estimation technique that delivers outstanding picture quality. Cifer can convert between any SD standard and between the primary HD standards. It can also convert from SD to HD and HD to SD with the resulting pictures virtually indistinguishable from the original. It performs particularly well with pictures involving a high degree of motion, such as sport.


Neil Maycock, President, Pro-Bel Americas, concluded, “When it comes to sport coverage, Fox Sports knows what it’s talking about, and we are extremely proud to have been selected to help with this project. Cifer is a market-leading product, and we have absolute confidence in its ability to out-perform anything else on the market.”
(SP)