Production Switchers

I am the senior director at an NBC affiliate . . .we ran into a problem last night with the smart conversion. Normally, we stick to 4 main routers . . 2 are up converted and 2 are HD, of the 2 up converted 1 is 16x9 480i and the 2nd router is 480i (4x3) . . .because of some odd things with the elections we had to satellite shots that were sd so we need to up convert them for air . . we switched the 2nd router to 16x9 480i and once we did that we could no longer go from router 1 to router 2. The switcher wouldn't even let us preview it and this message popped up: "There are no free video format converters." My question is why would changing 480i and 480i 16x9 cause this problem? The conversion is the same right? . . essentially we were just stretching the video.

The issue you have is that one of the converters is setup for a 480i to 1080i path and the other is setup as a 480i16x9 to 1080i path. Since it is not known how you have the conversion setup on the cards (could be that you do Wings insertion or a Scale/Crop) the system is being told what path ways it is to use for the different format choices.

Basically the other path would have to be re-assigned in the configuration menu from a 4x3 path to a 16x9 path. It would also be easier if you were to have 2 paths of EACH that way you would not encounter this error again.

Les

#Vision

I am, having a Smart converter problem as well. The converter seems to underscan sources brought into them. By underscan I mean when it calles up an SD ENG microwave shot, the smart converter will take the SD signal and upconvert it and strech it to 16x9. The top of the video signal. maybe 15 or 20 lines is black. I notive it when the video is Full screen. However when you put it in a split box it is very noticable.

The weird part is every so often it is not underscanned and teh video fills the screen compleatly. All of our converters are set the same and I can not tell that it is one certian smart converter acting differently than the others.

Any thoughts?

#Vision

Hi Tom,

There has to be a setting that is different on a specific converter.

What you can do is when you create the issue at hand -- go into the Installation-Aux Bus-Smart Conversion Menu then select the In Use button and you will be able to see what converter the source in issue is going into -- you can then go and tweak it. The other problem you could have is that if they are set to automatic and are following a Flag in the the Video this could be telling the converter to do the wrong thing.

Les

#Vision

We ran into those problems as well . . . it flagged wrong because the eng truck was trying to stretch the video . . . not realizing that we would also be stretching the video but it caused weird things through the router. Luckily, our eng's are now HD . . . so no more problems with live shots. Another problem we ran into was through our router system you can have something automatically upconvert . . but if you are upconverting through the switcher as well that causes problems too.

Anyway, just trying to help you track down possible solutions.

#Vision