Comments

farss wrote on 6/17/2012, 3:16 AM
The Terrenex which is now a Black Magic Design product has an extremely good wrap. The price has also dropped dramatically.

Terrenex Upscaling

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One thing worth mentiong.
From my experience the results you get from upscaling can very much depend on what you feed into the scaler....even when using composite video as the input to the scaler.
Taking composite into our LG HDTV from a very good DigiBetacam tape via composite it looks pretty decent, certainly better than the composite video out of our PD170 going the same route.
Then there's the quality of the video connection. Composite video is very sad when it comes to chroma sampling and it does show quite noticeably. Almost all our OTA broadcasters are still transmitting 576i. It looks remarkably good, way better than feeding much the same content via composite. The OTA transmission is 4:2:2, the SD composite is more like 3:0:0, yuck.

So first thing. If your HDTVs in the venue are looking sad when fed SD first thing I'd spend some money on is making sure you're feeding them the best possible signal, HDTVs seem to do a pretty decent job of upscaling these days. I've no doubt a box such as the Terrenex will do a better job howeve your money might be better spent getting the best possible SD signal to the HDTVs in the first place.

I'm also guessing you've got a vision switcher between your cameras and the HDTVs. The older mixers such as the MX50 are really not very good. My understanding is they only used one field and quality goes down as the signal goes through them as a result. Probably acceptable for SD on a budget but not good if you're upscaling that to HD as half the vertical resolution is lost in the mixer.

Bob.
RalphM wrote on 6/17/2012, 9:35 PM
Thanks Bob,

I'm starting from scratch with just a SD camera. The displays (70" TVs) will be in next week, so I'll get a chance to test with them before they are put in service. The Black Magic Design product looks interesting, but may be a bit above our budget. I've even thought of a low end AV receiver with upscaling to provide the HDMI output.

There is no switching involved, just single source distributed to multiple sets.

Ralph
John_Cline wrote on 6/17/2012, 10:40 PM
It would probably be cheaper and much higher quality just to get an HD camera in the first place. Upscaled SD to a 70" TV is going to look sub-par no matter what. Is there any special capability of the SD camera that requires you to use it?
farss wrote on 6/18/2012, 2:40 AM
"There is no switching involved, just single source distributed to multiple sets."

Oh well there's a problem for starters.
You'll need a distrubution amplifier of some kind and for HD and longish cable runs that'll probably mean HD-SDI, that alone is not cheap. I know there are other ways that might be a bit cheaper but really I think you're much better off talking to a company that specialising in solving these kinds of problems as a packaged deal that'll provide some form of warranty regarding the results.
One of the big churches I work in from time to time has something like what I think you're after and it works very well but it looks like it was all done as a packaged deal with a Sony fixed camera, lighting etc, etc.

Bob.
RalphM wrote on 6/18/2012, 7:19 AM
Thanks Bob and John,
As with most churches this is also constrained by finances. I'll do some testing with one of my personal HD cameras vs the SD camera that the church owns and see how things look. It's also complicated by a live streaming video requirement that must be at a resolution that can accomodate the capabilities of the end viewer.

I'll be off the grid for a few days...

Thanks,
Ralph