Friday, September 15, 2006

HD at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics

A while ago I remembered the first HD job I was involved with in 1994 - I came across this interesting PDF showing that there was full HD coverage of the 1992 games and even delivery to many (possible!) viewers using the HD-Mac transmission standard. I did monkey around with C/D/D2 Mac at the time and was amazed when I read the spec for HDMac - it allowed up to 1250 line signals that could be switched on the fly - frame to frame - so that when a 720 line (for example) fifty-fields interlaced sports programme went to the slow-mo it could up-res to >2k but at a lower frame rate (typ. 12.5 fps).
But, the really clever feature was that this was all compatible with the SD standard D2 Mac signal (the one which the origional BSB system used before Sky bought them out and reverted all broadcasts to PAL). So a broadcaster could send the 36Mhz signal at whatever resolution/framerate he wanted and be assured that all viewers could watch it. The page on Wikipedia is a good starting point.

No comments: