Video Clarity at NAB 2010

Here we go, again. The NCAA men's and women's college basketball tournaments are down to the Final 4. The first quarter has seen monumental growth in most of the world's stock markets. The US has passed historic health care. And, Video Clarity is getting ready for NAB. If you have not already done so, please mark your calendars and come and see our new offerings in booth SU5703. Click for a free pass.

As many of you know, we have been working on a new product called RTM for over 1 year. It has been passed all of its beta trials and we will list some very nice case uses briefly below.

RTM analyzes and continually aligns 2 live feeds. This means that it can be placed between any 2 points in the process flow (or network operation center). For example before and after the MPEG encoder.
It measures (and reports in a log file) the A/V quality. It computes the difference between the 2 inputs now that they are aligned.
It measures (and reports in a log file) the audio and video delay between the 2 live feeds. In theory the audio and video delays should be the same to keep the lips aligned with the voice (lip-sync), but often it is not the case since the processing for audio and video is done by different devices.
It looks at each VANC line and compares the 2 live feeds line-by-line. If any line is different, then the processing changed the original VANC attributes. This may be expected and may not be based on the process flow.
RTM generates alarms if any of the above measurements are outside of the expected value. The alarms include audio beeps, SNMP traps, log files, or flashes on the front panel.

Since a picture is worth a 1000 words, below is a basic drawing


If you are a broadcast or cable network, RTM helps you to diagnose different areas across your network non-intrusively. It finds areas with degraded quality. After improvements are made, rerun the test to confirm.
It can also be used to help the operator who is monitoring the on-air programming. It confirms issues that they see and it alerts on issues that were missed. RTM never gets tired or distracted. It just works!

If you are a manufacturer, RTM is great for long duration testing. It finds problems that do not occur until the machine has been in operational use for 4 days and since it records the A/V sequence before and after the error is found, you can perform a deep analysis of the error using a picture quality analyzer like ClearView.

Maintaining video quality throughout the transmission path requires due dilligence. We are excited with the launch of RTM, we hope to see you at NAB, and if you cannot make, then call us for a demonstration.

Thank you for your continuing support and encouragement.