London-based post house, The Moving Picture Company, has ordered five Eyeheight safeEyesMDi multidefinition safe area generators for installation at its Soho headquarters.
“We are currently refurbishing our video effects suites and have opted for five of Eyeheight’s latest 1RU safeEyesMDi multidefinition cage generators in place of earlier devices from another manufacturer,” comments MPC video broadcast engineer, Tom Harvey. “We have used Eyeheight equipment for years; it is very reliable and the Eyeheight team are very co-operative.
“The Eyeheight safe area generators are the first thing the signal sees when it goes into any one of the suites,” he continues. “Their caged output is in turn connected straight into HD monitors. We are at the transition stage where SD and HD are being fed to auto-detecting devices. SafeEyesMDi auto-detects SD and HD which means we will be able to route HD and SD on a single feed. Each unit has six memory presets which can be assigned to house style or to individual users.”
Introduced at NAB 2006, Eyeheight’s safeEyesMDi multidefinition safe area generator allows programme originators and editors to ensure that titles, action, graphics, credits and other essential content are held close to the centre of the transmitted image regardless of the screen size or shape used by the programme audience. User- configurable safe-action and safe-title guides can be superimposed on the output to a preview monitor. These include short-screen and full-screen centre markers, movable horizontal and vertical cursors, edge blanking lines and an operator-definable aspect-ratio box. Preset aspect ratios for all common film and television formats down to 4:3 can be switch-selected.
Based on Eyeheight’s compact half-RU-width evolutionDT platform, safeEyesMDi automatically senses and adapts to incoming 1080i and 720p HD as well as 625i PAL and 525i NTSC SD. It can be used conveniently as a free-standing or rack-mounting instrument on location, in a mobile production vehicle, as part of an editing workstation or in a mainstream post production or playout facility. The downconverted transmission output is fully compatible with the feed from Eyeheight’s standard-definition safeEyes SDI cage.