The VC-300 converts nine live broadcast feeds to HD and SD signals for CTV.

Introduction
Tom Bradbury is the Director of Production Engineering at CTV in Toronto. CTV headquarters based in Toronto, Canada’s largest private broadcaster, offers 34 channels including a wide range of quality news, sports, information, and entertainment programming. Some programming includes Discover HD, TSN (Total Sports Network), and 30 channels of local broadcasting across Canada.

The System
CTV used the VC-300HD to convert nine live broadcast feeds to HD and SD signals from live concert venues from around the world. The main broadcast feeds were coming in HD-SDI and converted to various HD signals and SD signals depending on the local affiliate broadcast format. “The VC-300HD is the only box that can do a cross-conversion and SD output simultaneously. It was a savior for our project”, said Tom Bradbury. They VC300HD converted the live broadcast feeds for over 29 hours straight without any glitches or hang-ups.

The VC 300HD uses high quality A/D and D/A converters for input and output along with internal 4:4:4 10 bit signal processing delivering professional results. Bradbury exclaims, “We were very impressed with the VC-300HD signal quality of HD as it was the main HD signal on air. The VC-300HD is invaluable and we were very happy with the results if you compare similar boxes at 15 times the price.”

The VC-300HD is very versatile with bi-directional conversion and scaling. Multiple resolutions like 480i/p, 720p or 1080i can be input/output along with NTSC/PAL conversions. Because of the versatility of the VC-300HD it also allows CTV to take broadcast feeds and off air content from other countries in PAL formats and convert to NTSC and to the various HDV frame rate formats.