Development of a small-size light-weight SNG transmission system via satellites using the digital bit-reduction technology

A description is given of a small-size, light-weight SNG (satellite news gathering) transmission system developed at NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation) using digital video-audio bit-reduction technology, which can be used to transmit news from remote gathering spots to the main station (broadcasting station) immediately. The input to the equipment is the component video signal of 4:2:2 conforming to CCIR Rec. 601-1. The composite NTSC signal also may be input. The component video signal is bit-reduced to 7 Mb/s, 11 Mb/s, and 18 Mb/s, respectively, before transmission. The bit-reduction technology used in the system is the adaptive DCT (discrete cosine transformation) using a block-matched motion vector. The system's usefulness has been verified by transmission experiments via satellites.<
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