The SM03 is a pre-processor for analogue composite video input sources, (e.g. NTSC, PAL or SECAM).

With the analogue transmission switch-off either progressing or completed in many countries today’s preferred medium transmission is digital, e.g. DVB-T, DVB-C, DVB-S or IPTV. However the source material in a lot of cases in still analogue, e.g. NTSC or PAL.

The MPEG compression that is used for digital transmission standards demands very high quality sources else it will, itself, generate noticeably worse digital artifacts such as blocking or speckle noise, especially if the compression ratio is high.

The problem arises because MPEG compression looks for motion in video images, effectively sending only image differences between subsequent frames. Unfortunately noise and motion have very similar characteristics and the MPEG encoder cannot distinguish between them; valuable transmission bandwidth is therefore used just to transmit noise requiring a wider transmission bandwidth to achieve acceptable image quality. The SM03 is designed to remove the noise freeing up the transmission bandwidth for the broadcaster to add additional channels or services and for a better viewer experience.

A similar issue arises with large flat panel displays when displaying analogue sources. Artifacts caused by poor decoding of the composite video source become very visible on a large screen display and these artifacts and noise are also magnified by the display’s requirement to de-interlace the video source, a technique which also requires detection of video motion and is therefore adversely affected by noise in the image.

The SM03 provides three basic techniques to optimize the analogue video source. The first of these is the provision of a very high quality video decoder. The function of the video decoder is to separate the composite video into its component parts, basically the brightness component, the luma, and the colour component, the chroma. Most MPEG encoders have an inbuilt video decoder but most also actually produce artifacts that are latterly very difficult if not impossible to detect and remove. For example you may have noticed on certain black and white check suits and clothes that a shimmering colour appears. This noise component is actually generated by the video decoder and of course uses up transmission bandwidth. The SM03 video decoder is virtually artifact free. In addition an adaptive notch filter can also be used to further reduce residual cross colour components.

Secondly noise in the signal is reduced using a motion adaptive recursive video noise reducer. The noise reducer has been optimized over many hours of viewing of video images and provides an ideal compromise between motion blurring and effective noise reduction. The noise reducer is ideal for removing video tape noise, film grain noise or transmission noise. A set of additional low pass filters may also be used to further reduce noise and transmission bandwidth requirements for highly compressed transmissions allowing the broadcaster to optimize his bit rate.

Thirdly the SM03 has a full frame synchronizer that reduces line to line jitter in the original image and can remove horizontal ‘tearing’ from video tape sources or other mechanically scanned sources such as laserdisc.

The suite of features offered by the SM03 presents the MPEG compressor or flat screen display processor with a pristine, artifact and noise free video source allowing higher degrees of compression for the same image quality. By preserving as much of the original image as possible the SM03 allows the display of standard definition images on large screen displays with the optimum image quality possible.

SM03 provides completely automatic control of the image source material but the user can also override this and optimize the image manually. Two control setting memories are provided to aid this which may be locked to each of the two composite inputs.

M03 accepts 2 selectable composite inputs and provides YPbPr analogue component and serial digital (SDI) outputs. SM03 is provided in a compact case measuring just 230x160x55mm and with an intuitive user control and a 3 year no-quibble guarantee.