ABSTRACT
Standards conversion is the process of taking one television system and converting to another television system. The classical standards converter came into being for international programme exchange where conversion was performed between NTSC and PAL/SECAM and the reverse. Today the need for standards conversion is even greater with the uptake of high-definition (HD) formats for both capture and broadcast. The proliferation of standards has led to a requirement for converters that can interface between different HD standards and standard-definition (SD) standards. The most challenging standards conversion process is where
there is a field rate change, for example changing from NTSC to PAL, where NTSC is at 60Hz and PAL is at 50Hz. The field rate conversion will be the main focus of this chapter. Colour encoding systems, such as NTSC and SECAM, will not be covered; it is assumed that all signals are in digital component form. The goal with standards conversion is to produce a trans-
parent representation of the input. Today’s high-end motioncompensated converters achieve this, but this has not always been the case.
