01-02-2021, 12:44 PM
To operate a TV studio in SECAM was a nightmare. You could cut between cameras but a simple fade or mix was horrendous. At Cox we made SECAM mixers, for the few masochists, usually from Eastern Europe, who wanted the ideological "purity" of full SECAM.
As well as the direct path through the vision mixer you had an alternative route. A partial decoder demodulated the alternating Dr/Db chroma and brutally filtered off the Y signal. Twin video paths allowed you to mix, fade etc the signal. Then through a partial encoder to get back to SECAM. As the fader came off the endstop the picture quality would visibly change to soft and horrible. Jumping back to normal as you got to the other end.
The French soon realised that you produced in PAL and transcoded to SECAM before sending to the transmitters. As I said earlier, they were very enthusiastic about analogue components, made possible by the first Betacam professional VCRs. The fact you needed 3 times the amount of kit to switch, fade, mix the YCbCr signals was just a fact of life until digits arrived.
As well as the direct path through the vision mixer you had an alternative route. A partial decoder demodulated the alternating Dr/Db chroma and brutally filtered off the Y signal. Twin video paths allowed you to mix, fade etc the signal. Then through a partial encoder to get back to SECAM. As the fader came off the endstop the picture quality would visibly change to soft and horrible. Jumping back to normal as you got to the other end.
The French soon realised that you produced in PAL and transcoded to SECAM before sending to the transmitters. As I said earlier, they were very enthusiastic about analogue components, made possible by the first Betacam professional VCRs. The fact you needed 3 times the amount of kit to switch, fade, mix the YCbCr signals was just a fact of life until digits arrived.
www.borinsky.co.uk Jeffrey Borinsky www.becg.tv