Aberdeen Broadcast Services completes implementation of industry-leading standards conversion software Tachyon.

The quality of our client’s programs is at the forefront of everything we do at Aberdeen. Adding CinnaFilm’s Tachyon product to our digital encoding workflows means higher-quality frame-rate conversions for those requiring international delivery or a 24P adaptation for broadcast. Currently, Aberdeen encodes and delivers thousands of standards-converted programs per month to over 400 broadcast outlets all over the world. This latest technology advancement allows Aberdeen to further increase the quality of the programs we distribute.

Before we move on, we should probably explain what exactly is meant by a standards conversion. The description is that the word standard can be more easily understood as frame rate. This frame rate conversion is the process of taking a video filmed at one frame rate, say 30 frames per second, and converting it to 25 or 24 frames per second.

Why would you want to do a frame rate conversion? Well, IMHO, no one really wants to do this sort of alteration as it takes away detail and cadence from the intended “look.” However, when delivering content to other countries for television broadcast, certain standards are in place. Standard, in this case, refers to the geographically imposed frame rate dictated by a country's power system and the conversion is the change of that frame rate to the new time base.

Before we made the clear decision to go with Tachyon, we had to explore what features/technology it utilizes to produce a higher quality conversion over the other leading software converters. Tachyon has the ability to synthesize new frames using motion compensation, along with special and temporal noise reduction, cadence error correction, and interlace re-scaling make up the majority of where the magic happens. The results of using Tachyon were an obvious increase in motion smoothness, image sharpness, and noise reduction in the Tachyon converted video over the other, more elementary, systems of software that typically use a method of cadenced frame blending.

Tachyon’s patented GPU-based algorithms are the broadcast industry’s highest-quality frame rate conversion software. When we first saw the side-by-side tests we could not wait to adopt and roll out such a quality-enhancing product for our clients and stations. We are extremely excited to implement this addition to our client’s workflows.