Genesis Taps Pro-Bel Cifer For Tennis Coverage

Genesis Networks recently enlisted seven Pro-Bel Cifers during the recent French Open and Wimbledon tennis tournaments.

Dan Brenneman, director of engineering at Genesis, was impressed with the both Pro-Bel’s fast response time and also the ability of the Cifer to handle scenes involving fast motion.

“We used four Cifers for HD frame rate conversion and three for SD standards conversion with motion compensation and the Cifers provided the video conversion required for distribution in the USA,” Brenneman said. “Pro-Bel was able to supply the HD units in a very tight time frame to meet our on-air dates and also came through with the SD units as a last-minute requirement. The Cifers performed very well, especially given that tennis can stress conversion equipment due to the speed of the ball.”

Pro-Bel partnered with Digital Vision to develop the Cifer product, which can accommodate both up and downconversion. The Cifer technology is based on proprietary motion estimate techniques to produce high quality video.

“Cifer has been painstakingly developed to handle the most complex signal conversion tasks that broadcasters and service providers face today,” said Adrian Scott, Pro-Bel’s chief marketing officer. “We are pleased that Genesis Networks has recognized this, along with many others.”

Genesis Networks provided signal conversion and transmission services to the United States for the two tennis events.