9.1.1 Introduction

No other single topic in television preoccupied the attention of standardization committees worldwide like the quest to develop a high-quality HDTV studio origination standard. The effort was complicated by the desire for international unanimity on a single worldwide HDTV system. Securing a new global flexibility in high-performance television production, postproduction, and international program exchange was high on the agendas of participants within the television industry the world over.

From all this work, the parameters of a durable origination standard have been structured to endow the HDTV studio format with more electronic information than is required to satisfy, for example, the psychophysical aspects of large-screen viewing of the picture. This additional information translates into the technical overhead that can sustain complex picture processing in postproduction, multigeneration recording, downconversion, transfer to film, and other operations.

Nevertheless, the establishment of a strong production standard was essential to the definition of some of the more fundamental parameters of a broad-based HDTV system. The sheer breadth of the television industry today demands flexibility in the deployment of an HDTV format. The concept of a system hierarchy has been discussed and, indeed, a carefully structured hierarchy offers an ideal methodology for tailoring a basic HDTV system to a wide variety of applications while meeting specific performance requirements, system needs, and budgets.

Within business and industrial (B&I) applications and other nonentertainment video uses there exists a wide diversity of imaging requirements. The picture quality and system facilities needed may be...