Envy Post Production Stays Legal With Eyeheight

Envy Post Production, one of London's largest independent video facilities, has invested in an Eyeheight legalHHPi video legaliser.
Installed in their machine room, the legalHHPi is available to conform automatically any HD or SD output from Envy's router to standard broadcast signal levels.
"We are using the new legalHHPi in series with our existing Eyeheight legalEyes to ensure signals are legal in both the RGB and composite domains," said Envy Post Production's Chief Engineer Daniel Sassen.
"The two units work extremely well. When we opened in March 2006, 25 per cent of our work was in HD and this is now approaching 70 per cent. Legalising in HD is trickier than in SD because parameters such as colour space are different but the legalHHPi automates the whole process. We went to Eyeheight for this solution as we already have their multidef safe-area-generators in each of our eight online edit suites and we have a good working relationship with the Eyeheight sales and support team who are helpful and easy to deal with."
Eyeheight's legalHHPi high definition legaliser restricts the Y, U & V components of incoming HD-SDI signals. It selectively reduces the saturation of pixels which would otherwise result in overmodulation of the composite waveform. Composite mode preserves the hue of each pixel but not the saturation. When the signal is converted to a composite waveform, the Y component is held within the range allowed by the Y High Clip and Y Low Clip. The total composite waveform is maintained within the range defined by Composite High-Clip and Composite Low-Clip.
Operating in composite, YUV and RGB colour spaces, legalHHPi incorporates two independent outputs for 'Legalise' and user controllable 'Legal/Indicate'. Clipping levels and soft-clipping knee levels are adjustable. Eyeheight's 'Clobbering' technology suppresses luminance overshoot and undershoot. EDH re-insertion with integral luma and chroma gain, black level adjustment and hue rotation are provided.
EBU-R2003 standard legalisation settings and 7.5 IRE or 0 IRE pedestal with sixuser-memories are incorporated. The monitoring output includes a legalisation-severity display mode unique to Eyeheight. Timecoded legalisation logs can be viewed and stored on an external PC using software supplied.
Eyeheight's legalHHPi hue-processing legaliser is available in half and full rack width configurations, both being fully controllable from the front panel. Power consumption is less than 50 W, 100-240 V AC.
www.eyeheight.com
(DS/SP)