Noise Reducer

Film grain, dirt, scratches and dropouts can now be detected and repaired in real-time with the "Puritan" noise reducer. Puritan's software is flexible enough to allow users to decide, at any time, whether or not to change settings or to protect regions within a picture.

Puritan uses "Ph.C", the company's motion estimation technology, which enables noise reduction circuitry to differentiate between noise and motion within the footage. Noise reduction can therefore be carried out in areas of high movement, where existing commercial equipment would simply switch off.

The innovative design of Puritan ensures that the operator has full control over how the noise reduction is carried out. For general-purpose material or material that has a lower commercial value, a single pass operation will in most cases be sufficient. Source material is played off tape (or film) directly into the equipment and passes through to the recording medium of choice.

Alternatively, for more commercially sensitive material, timeline control can be applied with the addition of third party control platforms. This allows the operator to go back over specific areas of interest and amend the results to accurately match the users needs.

The real-time capability - coupled with the flexible system control - ensures that Puritan makes the repair of all material commercially viable - fully maintaining the users high quality requirements while preserving ever-valuable bandwidth.

Snell & Wilcox, Inc., 2225 - 1 Martin Avenue, Santa Clara, CA 95050. Tel: 408-260-1000; Fax: 408-260-2800.