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 Can the VTR be digitized? This was the question of many video engineers in 1976. At the time, the demand of commercial film producers was for a VTR that did not lose image quality when subjected to numerous dubbings. Digital images theoretically do not lose any quality regardless of the number of dubbings made. Digitized images would require a far wider frequency band than digitized sound, which was about to be realized by Sony. Most people did not think this was feasible. Under these circumstances, Yoshitaka Hashimoto and his group began fundamental research of digital VTRs in March 1977 at the Research Center in Yokohama.
The actual project was launched in March 1978, a year after Hashimoto's team started their research with Morizono's blessing. Steele who was leading SBC into a successful business expansion in Europe motivated Morizono. He persuaded Morizono by insisting that the future was in digital broadcasting. Takeo Eguchi, who had studied digital VTR technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) returned to Japan and joined the development team. The project evolved into a major effort with R&D facilities in both Europe and the United Sates also assisting. Everyone involved spent days and nights thinking only of digital technology. The Japan based engineers went to the Sendai plant and had the engineers upgrade the quality of tapes and recording heads, preaching to them about the coming digital age. In just a year and a half, a digital image was played back on a VTR.
At NAB in 1979, Ampex, Sony and Bosch G.m.b.H. independently introduced the fruits of their digital research, opening the door to serve competition for digital VTRs. Eventually, in consideration of the benefits to users as well as to manufacturers, a movement to establish a universal standard emerged. There are three major broadcasting systems in the world: NTSC for Japan and the United States, PAL for most of Europe and SECAM for countries in the Middle East. The standardization effort was an attempt to cover all three systems.
At the time, the standardization of the digital VTR was the hottest topic with SMPTE, where standards were decided. A team of Sony engineers visited the United States several times, and they participated in talks with their counterparts from all over the world, even though Japanese engineers were rarely seen then at SMPTE. Each broadcast station and manufacturer would send teams of twenty to thirty engineers at a time, eagerly setting forth their technology. In a similar way, Eguchi and his team explained their position and worked to persuade their counterparts. Eguchi had been a member of SMPTE since his days at MIT and once he was selected for the digital VTR task force at SMPTE, he began to play a major role within the organization.
Eventually, negotiations with European representatives were completed, and a universal sampling frequency of 13.5MHz was agreed upon. Eguchi learned a very important lesson through this standardization process, which will not succeed if one insists on a Japanese perspective. Learning to understand the perspective of people from all over the world with different cultural backgrounds is international communication in its truest sense.
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 | | Eguchi introduces Sony's first digital VTR at NAB in March 1979. |
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Once an international standard was established, product development proceeded. In 1987, Sony introduced the world's first component digital VTR, the DVR-1000 (D-1), and in 1988, a composite digital VTR, the DVR-10 (D-2) was introduced. The D-1, capable of individually recording luminance and color difference signals, had a very high resolution and was endorsed by broadcast stations and video production houses alike. The D-2, which records an integrated signal, was widely used as the digital VTR for production and transmission at stations, replacing the conventional composite analog one-inch VTR.
The digitization of images, close on the heels of digitization of sound, marked the beginning of a new era in broadcasting systems.
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