EBU Technical Statement D62-1998

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EBU Technical Statement D62-1998

Choice of an HDTV production standard for Europe

EBU Committee First Issued Revised Re-issued

PMC 1989 1996, 1998

Keywords: HDTV

The EBU firmly believes that:

1. Any HDTV standard used for production in Europe should have a field rate of 50 Hz to maintain compatibility
with existing television and film production.
2. In accordance with the long-standing position of the EBU, there should be maximum commonality with other
HDTV standards world-wide in order to achieve maximum benefits in production and post-production,
particularly for co-productions. A common format for the image would be highly desirable in this respect. In
addition, an image format with square pixels would offer further advantages in production.
It now seems likely that a common image format for production based on 1920 square pixels by 1080 lines
will be adopted world-wide.
The EBU will support this HDTV production standard for new implementations, particularly where
interoperability with other applications is important.
A system based on the common image format of 1920 square pixels by 1080 lines operating at 50 Hz field
rate is described in ITU-R Recommendation BT.709-3 Part II [1].
The corresponding advice to EBU Members is given in the revised EBU Recommendation R76-1998
Note: This updates EBU Statement D62-1996.

Bibliography
[1] ITU-R Recommendation BT.709-3: Parameter values for the HDTV standards for production and
international programme exchange (to be published)
[2] EBU Recommendation R76-1998: Interlaced HDTV standard for production