Reborn Tech Maniac

Chapter 566 Digital video started from high-end
Generally speaking, the Olympic Games represents the highest level of competitive sports in the world, except for certain highly professional sports, such as football and tennis.

For fear of affecting their own interests, the highest authority for the commercial operation of these sports and the International Olympic Committee often fight openly and secretly, and take various measures to restrict professional athletes from participating in the Olympic Games; on the other hand, the International Olympic Committee To be fair, there are also many restrictions on the number and age of professional athletes participating in the Olympics.

This is the case with tennis, which has not been listed as an official Olympic sport until now.In the current Los Angeles Olympics, it, like baseball, is a performance event.And according to regulations, only athletes under the age of 20 can participate.

In this way, there is also an advantage, that is, it gives young athletes the opportunity to show themselves, as is the case with 15-year-old Steffi Graf.

Steffi Graf's performance has been remarkable since he turned into a professional game at the end of the previous year. Last year, he won his first professional championship at the age of 14, breaking another record. The record of Tracy Austin, a talented tennis girl at the age of 14 and 28 days, made the West German media shout excitedly that she also has a talented tennis player like the United States.

The professional sports media is optimistic that Steffi Graf and Tracy Austin are expected to be the successors of the generation of Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert. Since 1976, they have jointly dominated the world women's tennis.

Trish Austin once defeated Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert respectively, and ascended the throne of the world twice in 1980 for a total of 21 weeks; Steffi What Graf lacks is the Grand Slam champion and the record of defeating these two predecessors.But she is still young and has plenty of time to practice.

Unfortunately, things go against expectations. The fate of a genius is always accompanied by various risks of premature death.

Trish Austin has been troubled by back injuries since 1982, and it didn't get better in 1983, and her performance continued to decline. All the Grand Slam events she participated in were eliminated in the quarter-finals; on the eve of her 21st birthday, she was even eliminated by He squeezed out of the top ten ranks in the world; after entering this year, he almost disappeared from the professional stage.

Although Steffi Graf's world ranking has been rising rapidly, and he has been firmly squeezed into the top ten in the world before this year's Olympic Games, but Tracy Austin's lessons learned there, plus Martina Na After Vlatilova improved her training methods, her skills became more and more superb, and she eliminated Steffi Graf, who was unlucky and encountered herself, several times. After that, no one dared to be so sure about the bright future of this young talent.

In fact, the reason why Steffi Graf has repeatedly encountered experts such as Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert in competitions has nothing to do with bad luck and poor draw. It is the inevitable result of her outstanding performance and successive promotions.

Take the British Wimbledon Tennis Championships, one of the tennis Grand Slam events held from June 6 to July 25 this year. In the fifth group, Steffi Graf passed all the way and defeated the top and seeded players. Britain's Joe Dury joins forces and competes for a spot in the top eight.

两人精彩地苦战三盘，最后施特菲·格拉芙以6：3、3：6、9：7的比分获胜，闯入了八强。

Next, Steffi Graf met another seeded player, Hana Mandlikova of Czechoslovakia who once reached the third place in the WTA world ranking, and fought hard again in three sets, winning 6:2, 3:6 , 6:4, narrowly entered the semi-finals, thus creating her best result in a Grand Slam.

However, Steffi Graf's momentum stopped there, and was eliminated by "Ice Princess" Chris Evert 6:3 twice, and the prize money stopped at 21900 pounds; the latter lost to Martina Navra Tilova, who won the runner-up's £45000 bonus.

It can be said that no matter how polarized the evaluation of Steffi Graf is, the West Germans already love their genius girl very much.

Steffi Graf was praised by Tang Huan as "Lingboweibu" because of her fast, precise and perfect running on the tennis court. The nickname of "Bo Fairy".

In this Olympic tennis match, Steffi Graf naturally broke into the final on August 8 without any accidents, and her opponent was Sabrina Golesh of Nanslav.

At this time, the Los Angeles Olympic Games is coming to an end. On the medal list, the United States is far ahead with more than 80 gold medals and more than 170 medals, compared with No.2 Romania, No.3 West Germany, No.4 China, and No.5 Italy. The sum is more, it can be said to be domineering and magnificent.

However, this also makes McDonald's, which promotes according to the number of medals, want to cry without tears, and has a deficit of tens of millions of dollars out of thin air. .

With the general trend of the medal table set, the West German media gathered at the Los Angeles Tennis Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, to watch this tennis final that had no meaning to the medal table.

Because of Tang Huan's appearance, some American media also chased him.

The final was not evenly matched. Sabrina Goresh, who was four years older, did not take advantage of any advantages and was defeated by Steffi Graf in straight sets with a score of 6:2 and 6:4. .

It can be seen that Steffi Graf, who is on the rise, is a bit too aggressive and has more to say. After shaking hands with Sabrina Goresh, the originally shy little loli ran to the audience In front of the table, he threw the racket to Tang Huan who was sitting in the front row, and then hooked his fingers, which was full of "provocation".

Such post-match tidbits stimulated the audience and various media in the arena, screaming with excitement, encouraging Mr. Richest Man to end the match.But Tang Huan was very reserved, smiling and waving at the camera.

This little episode will naturally be entertained by all the media, and that’s all there is to it. However, on the last day of the Olympics, CNN produced and aired an entertainment program "Tang's Footsteps in the Olympics", Let's take stock of the similarities and differences between the richest man and ordinary people in the programs they like to watch in the past half a month, and the ratings have exploded.

It is no exaggeration to say that ABC and Turner Broadcasting Company, which spent huge sums of money to bid for the US regional television rights to the Los Angeles Olympics, have made a lot of money, and their ratings have been rising, which has directly increased the value of advertising. Even soap operas Also benefited a lot.

However, among the two broadcasting organizations in charge of broadcasting, Turner Broadcasting Company has obviously benefited more, and the viewers have received rave reviews. This is unexpected by those who are not convinced that the upstarts get the TV broadcasting rights , They were still waiting to see the joke.

The successful performance of CNN is rooted in Barry Diller, who jumped from Paramount, and made a lot of contributions, but behind this, the digital video technology provided by Tang Huan also contributed.

The so-called digital video is naturally compared to the traditional analog video, which uses digital methods to record video data.

This technology began from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. Three companies, Thomson-CSF, Ampex, and NEC, respectively launched solutions for digital video production equipment; then Bosch, RCA, and Ampex came up with solutions for video tape storage. .

In 1982, the Radiocommunication Sector of the International Telecommunication Union released a standard called BT.601 to regulate the digitization of video signals.

Tang Huan has been actively promoting the application tentacles of microcomputers, extending from traditional numerical calculation and data processing to emerging fields such as electronic games, communications, and multimedia. 1 system.

At this stage, VHS home video recorders in analog form have just become popular in economically developed areas, and it is a good time to reap profits. Tang Huan is not going to make it difficult for him to start digital products including VCD prematurely in the mass consumer market. For video applications, his strategy is from high to low, firstly aiming at the high-end application fields of broadcasting and television, such as the Digital-1 system.

Compared with other pioneers in the industry who can only use their products in certain specific business links, the Digital-1 system can be fully used in the TV station's program production and broadcast processes.

The reason why Tang Huan was able to occupy the leading position in the industry once again was due to the comprehensive effects of several aspects.

First of all, Tang Huan, who has accumulated enough capital, can easily distribute the subject, allowing a large number of technical experts to conduct basic research according to the direction and ideas he gave, and quickly produce results.

Take the compression and decompression of audio and video as an example, which involves many mathematical problems. Tang Huan put some general topics to study in mainland China, and the labor cost required is so low that he is embarrassed.

However, as a result, concepts such as JPEG, MPEG, VCD, etc. are very different from the original time and space.

Secondly, in the field of manufacturing after research and development, the three semiconductor factories of FAB1, FAB2, and FAB3 have fully matured the process level of 1 micron process. Among the chips produced by them, Motorola MC68020 with CISC architecture can reach a maximum operating frequency of 33Mhz; RISC architecture The Holder1 and Holder2 series processors designed in-house can reach a maximum operating frequency of 50Mhz; other chips such as digital signal processors have not low performance.

On this basis, the speed of digital video encoding and decoding has reached the standard worthy of practical application.

Finally, no matter how it is developed and manufactured, it must be implemented in the application field. If no one comes to buy it, what is the point of working hard.

At this time, Tang Huan's investment in film, television and other fields played a leading role in the use. Media Asia TV and Cable News Network were the first users of the Digital-1 system.

One of the video acquisition devices of this digital video application solution is a digital video camera - D-VHS camera, which can be roughly divided into two categories: low-end interlaced scanning and high-end progressive scanning.

When Tang Huan entered the video tape industry, one of his main goals was to obtain a technical system in this mature field as soon as possible. The arrogant Sony rejected him, and JVS became a partner.

On the basis of the original video tape format VHS, Tang Huan quickly launched an enhanced version of the format S-VHS, and developed a smaller pocket video tape VHS-C for shoulder-mounted cameras other than home video recorders.

More importantly, Tang Huan also introduced the D-VHS format for digital storage on video tapes, which brought great convenience to computer processing.

JVS and Panasonic can be said to have embraced the thighs that are striding in the right direction. I don’t know how much worry and effort they have saved. Therefore, they have changed from the boss of VHS to the most active shop assistant.

The D-VHS camera will perform lightweight fast lossless compression on the collected digital video, and record it on the video tape in D-VHS format, and then the TV station can broadcast it directly, or perform various processing through the Digital-1 system .

A major technical feature of digital video is that users can process the video stream and audio stream separately, such as adding metadata such as date and copyright, or placing flexible subtitles.

With this function, CNN provided the audience with the most comprehensive and intuitive introduction information about the participating athletes during the broadcast of the Olympic Games, allowing the audience to see clearly and clearly when enjoying the game.

In addition, this flexible way of inserting subtitles also brings great convenience to advertising. Cable News Network’s commercial advertising revenue during the Olympics surpassed that of ABC.

This is not all the benefits of the Digital-1 system. Its real power lies in the post-production stage of TV programs. Compared with traditional linear editing, more powerful nonlinear editing can be used.

Linear editing requires the cooperation of several video recorders, video effects machines, sound mixers, control panels, signal generators and other equipment in order to edit the content of the master tape to the finished tape in chronological order.

This editing method is time-consuming and labor-intensive. One of the reasons why behind-the-scenes personnel such as TV station directors stay up late and work overtime is the cumbersome work.

There are a total of 23 major events and 221 minor events in the Los Angeles Olympic Games, and the host US team has won so many medals. The presentation of each wonderful moment is a severe workload test for all TV agencies that broadcast it.

CNN, which has adopted the Digital-1 system, is undoubtedly far ahead in the appeal of this program that most attracts viewers.

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(End of this chapter)