Two Interesting Applications of Digital Data Insertion in Video Signals: The TV Display Generator and the Video Countdown Programmer

Abstract

The recent development of compact, rugged, reliable and easy-to-use video cameras, recorders, amplifiers, digitizers and monitors has made this equipment increasingly attractive for data acquisition purposes. When analog and/or digital data is combined with video signals, the resulting configuration is a video instrumentation system. Two examples of video instrumentation systems are described in this paper. The TV Display Generator accepts four independent analog signals, modulated IRIG B serial time code, three different standard composite video signals and several digital control signals. The analog and time code signals are digitized and inserted into the composite video input signals for recording and display. The Video Countdown Programmer generates four color and two monochrome standard composite video signals and formats and inserts up to six sets of parallel BCD and ASCII digital data into each video signal. The output video signals are displayed by large screen monitors. As these two systems indicate, the recording and display functions of video instrumentation system provide additional capabilities in data acquisition applications.