One Sunday morning in 1934, a group of UK engineers invented high definition television. Not HDTV as we know it, but high definition compared with what was available at the time. The 405-line electronic system that Sir Isaac Shoenberg and his team from EMI Research created consigned the rotating disks and lenses of John Logie Baird's 30-line mechanical system to the dustbin - and nothing much has changed since. More lines and colour for sure, but the technology is essentially the same.

Now, almost 70 years later, another group of engineers is set on re-inventing television. "We will rewrite the book," claims Roderick Snell, chairman of Snell & Wilcox, the UK engineering group which is leading the project, adding swiftly that book-writing is what the group will not do. "We make things; we are the oily rags," he insists.

The E9m "MetaVision" project has been funded through the European Union's Framework 5 research programme: the aim is to revolutionise the way films and TV are captured, produced, stored and distributed. It is a logical conclusion of the convergence of TV and film production, as both move to digital imagery. Video is quick and easy, but compressing the image is difficult and the quality is low, especially for the latest "home cinema" screens.

A major element of the project will be the construction of an intelligent digital video camera capable of producing images for either the small or large screen. Snell & Wilcox is working with Arri, the German makers of the industry-standard Arriflex. Snell says: "This new camera will have all the good features of a traditional movie camera: the ability, for example, to vary the speed of the action for dramatic effect."

Sport will also benefit. At present broadcasters must use special cameras, which capture three times as many images, for slow-motion replays: "Every camera should have that capacity," Snell says. "Our camera will capture one picture in full together with coded information about the intervening two images. It is a vastly more intelligent system."

It will also be able to track the motion of every element in a picture, essential for picture compression for distribution by cable: "You have to understand the motion of every tiny part of the picture, and today's computers are not very good at that. We are proposing to do that analysis in the camera and we think we know how to do it."

S&W's partners in the project, in addition to Arri, are the BBC, the Portuguese research group INESC, France 2 and Padua University. The company, founded in 1973 by Snell and the now-retired Joe Wilcox, is one of the UK's best-kept engineering secrets - if a company with eight Queen's Awards for export and technical success and more than a hundred other honours can be regarded as a secret.

Snell himself was awarded the prestigious IBC John Tucker Award last year (in succession to Ray Dolby, inventor of the eponymous sound system) for his work on standards conversion. His career has been devoted to developing technologies to preserve the integrity of moving images converted from one format to another.

The company's bread-and-butter line is "black boxes" which convert between TV standards: "If you watch television anywhere it is more than likely it will have passed through one of our boxes. We dominate the world of standards conversion," he says.

S&W equipment has been used, for example, to convert the BBC's Blue Planet nature series from conventional PAL 625-lines to the HDTV format based on 1000 lines. (That's magic, of course. You end up with more screen information than you started with: "There's a bit of artifice, no question about it," Snell says, self-deprecatingly.)

The company has since expanded into high definition television, vision mixing consoles, electronic cinema, image compression and, more recently, archive restoration. It has also developed a standard for the worldwide exchange of audio-visual files.

All this expansion has begun to strain the resources of the privately held group: it has a turnover of under £50m yet spends up to 15 per cent on research and development. Last week it announced that Advent Venture Partners had agreed a £22m financing package.

The company is profitable, but Snell clearly sees making money as a poor second to making great images: "Profitability doesn't actually matter if you are a private company, as long as you are having a good time - and can pay the bills."

alan.cane@ft.com

www.snellwilcox.com

EMAIL THIS PRINT THIS MOST POPULAR