There is certainly a weakness in that regard, but not to the point of making things completely impractical. Thomson made SECAM studio equipment with an AM bus that would be used when signal addition was needed. With that kind of equipment it would be possible to encode at the camera and remain in SECAM after that. One can argue that during mixing you no longer had a standard SECAM IIIb signal. However, that was still secam in principle, albeit in AM. But obviously that is more complexity, more processing steps for analog signal and hence more degradation. And since the market for SECAM was smaller, more expensive equipment. So not ideal in the studio indeed, but at a time when color television sets were such unreliable beasts, there were reasons to choose a standard that required less complexity and precision in the receivers, even if it meant more complexity in production. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line.