We present a qualitative performance evaluation of several components of a video format conversion algorithm (referred to as natural motion (NM)). The implementation platform is a new programmable media-processor, the TM3270, combined with dedicated hardware support. The performance of two compute-intense NM components, motion estimation (ME) and temporal up-conversion (TU), is evaluated. The impact of new TM3270 features, such as new video-processing operations and data prefetching, is quantified. We show that a real-time implementation of the ME and TU algorithms is achievable in a fraction of the available compute performance, when operating on standard definition video.