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Has the revolution begun?


Ed Nyankori

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Not in broadcast, no. HDTV broadcast is highly-compressed and laughable as a source anyway. Blu-Ray discs, however, are 1080p compatible and the new HVX shoots 1080p as well. There's plenty to take advantage of.

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Yes. And the broadcast master went through a 1U rackmount MPEG-2 encoder with a latency of about two seconds and a pricetag of about $15,000. The DVD went through a quarter million dollar Hitachi encoder which has an air-conditioned machine room all to itself. Even if the bitrates were the same, which they aren't, the DVD would still look better.

 

This has nothing to do with the point I was making. The colorist and the sound mix are the same. The source is the same. If there is a difference, it has to do with the broadcast process, not the source.

 

I once worked on a digital satellite channel which had the superb wheeze of pre-encoding all their stuff with slow-but-great software encoders; this tiny-bandwidth channel ended up looking better than some that paid a much bigger ticket for their bandwidth.

 

Also true to a degree, however, network programming is, as I mentioned previously, not MPEG encoded by the network (except for Fox). It is fed on a much higher bandwidth feed, and encoded by the local affiliate at the point of transmission. None of what he may or may not be seeing is a network issue.

 

It's about the network caring enough about supplying a high quality product that they're willing to overlook increased cost of bandwidth. This is a judgement call (even if it is a judgement call of how much can we get away with) and yes it is a matter of care.

 

Clearly, you have never spent any time around broadcast engineers, either at a network or at the local level. The ones I have spent time around care a great deal about what is fed to their viewers, as do those involved in making the programs in the first place. Technical issues, such as they are, exist because of problems inherent to the system, such as the fact that the FCC decided to stick with 6MHz broadcast channels. In any case, I really do think anyone who looks at an HD broadcast and can't see a miraculous improvement from what we had before is either blind or one of those chronic complainers I alluded to in an earlier post.

 

Mike, it's OK to question people's sources, but there's no reason to be so unpleasant to the guy - especially when he's fundamentally correct.

 

I really don't want to pull rank here, but geez, Phil, you live in the UK. How many American HD broadcasts have you actually seen in the last 2 years or so?

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  • 2 months later...
The fact that you can buy a camera that produces this quality of images for such a low price is amazing. What an opportunity to learn filmmaking! Can you imagine how long it would take to learn the basics of how your lighting design looks on screen using film? A_long_time! 24P has accelerated the learning curve of filmmaking in a way that would have taken a long, long, long time with film. I'm very appreciative of the opportunities made possible by these little cameras. Even though they don't look like film, they still look very good.

 

it doesn't take a long time to learn how to light with film, it's a matter of simplicity. all you have to worry about is how bkground and foregrounds are lit. I never took a lighting class but took 3 cine classes, lighting is easy and it doesn't take too long but that all of course depends on what film stock your using, but it doesn't take a longlong long time.

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