At the moment decent VHS players are hard to find, but take a look here.
John

ok heres what I've found

My DLP tv has a atsc tuner built in so at least I can watch shows.
I doubt I can record them in 720p or 1080i with my vhs ( i know i cant).

Heres my next part of understanding OTA hd. I looked up hd programming in my area and it all starts at 8:00 pm so what about morning meet the press? I realize it may not be shot in HD but will it look like crap or will it look descent.

I know when viewing an analog signal it looks flat out CRAPPY!
but I'm thinkin what if I LOVE LUCY (NON HD) is transmitted over HD I imagine it will look as good as regular televisions.

can someone explaing this to me pleeaase, i know this is a vegas forum but you guys have helped me with vegas and I trust your video direction.

Auggy

You should be able to find a D-VHS VCR recorder for a reasonable price to simply record HD.

You should be getting a lot of channels in Los Angeles, so 8pm seems a little late. Although not all content is available in HD yet. The SD content on the HD channels is still very easy on the eyes compared to cable. PBS HD has some great stuff.

Start here to find out how far away from the over the air broadcast antennas:
antennaweb.org
A lot of areas have an "antenna farm" so you can point your antenna one direction and get 95% of the stations available in the area.


If you are fairly close to the towers (<15 miles) you might try this antenna first:
From Amazon.com:
Zenith ZHDTV1 HDTV-UHF Digital Indoor Antenna (Silver and Black)
List Price: $39.99
Price: $19.99 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. See details You Save: $20.00 (50%)


Finally, to get coverage info for a specific station, you can go here:
FCC website (hard to get just right, lots of options, you can play with it)
FCC tv
Use the "Stations Within A Radious" option further down the page, out to about 120km. On the resulting list, look for the stations with the "DT" service, that will be the Digital/HD station. Then click on the call letters. On that page, click on the "Service Coutour Map" to see how far out the broadcast range goes. Pretty cool.

lets talk antennas,
I dont have but rabbit ears right now. When you say antenna farm what is that exactly?

Aug

Antenna farm: a strategically placed collection of antennas that provides the widest coverage over the targeted population. Not all areas have one, but Los Angeles does. Also, not all stations choose to put their antennas there.

Los Angeles Antenna Farm

Also, here is a good forum for seeing what other people in Los Angeles area are using to receive over the air HDTV:

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=191672

I can answer one of your questions.

A lot of stations (like us) are using some pretty sophisticated stuff to upconvert standard-def to HD. Basically, we take a standard NTSC source, use some noise reduction and then line double it. It is NOT true HD by any means, but it does look much better than standard analogue, especially if the original source is very clean. Our local newscasts, which are quite clean to start with, look pretty amazing. I'd be interested to see how Lucy would come out :)

Be aware that some of the hi def sets do not look very good with standard def feeds, as they are optimized for HD.

I also remember seeing advertised a DVD/S-VHS combo somewhere that said it did noise reduction and some "enhancements" on the VHS side of things to improve the picture. It also had a line doubling DVD player, if I'm not mistaken. If I find the link, I'll post it. I think it was one of the ones at www.crutchfield .com before Christmas, or perhaps at B&H.

T

Here's a link to one of them

http://www.crutchfield.com/S-UITMNPqTyr5/cgi-bin/ProdView.asp?g=88000&I=305VR325

plasmavideo:

Not to hijack this thread, but have you tried to duplicate in Vegas what you do with "pretty sophisticated stuff" at the station? Taking SD and upconvert to HD?

I know about the discussions using virtualdub, split the interlaced to "side-by-side", double the size of that, then put the interlacing back.

Just curious if there is some magical combination of what works best, like Mike Crash's Noise Reduction with a dash of Chroma Blur.

I have a ton of stuff that I would love to upconvert with better quality.

Dunno the answer to that one.

We use hardware conversion and encoding in "real" time, so it's not done in the editing process. It's basically a couple of black box cards in a card rack with not much to tweak. I emphasized "real" time, as there is some processing and encoding delay.

There's is no reason it couldn't be done in a process similar to what you suggest. I have no experience with that at all, but it's intriguing. After all, the hardware we have is nothing but some dumb components driven by smart programming.

EDIT: What I meant to say was that these devices are in our program chain. When there is no true HD material, be it local or network, we insert the upconversion hardware into the HD program stream ,and the standard 525 NTSC stuff is upconverted to quasi hi-def using the enhancement hardware I mentioned. We don't process shows individually onto tape or into a server. It is done basically "on the fly" depending on the originating source. I do want to emphasize that it looks quite good, although the aspect ratio is still standard and not 16:9. We've experimented with stretching the picture a bit, and find if we do a little, it fills more of the screen without distorting images too much. We get both positive and negative comments about the stretch. Some people like it, as it reduces the possiblity of burn in on the Plasma with the gray or black bars on the side. Others can't tolerate the distortion.

As I write this, we're running a segnment on our local news about consumers returning HD monitors back to dealers after Christmas because:

1. They don't have tuners and the sales guy didn't tell them that.

2. They look bad on regular cable, or no place to hookup the cable (no RF input)

3. No idea how to operate the set.

Wish I had caught the whole thing. I need to go pull the aircheck to see all that was said.

Tom