OT: HD Broadcast NBC Aspect Ratio Changed?

DavidMcKnight wrote on 1/26/2006, 9:54 PM
Totally OT, but I've seen this twice and wonder if anyone else has.

I'm on Time Warner cable in Houston, and I'm flipping though the HD network broadcasts tonight, and stop at The Office. It's in HD, 16x9, and fills up my TV screen just fine. They go to a commercial, which is 4x3 SD of course. But, when the show comes back on, it's now at a reduced letterbox within the 4x3 space and does not fill up the screen. What's that all aboot?

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 1/26/2006, 9:57 PM
is your television set to auto aspect? I've seen a couple instances where the flags are either improperly set, or the television can't manage the flags fast enough, and the channel needed to be changed to reset them.
DavidMcKnight wrote on 1/26/2006, 10:11 PM
I actually did change channels and back, to no avail. Didn't stick around, it was just in passing. But it sounds like it has to do with the broadcast signal and my TV's ability to decode it in realtime, eh?
TheHappyFriar wrote on 1/27/2006, 5:27 AM
could be eigther a) the cable company messed up (could be one of their own commercials inserted) or b) the NBC affiliate messed up (again, same thing).

Was this a national show or a local show?
JJKizak wrote on 1/27/2006, 6:12 AM
This kind of thing is rampant at the present time and hopefully the broadcast engineers will learn when to push the proper buttons. Cable just multiplies the possibilities of screw-ups. Ree-encoding HD, stretched SD, noise, red shifts, low cable signal strength, etc. Broadcast engineers are complaining that everything involved with this HD stuff starts at $100,000.00.

JJK
Coursedesign wrote on 1/27/2006, 6:25 AM
It's a total mess.

The only tangible effort in this area I have seen is from SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers). They are setting up a committee to try to get TV engineers to ensure synchronized audio with HDTV.

All the other issues, we're on our own. The interns who replaced the knowledgable station engineers are waiting for a cartoon book that could tell them what to do.
baysidebas wrote on 1/27/2006, 12:21 PM
I've seen this happen on the OTA signal from WNBC, New York's flagship station. People in the control rooms are just not paying attention as to what they're sending out. There's also trouble often enough on the audio, phase mismatches, errant pans, etc. Makes me want to cry for the olden days when an engineer would come close to committing seppuku if such things happened on his watch.
apit34356 wrote on 1/27/2006, 1:41 PM
its really sad how the staffing at some network stations are so substandard in performance.
DavidMcKnight wrote on 1/27/2006, 3:13 PM
HappyFriar - this was a national show called The Office.-
TheHappyFriar wrote on 1/27/2006, 7:52 PM
i worked my butt off at the station i worked at. I would only mess things up maybe once a week, max. Not counting hardware fubar's that I couldn't predict/control, but I got so good with those DVCPro's that I could sync up multiple tapes with pieces of a show on it & switch between them & noone would notice. :)

Not like the local FOX/WB affiliate... man, those control room guy got paid ~2.5x more then I did starting & NEVER hit a cue!
TheHappyFriar wrote on 1/27/2006, 7:54 PM
ok.. I thought maybe that was a place. :)

Odds are the guy at the studio flipped in one of their commercials & it had a flag for their ratio settings (obiviously 3:4) & there was no flag that turned it back.

Stange though.... you'd think that they would include a ratio flag with every chunk of info...
fldave wrote on 1/27/2006, 9:06 PM
Regarding video/audio HDTV quality:

It may have been a national show, but from the HDTV local forums I've reviewed for the past year and a half, each station is responsible for retransmitting the feed over the air. Our local ABC station had video/audio synch problems for six months, with people on the forum constantly communicating wtih the local station engineers.

They finally got it right. I understand they had to buy yet more equipment to delay the video enough to match the audio retransmission.

The upshot of all of this is that each station appears to be responsible for the quality retransmission of the signal feed. The stations that buy all of the equipment now are one step ahead of those that really don't care and will only spend money when the government mandate is imminent.

craftech wrote on 1/28/2006, 6:40 AM
David,
I noticed exactly the same thing on NBC when viewing it through my video monitor set to "auto". At first I thought there was something wrong with the monitor.
It's really annoying. You aren't going crazy.
John