SOT: More ads via time compression

riredale wrote on 2/19/2015, 4:05 PM
Fascinating article in the WSJ today about how cable channels are throwing in a lot more ads per hour than ever before. BET has 24 minutes of ads per hour. A&E Network has gone from 15 minutes to 18+ minutes just in the past 13 months.

How do they do it? A large factor is time compression. They are speeding up the video. But how? In the link referenced above the WSJ has a video showing an episode of Seinfeld in both original and shrunk versions. I don't hear any pitch change, and I don't see any video artifacts (at least on this small scale).

I know from my experimentation in Vegas that changing the frame rate just a small amount (say, the 2-3% evident on the Seinfeld clip) can create a host of visual artifacts. So how do they do it?

Also, how do they get away with it, given that what is shown is not what the creator had in mind? It's almost like the whole colorization issue years ago. Or maybe money talks and the show producers don't really care if the show is chopped or tweaked.

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 2/19/2015, 4:46 PM
A few thoughts ...

TV stations have been speeding up movies for at least two decades.

For even longer than that (going back to the 1960s) TV stations have been removing program content, simply by cutting, in order to add more commercials, especially when doing "strip programming" (showing re-run episodes daily rather than weekly).

I find it questionable that pitch would be changed, given that most editing programs (including Vegas) make it easy to slightly alter the length of audio without altering its pitch. Having said that, I am amazed at how often I see field reversal artifacts, even in the shows themselves (just saw it last night), so perhaps the "professionals" in the TV business are not as professional as they used to be, and actually don't know how to speed up a clip without altering its pitch. (Field reversal is grade school stuff and should never be put out over the air, but I see it every night on the news channels. It is sad how many incompetent people are now working in the industry.)

There are other technologies, other than dropping fields, to decrease the running time of film. Having said that, some of the lesser cable channels are clearly doing that, and when you watch a horizontal camera pan, the film/video is often unwatchable because of the obvious hiccups from the dropped fields every second or so.

[edit]P.S.

For those of you without a Wall Street Journal subscription, you may find that this link works better:

Cable TV Shows Are Sped Up to Squeeze in More Ads


riredale wrote on 2/19/2015, 5:49 PM
Huh. I got the link from Google, which previously bypassed the WSJ paywall.

In any event, I would have thought that the producers would put up resistance against modifying their shows in this fashion, but perhaps cable fare is not considered as "artistic" as feature film.