Studio quality to viewer quality

bw wrote on 3/18/2005, 12:30 AM
In another post I commented on cameras and my holiday trip. Another observation is on the terrible quality of the signals sent to average hotel room TVs. the swirls, lines and distortion on pictures, variable sound levels and quality, differing aspect ratios, watermarks on top of watermark are only some of the obvious failings as attempts are made to send more and more channels of word content to our 3 star rooms (not sure what its like in 5 star!!!).
Considering the trouble many on this forum go to with certified monitors. super sound systems and only the best of gear to produce our finished product with never a pixel out of place, perhaps we should just smear butter on the lens, run twinflex for cables, sit our mikes near the monitor power supply and join the rest of the world.

Comments

Jay Gladwell wrote on 3/18/2005, 4:58 AM

Considering the trouble many on this forum go to... to produce our finished product with never a pixel out of place...

That's the way it's done, and why it's done that way. Have you ever seen the difference between what a program looks like at the point of broadcast and then in the home? What you're describing is the very reason for making the best image possible upfront. Can you image what it would look like if we didn't go to all this "trouble"?


farss wrote on 3/18/2005, 5:41 AM
Well our TV signals arrive via DVB to a decoder that feeds RGB to the TV, what comes out of the station looks pretty damn good mostly. Just remember one thing, if you're trying to sell your stuff I doubt the prospective client is going to feed it through a clapped out motel system to watch it.
And as Jay said, the better it is to start with the better it'll look after the torture test it goes through getting to the viewer.
Bob.
riredale wrote on 3/18/2005, 8:25 AM
Back when I was promoting our company's NTSC-compatible HD signal called HD-NTSC, I appeared many times on engineering conference panels alongside Ives Faroudja. I dropped out of that scene, but he continued with his line-doublers and patent portfolio and is still successful today. He and I both argued that the viewing public had no idea just how good NTSC could look if only greater care was taken with the delivery. Ives promoted line-doubling for his "SuperNTSC" approach, and we pushed subpixel sampling, but our arguments failed to convince the Feds to adopt a newer version of NTSC.

Anyway, I've seen some very clean hotel video and some crummy hotel video. If patrons really cared and complained to management, they would do something about it, so I guess the public gets what it deserves.