I don't see too many TV ad breaks these days (being a PVR owner) but last night I watched
C4 in 'real time'. There was an ad for Wayfair (featuring Lorraine Kelly) that had appalling jerky motion artefacts in it. It's bad enough when news footage etc suffers from this, it's, more or less excusable (I reluctantly accept) for news, but as an advertiser if you've paid a fortune to have a TV ad produced and shown, wouldn't you exercise maximum care over the tech quality, or does no one these days genuinely give a monkey's ?
It's atrocious, and detracts from the surrounding material. Most are delivered at 720p, but I'm convinced there's still some SD around. Eurosport are the exception where virtually all are 1080p.
It's atrocious, and detracts from the surrounding material. Most are delivered at 720p, but I'm convinced there's still some SD around. Eurosport are the exception where virtually all are 1080p.
Interesting. Who's to blame, the advertiser, or the broadcaster ? By your observations it sounds like the broadcaster ?
One major national broadcaster was still specifying ads to be supplied in SD which were then upscaled to HD for transmission! Very noticeable during their breaks, even now. When an advertiser contracts a broadcaster for airtime the broadcaster has to provide that airtime regardless of whether the copy is wrong/out of date or not quite the quality we would all expect. How many times have we seen Christmas ads in January because the advertising agencies are often off and forget to supply replacement copy in time? The broadcaster would be in breach of contract by not running the old copy even though it is out of date!
One major national broadcaster was still specifying ads to be supplied in SD which were then upscaled to HD for transmission! Very noticeable during their breaks, even now. When an advertiser contracts a broadcaster for airtime the broadcaster has to provide that airtime regardless of whether the copy is wrong/out of date or not quite the quality we would all expect. How many times have we seen Christmas ads in January because the advertising agencies are often off and forget to supply replacement copy in time? The broadcaster would be in breach of contract by not running the old copy even though it is out of date!
So whose fault would it be in Ofcom's eyes if an advertiser ran a pay-to-enter promotion on, say, Watch, with a closing date that was aired after said closing date? Say it was one of those "solve this ridiculously easy wordsearch that a 2 year can do and phone this 0904 number with a chance to to win a fortune and then some more, lines close on April 1st" and then that's aired by Watch on April 3rd?
One really bad example was in December, when Kellogg's ran their Christmas Corn Flakes ad with some serious interlacing/combing issues. Okay so it was an old advert they'd dug out and tried to modernise, but how anyone could have ever thought the end result was good enough for broadcast is a bit of a mystery.
Actually the advert for Bought By Many Pet Insurance (which for some reason seems to be using Sweep from The Sooty Show complete with the show's theme tune) is so badly put together its surprising its ended up on air at all in that state. Not only is it in 4:3 for some reason it looks like it was done on a camcorder.
I thought it was a new advert but apparently it dates from last year too (this yea they've just changed the disclaimer text colour:
One really bad example was in December, when Kellogg's ran their Christmas Corn Flakes ad with some serious interlacing/combing issues. Okay so it was an old advert they'd dug out and tried to modernise, but how anyone could have ever thought the end result was good enough for broadcast is a bit of a mystery.
There's an Ed Sheeran music video (made up of old home video footage) that's like that all the way through. You'd think these people would know what they're doing.
I was able to handle interlaced footage properly working with a combination of a cheap capture card, VirtualDub and Windows Movie Maker back in 2004 at the age of 18, yet it seems professionals with expensive equipment can't manage it.
I can't speak for the entire industry, but in my experience there seems to be an increasing lack of understanding in post production teams of basic broadcast technical standards, especially interlacing. I work in a playout/transmission suite, and I often have to reject promos due to technical issues, interlace field issues being one of the more common ones.
A lot of the young talent coming in have experience editing only for digital, so have never dealt with interlacing before, and are used to being able to pick a preset in the edit software and it handling all the technical stuff for them. The increasing prevalence of DSLR shot footage doesn't help, which is generally 1080p25, and edit projects (especailly on Adobe Premiere) often default their settings to match the first inserted clip, so the whole project is unintentionally set to 1080p 25fps instead of 1080i 50 fields.