I'm not sure I'd use the word 'silly' for an organisation that owes people who worked for it significant sums of money - in some cases as high as tens of thousands of pounds...
There just seems to be an aversion to black bars at the sides of the picture, yet people are perfectly happy to watch films on TV presented 1:85:1 (or even 2:35:1) with black bars at the top and bottom on a widescreen TV!
Black bars top and bottom cause a lot of complaints from people too...
The OP is on SkyQ so I can't comment on how that behaves but Sky+HD has never pillarboxed anything when you set it to 1080i. Everything gets stretched/squashed and upscaled to fill the screen. This is the same behaviour in 720p mode, and only 576 or Auto mode presents things properly. It's a long-running "request" on the Sky forums, oldest thread I can find on it dates from 2011 and nothing's changed five years later.
I have Sky+HD set to 1080i output, and I can assure you it does pillarbox 3:4 broadcasts, but only on the HD channels. I don't think it does it on SD channels.
Err... No. All 1080i broadcasts are 16:9 rasters - if you are seeing a pillar-boxed image it is because the broadcaster has pillar-boxed it to add the black bars either side prior to broadcast. There are no 4:3 1080i video formats in use - so you can't send 4:3 1080i for a receiver to pillar-box.
The point about Sky HD boxes is that - unlike almost every other HD satellite box you can buy - they don't pillar-box 4:3 SD content when you upscale to 1080i or 720p. Instead they stretch it to 16:9 full-width. The only way of getting pictures to stay the right shape is to put the Sky box in AUTO mode and live with the rubbish 576i to 576p deinterlace and HDMI re-sync...
It's the 50i to 50p in the sky box - interpolating that extra space, that wrecks the image. The 1080 option keeps fields as fields, without creating imaginary gaps between temporal images.
Then it's doing a very poor quality upscale then... If you scale in the field domain you are throwing away a LOT of vertical resolution as you are effectively upscaling 288 to 540 for every field. Any decent 576i to 1080i scaler will deinterlace to 576/50p and then upscale from 576p to 1080i (either by doing a 576p to 1080p upscale and then a reinterlace - or possibly doing a 576p to 540line field-based downscale)
(*) This was true of DVEs too. Cheap DVEs did field-based scaling (and thus looked horrible when they zoomed. High-end DVEs like Kaleidoscope (and the bodged Encore in Flash Harry) did frame based scaling by deinterlacing first...
Also - if you run your Sky+ HD box in 1080i you lose aspect ratio switching for native 4:3 576i broadcasts as the Sky box won't pillarbox (or certainly didn't) This only works in Auto mode - or did - where 576p output is accompanied by aspect switching info.
I would say that the SD picture from TV providers would vary in quality. It also depends on people's TV settings as to what is the best SD picture that can be provided for us who are also the viewers of the programmes.
Yes - agreed - TV processing can play a big part in poor quality content looking even worse.
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I think that older episodes of The Chase will be inevitably suffering from poor picture mainly because of the way it was filmed in it's earlier series. I see it's older episodes sometimes on ITV HD and the picture there has a noticeable improvement because the picture is in upscaled HD & the sound quality will have some differences as it looks to be in Dolby Digital 2.0 not 5.1. Either that or it could have been upped Stereo sound.
Not sure what you are saying. ITV don't do any 5.1 content AFAIK - they are permanently 2.0 on DSat AIUI (and The Chase would be an odd candidate for 5.1)
One thing that could make The Chase look bad on a low bitrate SD channel is the LED screens that are in use in the set. They are notorious for hammering MPEG2 and H264 encoders - taking more data than is ideal.
According to http://www.wohnort.org/dab/ there is such a stick which will work with the mac. Just scroll down a bit and you will see some info about it on the left...
But I am not so sure about this...can anyone confirm if it indeed does the biz for DVB-T2 on mac ?
That's the same device I mentioned earlier on in this thread. It's badged Elgato, but Geniatech have bought the Elgato TV range, so I suspect it is closely related to the Geniatech T230 (aka August T210 v 2) - though I wouldn't be surprised if it had different USB IDs to limit use of other dongles with EyeTV (Elgato's software).
I've heard about the BBC Raven for a while and realize it's purpose as a way to ingest files and play them out. However I read that they've been installed in their ENG/SNG trucks for use. How exactly are the Ravens used in these instances - do they just ingest footage into the hard drive and then connect it to the BBC archive or is the device used to edit and perhaps playback a package on air?
Ravens were installed to replace/augment the DVCam VTRs that were in SNG trucks for local recording and also for playout of rushes down-the-line.
Ravens allow trucks to record content locally and replay it in both SD and HD (or make it available to an edit also connected to the Raven in the truck) and can also playout SD or HD content from SxS, CF, SD cards etc directly to line - allowing cards to be taken from a camera and line-fed without needing the camera to be present. The Raven will also do an HD to SD down convert if required to feed HD rushes over an SD link.
This picture gives a good idea of the space that was used. As you can see, the top row of monitors are always present and were not added to the set. Everything else was installed. A pretty creative use of a very tight space.
Ha ha - if you have a look at some of the pictures linked there someone in the press office thinks that a gallery sound control room used for Sky Sports News HQ is an 'editing suite'...
I believe that OFI Sunday was live though the Christmas/last episode seemed pre recorded.
Didn't TFI have to be recorded following Shaun Ryder's 6pm appearances?
I think it was delayed rather than recorded in the stricter sense though I may be wrong. So it was shot as-live but TX-ed with a delay? (Much easier to do on a commercial show as the ad breaks give you turnaround points)
Ironically I think at least one Noel's House Party had been made in HD by then (using the experimental 1250/50 standard - and I think a Top of the Pops was shot that way too). The HD cameras were used alongside SD, not instead of them.
I wonder if that means if Noel was presumably looking straight at the SD camera, on the HD version he's always looking slightly off to the side!
If it was shot long lens from a reasonable distance it might be tricky to tell - but yes.
Unless he had a 16:9 set, and was able to crop the picture down and have the vertical 14:9 bars instead - that would, at least, be some sort of improvement, if not in resolution.
Strikes me as a bizarre public experiment, though.
It still wouldn't be "honest" widescreen though, because as far as I know they were all 4:3 programmes that they just applied fake 14:9 black bars to in order to test viewer reactions to widescreen programming
Good point, well made. Very bizarre, really. Does anyone know why they did it? Surely it would have been better to begin 16:9 production first (as they would have had to at some point) and then work out how they would transmit on analogue (as Digital was separate continuity anyway at this point).
I think the point of it was to see if they'd get as many complaints with 14:9 as they had already received when movies had been shown letterboxes (which generated significant numbers of complaints on a regular basis)
The reason for doing it before 16:9 production had really kicked in was to set some ground rules for how 16:9 production would be done - do you shoot and protect for 4:3, 14:9 or 16:9? Can you run a fixed 4:3, 14:9 or 16:9 letterbox for 4:3 analogue outlets, or do you need dynamic aspect ratio conversion etc.
This was an experiment to measure public response - and it made sense to do it in advance of widespread 16:9 production - as it gave an insight into the audience reaction to widescreen content viewed on 4:3 displays.
Ironically I think at least one Noel's House Party had been made in HD by then (using the experimental 1250/50 standard - and I think a Top of the Pops was shot that way too). The HD cameras were used alongside SD, not instead of them.
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On the topic of widescreen treatment - I recall that right up until the mid-00s (or even later, but I stopped having the time to notice such things!) BBC Sport programmes would always be shown full-frame 4:3 centre cut-out on analogue, but send a flag on Freeview to deep-letterbox the picture (when on a 4:3 telly). Whereas, most analogue transmissions were 14:9 by that point, and the default flag on Freeview for a 4:3 telly was 14:9. I'm sure BBC Sport had a good reason for that transmission choice.
Yes - for some reason sport viewers disproportionately complained about 'their TV not being filled with picture' - and because sport was usually shot and protected for 4:3 (very easy with a camera 1 sport like football or rugby where the action is in the centre of the frame for much of the time) it made sense to send a 4:3 centre-cut type AFD to fill 4:3 displays with picture. The same AFDs were sent on DTT (to trigger AFD friendly set top boxes) and used to trigger the 4:3 centre-cut, 14:9 letterbox and 16:9 letterbox options for the ARCs that fed the analogue 4:3 network feeds.
Sky did the reverse on their Sky Sports HD channels and unconverted 4:3 SD to 16:9 HD by stretching, not pillar boxing, for the same reason...
Deposit boxes in banks are full of USB flash drives but flash memory is not recommended for long term storage. Even storing data in flash memory for a year is risky.
My recommendation if you have tons of video material is to invest in a tape drive to create master backups then store the tapes in a safe place like a fire resistant safe or a bank vault.
I think the suggestion for archival of video content is to store them on LTO or similar tape formats in multiple locations, and to migrate the tapes frequently to new formats (much easier in the data tape domain than the broadcast tape domain) to ensure the content is readable on a modern format. Stuff you need to access should probably be available either on disc arrays or a more immediate data tape system.
When digitising SD content, do it losslessly, when digitising HD content I suspect you need to use a high quality codec (or in the case of shows delivered as files, the original DPP file essence should be retained)