I'm surprised no one has commented in here yet, of the abysmal picture quality of Attenbourgh's interview with Obama last night on BBC 1. The clips of the interview
during the programme seemed to have a field dominance problem, so there was awful
frame by frame stuttering of the image.
Makes the '25p disease' that's infecting more and more BBC News reports pale into insignificance !
I've had a look at a download from iPlayer (which is 25p and seems indistinguishable from my YouView recording, so I don't think there's any interlacing), and there are a lot of frame dupes, most of which are spaced about four frames apart.
I'm not sure how that would happen, though. I'd guess it was shot at 60i or 30p (does the White House has it's own in-house production team?), but after that I can't think of a sensible sequence of events that would result in frame dupes. 60i culled to
20
p, for some reason, then bumped back up to 25p...?
Very poor. Looks like it has been shot at some non-25/50Hz frame rate and just plonked on a 25p/50i timeline... Very poor indeed. Should definitely have failed a tech review.
I found the whole of the interview elements poor from a technical point of view. I'm no expert by any means but both subjects faces appeared to be over-lit and it seemed whenever they leaned forward, they went out of focus as if the cameras were just plonked there and left running. The audio didn't seem too wonderful either to me.
I hadn't actually watched this but you're right it's very poorly shot, who on earth sticks massive great softboxes in the middle so you can't get a clean wide shot? Also yes, overexposed on the key and it does feel like no operator with no reframing or focusing when the subjects move, and no decent audio on Obama... wowzer.