Eurovision 2010 - 25/27/29 May 2010 - Norway

I can see only a slight difference in picture quality - thankfully I too have all shows recorded off BBC Three/BBC One (not HD though).

Why are the various songs not over the opening titles/sequence? No 'Puppet on a String' for Vienna 1967, no 'Waterloo' for Brighton 1974 etc. Is this to do with rights to the songs/music? That has disappointed me as it was one of the best opening titles/sequences ever.

Even though I have the BBC recordings, I must say I am one of the lucky ones to have the memories from been there in Telenor Arena on the night.

Yep - I see the same thing - Disc 1 and 3 entirely 25Hz, Disc 2 is 50Hz up until the sting after the interview with the Aussies after the interval act, when there appears to be a slight jump as well. I was so disappointed with the first semi and the final I hadn't had the heart to even try to watch disc 2...

Luckily I can spot 50i from 25p within a few seconds on most moving content (almost impossible on static!) as I'm quite tuned to 50Hz vs 25Hz motion (and I hate entertainment stuff shot 25p, and 50i to 25p conversions are even worse)

However there is something "not quite right" with the 50Hz stuff on disc 2 as well. I'm wondering if they've been mastered from a 1080/50i source by someone who doesn't know what they are doing when converting one interlaced format to another, rather than taking a 576/50i SD 16:9 video master (downconverted by a decent downconverter) and mastering from an SD interlaced source directly?

Also - the audio bitrate is lousy, Dolby 5.1 at 256kbps is miserable. Comparing it to my BBC HD 384k and my SVT HD 640k off-air recordings it sounds AWFUL.

The fact that Disc 2 is different to Disc 1 and 3 makes it appear NOT to be a post-production decision but a mastering error. Amazon e-mailed me to say the release date had changed - I wonder if this disc has had a number of problems?

Really disappointing though - as is the total silence from CMC after my e-mail, and Eurovision.TV for that matter.

My discs are definitely mangled - 25p motion all over 1 and 3, with a mix of 50i and 25p on disc 2 (you can see it change clearly at 1:41:34 - one frame after the wideshot after the sting). All of the discs have a "softness" that wasn't present on the BBC One/BBC Three broadcasts - and obviously wasn't there on BBC HD and SVT HD.

The sound is also dire - the compression artefacts are horrific. Sounds almost like AM radio at times.



Suspect it is a rights thing. There are issues with some older contests and the way that the orchestras and performers were contracted which may cause problems for commercial releases.



Yep - I've got fond memories from Kyiv 2005.

Just had a closer look at Disc 2 and the transition from 50i to 25p motion.

At 1.41.34, there is the Eurovision sting (50i), a crane shot of the green room (50i), and then they cut to the presenters. The first frame of the presenters is a slightly different aspect ratio (a bit taller) to the subsequent stuff (which appears to be a tiny bit letterboxed) and there is a jump after this frame.

I wonder if they have had issues with converting 1920x1080 / 1920x1088 to 720x576 / 702 x 576 and have got their pixel aspect ratios and de-interlace/re-interlace stuff wrong.

Sometimes to convert from a 1920x1080 frame within a 1920x1088 compressed stream (1080 is not divisible by 16, 1088 is) - to 702x576 within a 720x576 frame you de-interlace to 1920x1080/50p frames and then re-interlace to 720x576/50i rather than doing a scale of the 1920x540 fields to 720x288 fields.

UK televoting and jury results for both the final and semi final 2.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/eurovision/news/2010/may/uk_voting.shtml

Interesting how many songs are in one of the voting lists only - though not unexpected.

Glad that the UK public liked Iceland - thought it was a pity that they didn't get any votes from us when the jury was added into the mix. Also very pleased that the UK liked Ireland so much - I think Niamh was hard done by this year. It was a good song sung well IMHO - and deserved to do a lot better in the wider contest.

I just got a reply about the Eurovision 2010 DVD set (I sent an email again yesterday saying I hadn't received a reply yet). This is what I got in an email:
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Thank you for your e-mail.

We're quite unhappy to learn that the ESC10 DVD does not meet your expectations. Therefore, we have just completed a test of the DVDs on our own machinery as well as we have addressed the authoring studio about it. Below please find our feedback.

We are not able to locate any black bars neither below nor above the picture at the timeslot in question.

The shows are as you mention yourself produced in HD, but are authored for DVD release solely in SD. The decision to go with 25Hz motion has been made in an attempt to achieve the best possible outcome for the majority of consumers. Whether that decision is the best one we feel is a matter of preference, but our objective has been to create the best result for the many progressive-scan medias such as LCD screens and projectors.

The 50Hz motion that happens on DISC 2 was unintended and an unfortunate error on our part. Our objective was to maintain 25Hz motion.

To this date we have not received other complaints about the DVDs, so we hope that there is a general satisfaction with the product. Hence we have no intentions of re-authoring the shows and subsequently we cannot replace your discs. However, we will take your complaint under advisement for next year's DVD and be very careful to continuously deliver a high quality product for everybody to enjoy.

Thank you once again for your inquiry.

Med venlig hilsen/Best regards
[]....
___________________________________________________________________________________
Business & Legal Affairs Coordinator, ESC 2010 Coordinator (CMC)

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That is what I got after I emailed one of the EBU email addresses. Also my email to them about it didn't mention HD despite what it says.

I had a similar reply - but as I hadn't mentioned Disc 2 in my e-mail they didn't mention it, and they said they'd had only two complaints about the 25Hz processing.

I also pointed out that 256kbps for a 5.1 Dolby soundtrack is woeful (particularly as previous releases have been 448kbps), and the argument about progressive displays is bilge as if that were an issue the show would be broadcast in 25p... TVs that are progressive have de-interlacers - it isn't the job of DVD mastering to optimise for those with poor de-interlacers.

I pointed them, also, to the amazon.co.uk website where there are a number of complaints about the film-effect and poor sound and vision quality.

Hopefully they won't do the same next year.

Interestingly they replied saying that they would take another look - I think me pointing out the obvious glitch on disc 2 and questioning the sound quality may have meant they took me a bit more seriously (along with a few other elements to my e-mail) and they have said they will look again at the mastering once their technical team are back from Summer holidays.

To be honest the mastering of the discs has been pretty poor for a while - with very poor quality MPEG2 encoding being used (and in at least one case a composite rather than component source). I suspect I could do a better job myself...

I'm wondering if there was a mastering error - hence the release delay - but they decided to live with it assuming we wouldn't notice. My guess is that they decided to master from an HD 1080i source but got the SD downconversion wrong...

Just had an update from the DVD publishers, saying that they've decided to ditch the mastering studio they used this year for next year's discs as the studio have not been able to justify some decisions that caused the technical issues with this year's releases. (Presumably - why the audio is encoded at such a dreadfully low bitrate, and why the motion is inconsistently handled, and mangled so badly...)

It sounds as if getting a recording of the contest in a format that the mastering studio could handle might have been not without issue.

I think the EBU may have got involved...

My gut feeling is that the mastering house created the "progressive is better for flat panels" excuse when they realised that there was a problem with the discs - and that initially the publishers, not knowing that this was an excuse, just passed this on.

However when I followed up with a "why is it inconsistent, why was that decision taken when the live broadcast isn't 25p, and why does the audio sound so dreadful?" to the publishers they replaied and agreed to chase when people were back from holiday.

That's good news for next year's DVD - if they decide to stay with the current publisher. It's a shame they won't be re-authoring and recalling this year's DVDs. Hopefully that means next year's DVD will be a lot better and will be 50Hz. Though of course I hope they will release something even better than DVD

Belarus were, in my honest opinion, far superior to Turkey. "Butterflies" by 3+2 was a sweet, soothing song that deserved to be in the top ten. On the other hand, "We Could Be The Same" by maNga (Turkey) sounded like nauseating trash to me (at least the song itself didn't sound up to much). Quite frankly, I feel Turkey should have finished second last, or better still not qualified (I personally feel the entries by Netherlands, Sweden, Bulgaria and Croatia were better, and deserved the place in the final taken by Turkey). Did Turkey's entry have a memorable dance routine in each chorus, which helped the song reach 170 points and second place? For the reason explained below, I had to close my eyes each chorus of the Turkish song.


I hear what you say, but haven't you considered people who are affected by strobe lighting? I for one had to close my eyes every chorus of the Turkish song due to the strobe lighting. Deprive me and thousands of other affected viewers from watching the song in its entirety? Isn't that discrimination? What do you think the last UK Government passed the Disability Discrimination Act for? Over on YouTube, I've watched past ESC entries from the 1980s. They managed without strobe lighting then, why do certain countries feel they need it now?


Really? To me the Ukranian song sounded like a cat screeching at times. I found it a very disappointing entry compared to Verka Serduchka's "Dancing Lasha Tumbai" in 2007. Quite frankly, I think the entries from the Netherlands, Sweden, Bulgaria and Croatia were all far superior to Ukraine's entry, and one of them deserved the place in the final that Ukraine took.

I think Belarus were better than Turkey too.

I think the Turkey song needed some lighting effects but they should probably have toned down the flashing lights quite a lot, maybe they could have used some laser lights too (since it was supposed to be futuristic), as long as it didn't make it hard to watch for people. At least it didn't have (intentionally) bad camera work as well like Ukraine 2009.

I didn't like Ukraine's singing either, it sounded a bit like shouting.