ITV Discussion Thread

As far as I recall S2 was only on from 7pm and lasted til about 1am, with "coming up" slides during the day - when ITV2 was already off it's feet and offering more hours. S2 was originally trying to be a bit more offbeat and niche compared to mainstream ITV2 (Trying to pitch at the cool urban trendsetters into clubs and Beat 106 on the radio). However, it soon appeared that that business model was rubbish and people just wanted Corrie repeats etc.

I had a video cap of a 7pm weeknight junction from Grampian with Kate Fraser telling viewers for "arts, news and reviews, join Sarah Heaney for S2 Live - that's starting over on S2 now", but I can't find it anywhere. It may be on a dusty CD in a cupboard somewhere.

Anyway, the whole thing was a bit of a flop, the flagship 7pm evening show "S2 Live" tried too hard to be trendy and it didn't really work or have the all-important content (I think STV still struggles this way with The Hour etc). There's a clip on TV Ark on this page. I almost spat my tea out when I heard the top feature on that clip! Not really that difficult to see why no-one watched. The logo was pretty cool though and the short opening titles.

I'm a bit confused as to why (in the clip above) this was being shown on Scottish though. It may have been simulcast for a while. I only remember S2 being around in the Grampian/Scottish blue square ident era. (ie 2000).

Just wondering if there are likely to be rights issues for some of the content on ITV2,3,4 HD given that the programming will be behind a paywall.

For instance imports and sport, won't ITV need to acquire the free to air and pay tv rights to these now ? Perhaps there will be a lovely looking HD slide saying that for legal reasons the programme cannot be show.

Maybe the fact that the SD version is still FTA on satellite is enough. It's like the situation we have at the moment, the SD versions of ITV 2,3 and 4 are essentially pay channels on cable but no one seems to mind.

Good point or if not could they techinally not unencrypt the channel for them shows? Like IIRC Setanta did once or twice for England Highlights because of ITV not wanting to pay a high fee, Although Setanta did have a freeview slot (Top Up TV).

This makes complete sense. Commercial broadcasters all over Europe are finding it difficult to justify free-to-air high-definition, so they scramble their HD channels, while the SD versions remain free-to-air.

We've also seen this in Germany, were Astra have launched HD+ which offers the most important commercial channels in HD for a small fee. We can't rule out that the same thing happens in the UK.

Perhaps we will see a subscription HD offer based on the Freesat platform which brings basic channels (ITV2-4, C4, E4, Film4, Five) in HD for a small fee.

We can however not rule out that this will transfer to the terrestrial platform. If Ofcom decides to convert a second PSB mux to DVB-T2, it is possible that ITV and Channel 4 will have another channel for free in HD. However, I can't see that happen this half of the decade.

I think that perhaps this is the wrong economic climate to be asking people to pay extra to see FTA channels in better quality.

Next year (between Jan-April) will see VAT increases and other tax hikes take bite. Whilst they may be small, on a weekly basis, anyone who had spent £10 per month on getting their FTA channels in HD would perhaps see that as a simple sacrifice to negate the increase in the food/fuel/household budget.

It's not a difficult choice, and I know which one I'd choose.

Only they won't be paying £10 a month for FTA channels will they ? ITV2,3 & 4 will be part of the Sky HD+ subscription package, amongst the other HD offerings.

Pay TV has actually been exceptionally resilient throughout the recession, it's viewed as more of a necessity these days as people spend less on going out.

Good point, but if they don't get into it soon they never will! Plus it's better for them to have the HD versions of ITV2,3,4 and get some money from Sky rather than not lauching them and getting none at all!

Also it isn't as though it's an extra so much a month for the ITV HD channel's its already included in the Sky HD Pack. So that will be more Sky's problem than ITV's. Plus I should think this( and the fact that Sky are aiming for 50 HD channels by the end of the year) will encouarge new people to get HD.

Just to return to the question of their HD content - quite by coincidence, on my facebook stream this morning there's a discussion of Pride & Prejudice being converted to HD from a 16mm negative - rather than a 16mm print.

The ability gain HD scans from 16mm (which I didn't know you could do) suggests that there's a wealth of British programming which could be converted for HD release and broadcast.

I wouldn't necessarily expect ITV to have the resources to do this, but they could certainly buy the rights to show the content once its been adapted.

And here's a video of Pride & Prejudice's adaptation process.

http://vimeo.com/3869589

Yep - that is because the 90s BBC P&P (Colin Firth et al) - like many UK TV series - was telecined from the negatives (originally in 4:3), and edited in the VT domain, so no edited print existed to telecine. ISTR that when a 16:9 DVD was released they re-telecined the negatives, did another VT conform to match the existing 4:3 edit, and ARCed the 4:3 titles to 16:9. For the HD release I think they remade the titles.

Having watched the HD version - it does look nicer than the DVD - but the HD resolution does show the limitations of the Super 16 source material. There is a lot of noise - which is OK at Blu-ray bitrates, but which would hammer broadcast encoders running at 1/2 to 1/3 the bitrate of Bluray, and in realtime...



Yep - though Super 16 is still marginal for HD. Sure it looks nicer than in SD - but the cost benefit is less if you have to go back to camera negatives and re-conform, rather than the cheaper process of just re-telecineing a final edited print (as is the case with many US 35mm series that were cut on film)

The first HD series of Lewis was shot on Super 16 and looked awful in HD (recent re-runs reminded me of this) - but the second HD series looked a lot nicer (presumably they switched to electronic capture)



Yep - and they presumably own a LOT of 4:3 16mm series that MIGHT benefit a bit from re-mastering.

The more interesting stuff is the 60s 35mm stuff (Persuaders, Champions, Avengers, Man in a Suitcase, Randall and Hopkirk etc.) that makes up a lot of ITV4 output. Some of that may well look REALLY good in HD if transferred well.

However - without a large stock of remastered 60s, 70s and 80s content - what HD content other than ITV1 repeats, ITV1 spin-off "aftershows", and the odd sporting event, will ITV2-4 have to show? Or are they hoping that people will subscribe just to get the SD content in a watchable high-quality form rather than murky 544x576 overcompressed SD as it is broadcast now on Freeview and DSat...

When you say "electronic capture" - would these be the scanners I saw at IBC which ingest the film and do a frame cleaning pass "live" as they encode? I was pretty impressed at the speed - they were scanning and cleaning a frame every second or so.

No - that would be "film capture". The capture refers to the original recording of the light.

Electronic capture refers to CCD, CMOS or similar electronic sensors being used in E-Cinema/D-Cinema and HD video devices. Historically you might have used the word "video" - but that implies that a standard video format is being used, whereas many modern E-Cinema/D-Cinema cameras shoot in a non-standard format (different colour formats, resolutions, bit depths and log vs lin ranges) which would mean using the phrase "video" is also confusing. (Even more confusingly, one of the main standard HD video tape formats - HDCamSR - can be used as a data recorder for this stuff!) The data shot by these cameras can be recorded to tape, flash memory, hard drives etc. - but is usually stored on multiple hard drives (with a tape backup) for editing once it has left the shooting stage. (Backed up, copies taken off site etc.)

The most recent HD series of Lewis (the second broadcast in HD by ITV HD) appeared, to me, to have a cleaner "electronic" look compared to the much noisier, filmier, look of the first HD series, which made me think it had been captured electronically rather than on film.

Incidentally, the BBC won't allow any Super 16 content to be classified as HD and won't commission HD content using the format. They WILL allow 3-perf, and possibly even 2-perf, 35mm to be used though - which is I believe how some recent BBC HD film stuff has been shot.

Until this point most BBC HD drama has been captured electronically - either using HDCam or DVC Pro HD camcorders (Bleak House, Robin Hood etc.) or by using D/E-cinema cameras (Genesis, Viper, Arri D-xx, Red) etc. or more recently the hybrid Sony F35/F23 stuff, that is a half-way between the two.

When it comes to film restoration - there are many different approaches. Telecines usually run in real-time for HD output - though they can have extra facilities (ultrasonic cleaners, wet baths that have a liquid that helps mask scratches) working with them. ISTR that there is at least one device with a 4th Infra-red channel along with the Red, Green and Blue channels. The IR light is blocked by the film emulsion, but passes through where there are scratches, allowing a scratch field to be captured (and thus scratches to be detected and masked more effectively than just trying to analyse where there are "scratch-like" patterns in the video output from the telecine)

When you start moving to higher-than-HD scanning (4k etc.) then you sacrifice real-time capture for quality (you need to allow the film time to steady itself, and the optics/mechanics used for scanning need to be more accurately aligned to avoid masking the extra fine detail in variations in scanning quality)