Re: A final comment on the HDTV thing

On Jul 11, 1:27 pm, cur...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
OK, so I was checking it out, HDTV against normal Versus, and I have
to disagree with an earlier comment - what I saw on HDTV was clearly
better, with more detail, than what I saw on the regular channel, as
fed through Verizon FIOS. Your experience, of course, may differ.


My experience with Vs non HD (analog) feeds over the years for
European bike races has been that they have been uniformly lousy, even
by analog TV standards. Saying that their HD feed is better than that
isn't saying much at all, except that Vs has made minor improvements
on an inferior product. They appear to be applying the sharpening to
the HD signal (remember "HQ" VHS? -- same principle) after it reaches
the US, which can give the appearance of increased sharpness, but I
would bet money that the actual resolution is not even 400i, (as
opposed to 1080I HD) probably well below that. Look at the faces, not
the numbers or the buildings.

HD versions of analog programs often look better than the non HD
channel version because the digital chain is cleaner. There is very
little if any loss of resolution in a clean digital broadcast chain
between the original source and the end viewer, but there is some loss
of resolution in every link in a broadcast analog chain. If you have
ever watched a monitor during a live analog studio shoot in a control
room, the video looks amazingly good, much better than what you see at
home, but as soon as it leaves the studio, it gets worse. ( I have
spend hundreds of hours in studios as a producer watching both digital
and analog live shoots.) So what you see in the HD version of a
channel often looks better than the analog version of the same program
on the same channel, because there is less loss of quality from the
original. But, that HD version of that analog program is still just
the equivalent of good analog.

The contention that HD shots that have a lot of action always have to
lose a lot of detail and pixelate is stupidly uninformed. The reason
the Vs HD resolution is uniformly non HD (look at the faces) is
because there is not enough bandwidth in the Vs chain to support it,
so they compress the signal to fit their limitations. The more
bandwidth (and/or use of a superior encoding scheme like mpeg 4) that
is supplied the closer the broadcast gets to the theoretical maximum
resolution of the format, with virtually no loss in quality in an
action scene due to compression. Another way of looking at it is that
the more bandwidth you supply, the closer the digital signal can get
to reproducing every pixel that from the image sensor on the camera.
The less bandwidth you provide, the less detail you get because the
compressor is reproducing fewer of the actual pixels it is
receiving.

Today's portable wireless HD packages supply more than enough
bandwidth for excellent HD broadcast video quality. (If you are
actually interested in the technology, just google "wireless hd camera
transmitters") The dumbing down of the signal is coming later,
probably at the Vs satellite up link.

There is no limiting technological reason why the road shots of the
peleton (including the medium and close up shots without much action)
from the motos is uniformly so lousy and definitely not better than a
good analog broadcast. The ability to transmit *uncompressed* (or very
high bandwidth compressed) wireless HDTV signals from a potable
camera is now commonplace. it is virtually as good as a wired camera
would supply.

Vs is selling an inferior product and labeling it "HD"

Z
.

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