HD Coverage of the Olympics

[Pookie]

Once again, the opportunity to present this event in spectacular quality is lost due to bit rate caps. Some of the stuff looks great, but when the higher encode rate is needed (fast movement - I guess you don't see THAT in the Winter Olympics :rolleyes: ) the image turns into macroblock slurry.

[Enrico Ng]

Yes very true, however it depends where your source is.
If its DirecTV (like me) then you have no hope.
Back when I lived in chicago, I got an OTA feed, the quality was awesome.
This was back at the last olympics. They made the HD station 100% olympics, unfortunately this meant they repeated everything three times. Everything was also delayed about 24hrs from the SD station.
They also only had 3 commercials

[Pookie]

OTA, actually.

[woah!]

720p60 should have been the standard for this coverage. 1080i sucks at fast moving sports etc..

[davidhildreth]

720p60 should have been the standard for this coverage. 1080i sucks at fast moving sports etc..

eh, i disagree 1080i FTW
720p is for movies and such, i dont understand people's chub for progressive
i have no idea why fox does sports in 720p, its just not right


this years olympics are being shot in 1080i50 anyway, and then being converted to 1080i60 for NBC.

and yea the pixelation is a bit much at times, but at least this year almost all venues have all HD cameras. transmission problems on the first few days (becuase of storms in new york) has been the only real problem IMO

[Pookie]

1080i Would be better IF there was enough bitrate allocated to it, but 19K isn't going to cut it for bright scenes and fast motion.

I agree they did an outstanding job with the cameras and overall production. All I'm complaining about is the opportunity to be truly superior was lost in favor of showing doppler radar on PID 21 and an informercial on PID 41. That bitrate could have been allocated to the Olympics broadcast.

http://img52.imageshack.us/img52/1646/1080ix0no.png (http://imageshack.us)

[davidhildreth]

ouch, who is your affilate and how many sub channels do they run?

here is what it looks like from KTVB in Boise at 19.2Mbps
http://www.newpantheon.com/news/NBC_KTVB01.jpg
http://www.newpantheon.com/news/NBC_KTVB02.jpg

[LocalH]

eh, i disagree 1080i FTW
720p is for movies and such, i dont understand people's chub for progressive
i have no idea why fox does sports in 720p, its just not right
What?

With a high temporal resolution (such as you'd have with sports), you're only getting an effective 540 line image for each instant in time with 1080i (whether it be PAL or NTSC frame rate), albeit with 1920 pixels per line. With 720p, you're getting a full 720 line image for each instant in time, and I doubt any non-trained eye could see the difference between a width of 1280 and a width of 1920.

In this day and time, interlace is bad, bad, bad in the context of producing native HD content. The only reason it was kept in, IMO, is to make it easier to reuse existing hardware designs that are centered around processing interlaced content.

[Emp3r0r]

I agree, anybody who says 1080i is better than 720p must only watch slideshows or soap operas in 1080i. It is very rare to see action encoded well in 1080i with today's (realtime) hardware encoders. All OTA 1080i broadcasts I've seen are bitrate starved with full motion video.

So HD is only HD 60% of the time.

[davidhildreth]

What?

With a high temporal resolution (such as you'd have with sports), you're only getting an effective 540 line image for each instant in time with 1080i (whether it be PAL or NTSC frame rate), albeit with 1920 pixels per line. With 720p, you're getting a full 720 line image for each instant in time, and I doubt any non-trained eye could see the difference between a width of 1280 and a width of 1920.

In this day and time, interlace is bad, bad, bad in the context of producing native HD content. The only reason it was kept in, IMO, is to make it easier to reuse existing hardware designs that are centered around processing interlaced content.

i just dont like how the end product looks, fast motion in progressive just looks odd, thats all i was saying

[LocalH]

I still don't see how, although it's as much subjective as it is objective. I think it's possible that your mind is subconciously comparing HD to the look of sports on analog NTSC/PAL, and since a progressive signal isn't what you're "used to", you see it as slightly odd. I and a friend of mine experienced something vaguely similar recently. During NBC's first 48 hours of programming on their flagship network, crosstalk between luma and chroma was extremely high, such that any fine detail was covered with a mass of horrid red/magenta and blue/green artifacts, depending on how fine the detail was and how it was moving within the frame. Even though every analog signal that goes through the composite domain exhibits such artifacting, it took such an excessive level to really bring it to the attention of my friend's non-trained eye, such that they actually commented on it, and when it was explained that all analog TV signals have that type of noise to a much lesser degree, they asked me "Are you sure? I've never seen this before." After this, said friend has since noticed much more crosstalk in normal, everyday, clean signals. My point here is, it's as much a matter of perception as it is a matter of technical details.

From a technical perspective, progressive is closer to what you see in reality than interlaced, and so it's common sense that, objectively speaking, progressive HDTV can represent an image that is closer to reality than any interlaced signal.

[woah!]

i just dont like how the end product looks, fast motion in progressive just looks odd, thats all i was saying


it looks odd maybe because there is no motion blur like with interlaced.

i personnally like that, and it looks odd because most people are so used to seeing that motion blur that interlaced has given for many many years on tv's

dont get me wrong i have a 1080i setup but for sporting events i have to say 720p60 is better "to my eye".