drbuzz0
29th August 2010, 17:53
I've noticed something rather bothersome when watching HDTV programing: A great deal of up-converted footage is improperly and just plain horribly converted. At times, it's not even properly deinterlaced and thus creates horrible interlace artifacts on the screen.
Obviously, when a program is broadcast in high definition, the footage used is always best sourced from native HD stock. SD programing will never look as good as HD, no matter how much processing and scaling you throw at it. Still, there are times when only SD footage exists and it has to be used for a given program.
I noticed this several times when watching documentaries that contained older video, taken, at the time, with standard definition video cameras. On a program about aircraft on the Discovery HD channel, they repeatedly used footage taken during the first Gulf War in the early 1990's.
Since the footage is SD, it's not going to have the same sharpness and level of detail as HD footage, but it still can be scaled to the higher resolution and, if done properly, ought to look okay. However, when I saw it, it was obvious that it had been scaled (poorly I may add) in combined field mode without any deinterlacing. It had horrible mouseteeth that are damn near impossible to remove after the video has been scaled like that.
I've seen worse, though. On some programing, World War II footage was shown in a similarly badly interlaced and poorly scaled format. This is even more irritating, since the original footage was taken with cinema film (not television) and thus is naively progressive. Whoever edited the program was apparently working with a telecined SD version of the original footage. They should have attempted to obtain a better telecine of the footage at higher resolution, but if that was not possible, they should have at least known enough to detelecin the footage back to progressive before inserting it into an HD program.
Of course, this is also seen when SD programing is aired on HD channels. My local Fox affiliate broadcasts in 720p, but from time to time they show older programing like reruns of 1990's sitcoms, old Simpsons episodes and that kind of thing. Without exception, they're always very very very poorly scaled. They look like complete crap. They look so bad that the quality is considerably better when I switch the channel to my cable's analog SD version of Fox and view the same program as up-converted by my television set.
Then there are those damn black bars on the side that they often insert. This might not bother me so much if half the time they didn't end up getting the aspect ratio wrong anyway. The one example that has to take the cake is a program I saw, while flipping the channels, which was of a widescreen program, letterboxed to 4:3 and then letter boxed again to 16:9. So you had program formatted by adding horizontal letter-boxing and then formatted again by using vertical letter-boxing. What you're left with is the video in a small rectangle in the center of the screen.
What the hell gives? One would think that the editors and broadcast techs who run things would know about interlacing and that you don't convert 480i to 720p without deinterlacing. You certainly don't convert 480i to 1080i without doing anything more than a simple bicubic resize. Don't they have some idea about the issue of resolutions?
Geez! Do the job right! It isn't that hard!
Obviously, when a program is broadcast in high definition, the footage used is always best sourced from native HD stock. SD programing will never look as good as HD, no matter how much processing and scaling you throw at it. Still, there are times when only SD footage exists and it has to be used for a given program.
I noticed this several times when watching documentaries that contained older video, taken, at the time, with standard definition video cameras. On a program about aircraft on the Discovery HD channel, they repeatedly used footage taken during the first Gulf War in the early 1990's.
Since the footage is SD, it's not going to have the same sharpness and level of detail as HD footage, but it still can be scaled to the higher resolution and, if done properly, ought to look okay. However, when I saw it, it was obvious that it had been scaled (poorly I may add) in combined field mode without any deinterlacing. It had horrible mouseteeth that are damn near impossible to remove after the video has been scaled like that.
I've seen worse, though. On some programing, World War II footage was shown in a similarly badly interlaced and poorly scaled format. This is even more irritating, since the original footage was taken with cinema film (not television) and thus is naively progressive. Whoever edited the program was apparently working with a telecined SD version of the original footage. They should have attempted to obtain a better telecine of the footage at higher resolution, but if that was not possible, they should have at least known enough to detelecin the footage back to progressive before inserting it into an HD program.
Of course, this is also seen when SD programing is aired on HD channels. My local Fox affiliate broadcasts in 720p, but from time to time they show older programing like reruns of 1990's sitcoms, old Simpsons episodes and that kind of thing. Without exception, they're always very very very poorly scaled. They look like complete crap. They look so bad that the quality is considerably better when I switch the channel to my cable's analog SD version of Fox and view the same program as up-converted by my television set.
Then there are those damn black bars on the side that they often insert. This might not bother me so much if half the time they didn't end up getting the aspect ratio wrong anyway. The one example that has to take the cake is a program I saw, while flipping the channels, which was of a widescreen program, letterboxed to 4:3 and then letter boxed again to 16:9. So you had program formatted by adding horizontal letter-boxing and then formatted again by using vertical letter-boxing. What you're left with is the video in a small rectangle in the center of the screen.
What the hell gives? One would think that the editors and broadcast techs who run things would know about interlacing and that you don't convert 480i to 720p without deinterlacing. You certainly don't convert 480i to 1080i without doing anything more than a simple bicubic resize. Don't they have some idea about the issue of resolutions?
Geez! Do the job right! It isn't that hard!