Video Asylum

Posted by petew (A) on April 04, 2002 at 13:09:36

In Reply to: Petew: So that's why TNG looks like crap !?!? posted by Iguana Man on April 04, 2002 at 10:44:09:

before I went plasma i had a regular, non-digital 27" TV hooked up to my satellite dish. the satellite signal is so much better than the cable.

now for a long time everybody recognized that any "live" broadcast, particularly the local evening news shows (use these shows to adjust your black and white levels (picture/contrast) and color saturation and hue if you don't have pro calibration gear) or C-span (i love C-span), had a much better picture than regular network programing. what this shows is that the NTSC standard TV signal is pretty darn good, and it also shows that almost nobody is broadcasting it--everybody is selling us something less, perhaps 240 lines, maybe even 200...or even less.

when you blow these old "broadcast quality" pro video tapes up to the size of these 40 or 50 inch screens you see a whole lot of crap--you see all the noise on the origional video tape and all the noise the signal has picked-up along the way.

but a show that was filmed and sent digitally in the NTSC standard looks better than ever. Check out the Three Stooges.

You can tell right away what is live, what is film, and what is video tape.

but wait till you see off-the-air high definition on an HD capable set (that has been professionally calibrated, because they don't come from the factory properly set-up).

oh, more bad news...the high definition cameras are very expensive, and each one is probably calibrated a bit differently than every other one...so every HD broadcast will be a little bit "off"

so it's still not as good as film...

we've just added another layer of complexity by which we can screw things up beyond any understanding.