NBC olympic coverage

is it just me or does the footage we're seeing look remarkably grainy? im also seeing a jerkiness in the playback (especially slow-mo)...

almost like theyre shooting it all in HDV and downconverting it... as these were two of my problems during my HDV downconvert tests...

What feed are you watching? SD or HD?

I think the "delivery" method has more to do with this than the aquisition. I have Direct TV via satelite, and all of their HD stuff suffers from pixellation on fade ins, high motion, etc. I'm sure it looked good leaving the source, but by the time it gets to my house, yikes! I'd be curious how it's looking from a direct terrestrial broadcast.

SD on my plasma always looks like crap! HD looks fine unless of course there's lots of motion (like in the olympics). I too noticed that whenever they go to "archive" footage, the grain and motion artifacts increase significantly.

Chalk it up to "one step forward, two steps back"!

Mark

im catching the SD stuff on a standard 10year old sony CRT tv during the late evening hours - last night, the footage that i was referring to was the womens mogul freestyle - airing in the normal SNL timeslot.

Haven't really noticed. But got to admit I LOVED the disco music as part of the March of the Athletes. It was wonderfully bizarre.

That and yoko ono made for an Acid flashback moment, let me tell ya.

My family headed over to the office on friday night to watch the opening ceremonies on our 1080i display. We arrived early and caught some downhill runs and I was very impressed. I didn't see any noticeable artifacts from about 8 feet away on the high motion stuff and the fades. Up close of course the compression artifacts and interlacing was very apparent. Most of that spots that ran that night were in 1080i HD also. Very impressive stuff. We're just receiving free DTV signal over the air from our local NBC affiliate.

Then the opening ceremonies came on and it looked horrible in comparison. The cameras were often zoomed in very tight and there were artifacts and grain galore. Low light was not a strength of the cameras being used. On top of that there was a good amount of red costumes and those looked like they were 4:1:1 or worse (8:1:1 anyone?)

What is really odd in DTV right now is the lack of consistency. You'll see a show that looks great, and then a spot or promo comes on that looks like it was an 320x240 highly compressed web video or worse. I'm shocked that people are buying into this so early when a lot of the content looks so bad. The olympic opening ceremonies was a great example, it seemed to me they were switching between HD and SD cameras. It was very dramatic.

At home however, we are watching SD on a 20-year-old 19" CRT something-brand and looks fine. They are definitely originating this in HD because many titles are cut off because they are violating safe.

My 2 cents.

- T. Payton
OneCreative, Albuquerque, NM