DVB-T Dongle

[Mike O'Dell]

The first HD imagery I ever saw was at a SMPTE meeting in NYC.
It was held in The Ed Sullivan Theatre (where Letterman is these days)
and they were shooting various HD test reels. MTV's "Unplugged" was
taping there in HD as some of the test material.

The playback was done with a pair of *big* Barco projectors that
were scanline-matched side-by-side to create one big image on a
really reflective screen.

The speakers gave several great talks on "how HD isn't just NTSC with
bigger pictures". They told a number of great stories, many of which
centered around the impact of NHK's taping of a season of the
Metropolitan Opera in HD for broadcast in Japan. They brought over
a metric butt-load of equipment including their two-van mobile HD
plant. Cameras were Sony and Ikegami i believe - memory is foggy.

The best stories, though, centered around the very different color gamuts
of HD vs NTSC. Maybe it has gotten better these days, but the sensor
performance and the mathematics of the optics interacted to make for
some really ugly surprises. One entire production of the Met had to
be completely re-staged because the colors picked for the production
design were outside the HD gamut and it was BIZARRO LAND when they
looked at the playback of the tape.

The other thing which made for some very different camera direction
and stage layout was the very different depth-of-field of HD vs NTSC 
cameras.
At least back then, the "in focus" depth of field was *very* thin and
in the MTV footage (do we still use that even if it's not even on tape?)
it was essentially impossible to get the artists and the audience sitting
very close by on bleachers in focus at the same time, so there was
a lot of "creative" over-the-shoulder focus/zoom pulls going from face
closeups to the audience to get any audience response.

The one thing that I still see a lot is chroma quantizing noise. It's 
particularly
evident on "talking heads" in closeup where the skin tone is not absolutely
uniform across the face (lighting, makeup, who knows?). The "chroma jaggies"
show up producing topo maps connecting regions of constant tone.
Is that because the video is being over-compressed by Verizon or is it
being under-sampled at the station? Or is it possible to know, other than
"there's quantizing noise in the video" ??

     -mo



On 5/19/13 2:26 AM, Chip Fetrow wrote:
> That wasn't THAT early.  The first HDTV camera I saw in the wild (not 
> at NAB) was at NBC and it cost a cool $1M on its own.
>
> I got shot by it, and later got to see me walking down the hall. Nice 
> video, odd subject.
>
> --chip
>
> On May 18, 2013, at 1:00 PM, tacos-request at amrad.org wrote:
>
>> Message: 3
>> Date: Fri, 17 May 2013 16:50:09 -0400
>> From: <wb4jfi at knology.net>
>> To: "Rob Seastrom" <rs at seastrom.com>
>> Cc: tacos at amrad.org
>> Subject: Re: DVB-T Dongle
>> [...]
>> How much did those router cards cost?  To an early adopter DTV 
>> station, just
>> the HD encoder cost well over half a million dollars each.  The costs 
>> of an
>> early adopter DTV station was typically between $3.5 million and over 
>> ten
>> million, for only the transmission systems, no HD production 
>> included.  Much
>> of that equipment did not last its capital depreciation cycle. "Early
>> adopter" was an official term from the FCC, BTW.
>> Terry, WB4JFI
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