TT506

[Chip Fetrow]

That NHK demo was their early analog system.  It was quite good, but  
it was wide bandwidth.

--chip

On May 19, 2013, at 2:54 PM, tacos-request at amrad.org wrote:

> Message: 1
> Date: Sun, 19 May 2013 14:07:49 -0400
> From: Mike O'Dell <mo at ccr.org>
> To: Terry Fox <wb4jfi at knology.net>
> Cc: tacos at amrad.org
> Subject: TT506
>
> 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