Any station that's not ready by now deserves to have its license revoked. Feb 17th was only the latest of many, MANY cutoff dates that this has been through, and the Feb 17 cutoff was set back in 2005.
TV trucks for major shows like this have backup generators. Cameras and microphones are powered from the truck, so the whole show can keep going if the stadium blacks out, though with no lights in the stadium or the announcer booth there wouldn't be much to look at.
"Routine" shows will run off stadium power since it's cheaper. I've got a couple stories of this backfiring, one of which I was present for... First story is a major entertainment awards show, the truck required 200 Amps of service, so that's what they ordered. During setup all of a sudden their breaker trips and the trucks go dead. They find out that the hotel lobby is on the same circuit as the loading dock, and the power outage coincided with a cleaning lady turning on her vacuum cleaner. Yup, the hoover put them over the edge of their power service. They got that fixed before the show and it went off without a hitch otherwise. Or at least as well as any live TV production can go.
Second story is an NHL game during a thunderstorm. Most of the crew was at lunch, I was alone in the truck working. The audio guy had some music playing through the speakers. All of a sudden the music stopped, I looked up, and saw the entire wall of monitors in the truck do a synchronized flicker and all the equipment rebooted. It was quite the image, I can tell you... I ran to the lunch room even faster than normal around then.
When was the last time you saw several minutes of credits on broadcast TV? They typically either speed them up, squeeze them into a box, or take the content of the credits and display them in their own graphics.
Explain what the refocus/dissolve stuff and pulling off the polarized lenses was. Tech explanation please.
A "dissolve" is a type of transition between different shots. It's when the image from the first shot blends smoothly into the second. It works fine in 2D, but in 3D it creates a very confusing and uncomfortable sensation. The "polarized lenses" refers to the 3D glasses that the people in the theater were wearing. Other comments in this article explain that part already, so I won't here. The article talks about people pulling them off because of the uncomfortable sensations created by mismanagement of the 3D effect in the broadcast.
The difference here is that the technology behind the first down line relies on stationary cameras with encoders in the pan/tilt heads and zoom lenses in order to figure out where to draw the line, as well as human operators carefully choosing key colors to make sure that the players occlude the line properly. The Stanford technology works with moving cameraout any encoders and handles occlusion automatically.
That's old-school chemical photography thinking. Now you want the sharpest frames you can get.
Pure nonsense. Perfectly sharp frames with no motion blur look unnatural and distracting. Also, look at animation and video games, where pictures are being created from scratch and can look however their creators want them to. Video games are starting to use motion blur effects for camera movement now that it's cheap enough to do it (see Valve Software's latest iteration of the Source engine, released with the Orange Box), and 3D animation has always attempted to incorporate motion blur whenever in the budget (i.e. any major motion picture release).
Any blur can be added later if desired.
What benefit is there to shooting without motion blur, then adding it back in post? It's an unneccessary complication for the workflow. Big productions might have big budgets but that's no reason to waste money that could be spent in an area with actual tangible benefits.
The coming technology is smart frame interpolation/morphing.
Your "coming technology" is more expensive and complicated than just shooting it the way you want it to look in the first place, and also adds time and expense to the workflow.
This gets you, among other things, arbitrary slow slow-motion. This is already being used in some sports coverage.
Which sports coverage is that? If you're referring to the super-slow-motion looks we've been seeing on high end shows like the superbowl and world series, those are in fact special cameras that actually shoot at extreme frame rates, not post production tricks. And before you ask, yes I work in broadcast sports production and have seen these cameras in use. The problem with trying to use post production tricks on live broadcasts is that if you're going to show a replay, it has to hit the air within seconds of the end of the play, and must finish airing before the start of the next play. Post production tricks that require rendering are right out in this situation.
The sports people want to sell ESPN HD Football, and the people who buy that want detail.
The people who buy that want good sports coverage. In any case, say you actually do shutter up all the cameras so motion is perfectly sharp. The only detail you actually gain is in objects that are moving, because static portions of the screen won't be motion blurred. In other words, the only extra detail you actually get is in areas of the screen that will be different in 1/60th of a second anyway! Any extra detail you'd get over a properly motion blurred scene flashes by too fast for you to perceive it! So why not just let it look natural?
With all that resolution, you're going to need either a tripod, Steadicam gyros, or stabilization processing. Stabilization processing won't help if the "shutter time" (really integration time) is more than a millisecond or two; the individual frames will be blurred.
This is only an issue in still photography. In motion photography, motion blur is actually desirable because it functions as a form of temporal antialiasing, allowing frames with motion to blend into each other and create the illusion of continuous motion. Faster shutter speeds that suppress motion blur are used more as an effect rather than being the norm.
High resolution with big enough collecting optics to get the shutter time down to 1ms or so, plus rate gyros to get info about camera movement, would be a useful option for news gathering. Just point in the direction of the action, take a bigger frame than you're going to use, and fix it up in post.
Um, no. Newsgathering is all about having the most efficient workflow to get footage from the field to the air as possible. What you would propose would require hours in the edit suite for all of the stories that have to make the air, for no appreciable benefits in any other part of the workflow. Believe me, you're already seeing the best possible footage that news shooters can get under the constraints they work under.
Ipod Touch is much much more than an MP3 player, I don't use mine for music at ALL. For me it's more about having email, internet, youtube etc. access in my pocket without having to haul a laptop.
So in other words, the people with the resources to raise children in the best way possible are the ones who aren't having them. I love the human race sometimes.
KARE in Minneapolis? Otherwise, it might be a pretty similar situation across all of NBC's O&Os. (Owned and Operated, meaning the network owns the affiliate)
However, the dirty little secret was that all of their cameras were 480p
There is no professional broadcast video gear that operates in 480p. You were probably actually seeing standard def (that's 480i) gear upconverted to 1080i. The local NBC affiliate does something similar... They at least have their studio cameras and graphics in HD, but they haven't upgraded all of their newsgathering cameras and editing systems yet so all of their packages are upconverted SD. It's pretty ugly actually.
1. What is the standard, uncompromised compression rate for full HD video? eg. The rate of compression on a Blue Ray disc.
The uncompressed HD signals flying around in a TV truck or control room are 1.5 gbps. Blu-Ray compresses that down to 36 mbps or so using an MPEG-4 class codec.
2. What is the standard compression rate for cable HD video? eg. What I can expect from Time Warner.
Last I saw, the industry standard was to fit 3 MPEG-2 HD channels into each 38 mbps cable channel.
3. What does Apple and Netflix (if they have a service) think they can get away with? eg. What they'll stream to me when I buy/rent something from their movie service.
Netflix streams in Standard Def.
ABC streams 720p from their web site at 2 mbps using H.264 and it looks pretty good. At least the quality of OTA HD (which is MPEG-2).
4. What is the bit rate or internet throughput required to stream true uncompromised HD video? I ask this, because I am in doubt as to whether most cable and DSL connections are even fast enough.
Again, HD-SDI (the professional uncompressed video standard) is 1.5 gbps. One video signal requires its own coaxial cable and has a maximum run length of 300 feet. The dirty little secret, however, is that once the signal leaves the production truck, it's MPEG-2 up to the satellite (36 mbps max) or over fiber (typically 100-200 mbits, but only available from select venues) to the network's master control.
Every element of a composite counts separately. At minimum, you're talking about a guy in front of a greenscreen and a background plate, which takes up twice the space of the background plate alone.
When I disabled texting I completely stopped hearing from certain friends. Same thing with MySpaceBook, because I don't spend all my spare time friending and commenting people I drop off their radar. Oh noes, how did we ever have friends before computers?
Considering that being blonde requires a specific combination of genes that make your hair blonde,
And being black doesn't require a specific combination of genes?
Anyway, my point here is that race is not any more relevant a characteristic to judge someone by than what color their hair is or any number of other superficial characteristics that someone is born with. What this survey should have done was analyze the socio economic backgrounds of gamers compared to game developers, which would produce a far more relevant comparison. Instead it took the easy way out and pulled the race card. THAT is racist.
Quick, do a study about how many blonde-haired people play games vs. develop them. The video game industry is blondeist!
Seriously, why do we still use race as a primary factor in surveys when what they're looking for is economic and social factors? That's where the racism is happening, not in the hiring practices of developers.
I agree, it's not fair to get paid over and over again for the same bit of work, but I really don't see a better way to fairly determine how to compensate an artist except by how popular their work is. Honestly the last thing I'm advocating is some kind of system that extracts every last cent by looking for every possible place that a song is entering someone's ears. That's not my intention at all. I just want the big pictures to line up, how rich an artist is should roughly correspond with how much of a cultural impact they have made. I also want to make sure that nobody can get rich using an artist's work while the artist him/herself makes nothing or very little. If your livelihood is made using the artistic works of others, the people who created those works deserve at least something for creating the works that you're making money off of. This isn't unfair, at least not in my opinion.
The solution there is pretty simple. The first print is sold for an appropriate cost under the assumption it will be duplicated to all the chain's cinemas.
That's asking the theater to assume the risk that the movie will make money. It would encourage theaters to only purchase bland, inoffensive movies that are guaranteed to appeal to the lowest common denominator, or at least edit the movies they receive until they are. Remember without copyright there would be no reason a theater could not edit or censor the movies, so on top of the layer of suits at the studio ruining movies you also have a layer of suits at the theaters! And if another theater chain doesn't want to pay the studio the full amount for a print, they can go to another theater chain who will be only happy to sell one of their copies for, say, half the price the studio is demanding.
No, they just need a way of making sure their prints can only be shown in approved cinemas who have paid. Ie: DRM. Given the relatively miniscule number and variability of customers, setting up an effective system would be child's play.
Haha, I never thought I'd see someone on Slashdot actually advocate DRM. No, DRM doesn't work. All it would do is create a market for DRM-bypassing projectors, which there would be a huge financial incentive to manufacture.
Well it would still require either the same provisions for "works made for hire" we have now, or if multiple people contribute to one thing like a piece of software, that multitude of people corporately own the copyright so if just a couple people withdraw their license it's no big deal because the majority of the people who worked on it are still okay.
What makes you think Lord of the Rings wouldn't have turned a profit without copyright ? Are you seriously suggesting the millions of people who saw it in the cinema would have just watched a dodgy handycam recording of it at home on their TV ?
The entire reason movie studios make money off of box office revenue is because they have a licensing deal with the theaters. That licensing deal requires a notion of copyright and intellectual property to be valid. Otherwise the studio would only be able to charge the theater for a physical movie print, which a theater chain could duplicate amongst all their theaters rather than having to buy more than one print from the studio.
The only way a studio could take a cut of box office revenue without copyright would be to own the entire vertical distribution chain. Every movie studio would have to build and maintain an entire theater chain, and consumers would have to go to separate theaters to see a 20th Century Fox movie as opposed to a Disney movie. Even then DVD distribution would be nearly impossible to make profitable if people could just press their own copies of the DVDs.
I abandoned Comcast for a "lower bandwidth" DSL plan because the local DSL ISP doesn't throttle. The final straw with Comcast was when I was trying to FTP something up to my web space and the connection kept resetting. They were throttling freaking FTP!
Your post is so irrational and paranoia-laden it barely deserves a response, but here goes...
All I ask is that if you profit off of my hard work, I want to be compensated in return for your use of my work. If you have a job, you are doing exactly the same thing! You are performing work for the company which helps it make money, and in return you are compensated. Yet when I want to do EXACTLY THE SAME THING with my music, I'm doing something "offensive"? That's complete BS.
I agree that copyright should be much, much weaker, but not eliminated entirely.
Slashdot Mirror
Any station that's not ready by now deserves to have its license revoked. Feb 17th was only the latest of many, MANY cutoff dates that this has been through, and the Feb 17 cutoff was set back in 2005.
TV trucks for major shows like this have backup generators. Cameras and microphones are powered from the truck, so the whole show can keep going if the stadium blacks out, though with no lights in the stadium or the announcer booth there wouldn't be much to look at.
"Routine" shows will run off stadium power since it's cheaper. I've got a couple stories of this backfiring, one of which I was present for... First story is a major entertainment awards show, the truck required 200 Amps of service, so that's what they ordered. During setup all of a sudden their breaker trips and the trucks go dead. They find out that the hotel lobby is on the same circuit as the loading dock, and the power outage coincided with a cleaning lady turning on her vacuum cleaner. Yup, the hoover put them over the edge of their power service. They got that fixed before the show and it went off without a hitch otherwise. Or at least as well as any live TV production can go.
Second story is an NHL game during a thunderstorm. Most of the crew was at lunch, I was alone in the truck working. The audio guy had some music playing through the speakers. All of a sudden the music stopped, I looked up, and saw the entire wall of monitors in the truck do a synchronized flicker and all the equipment rebooted. It was quite the image, I can tell you... I ran to the lunch room even faster than normal around then.
When was the last time you saw several minutes of credits on broadcast TV? They typically either speed them up, squeeze them into a box, or take the content of the credits and display them in their own graphics.
Digital transmission will increase in power once the analog towers are powered down.
Explain what the refocus/dissolve stuff and pulling off the polarized lenses was. Tech explanation please.
A "dissolve" is a type of transition between different shots. It's when the image from the first shot blends smoothly into the second. It works fine in 2D, but in 3D it creates a very confusing and uncomfortable sensation. The "polarized lenses" refers to the 3D glasses that the people in the theater were wearing. Other comments in this article explain that part already, so I won't here. The article talks about people pulling them off because of the uncomfortable sensations created by mismanagement of the 3D effect in the broadcast.
The difference here is that the technology behind the first down line relies on stationary cameras with encoders in the pan/tilt heads and zoom lenses in order to figure out where to draw the line, as well as human operators carefully choosing key colors to make sure that the players occlude the line properly. The Stanford technology works with moving cameraout any encoders and handles occlusion automatically.
That's old-school chemical photography thinking. Now you want the sharpest frames you can get.
Pure nonsense. Perfectly sharp frames with no motion blur look unnatural and distracting. Also, look at animation and video games, where pictures are being created from scratch and can look however their creators want them to. Video games are starting to use motion blur effects for camera movement now that it's cheap enough to do it (see Valve Software's latest iteration of the Source engine, released with the Orange Box), and 3D animation has always attempted to incorporate motion blur whenever in the budget (i.e. any major motion picture release).
Any blur can be added later if desired.
What benefit is there to shooting without motion blur, then adding it back in post? It's an unneccessary complication for the workflow. Big productions might have big budgets but that's no reason to waste money that could be spent in an area with actual tangible benefits.
The coming technology is smart frame interpolation/morphing.
Your "coming technology" is more expensive and complicated than just shooting it the way you want it to look in the first place, and also adds time and expense to the workflow.
This gets you, among other things, arbitrary slow slow-motion. This is already being used in some sports coverage.
Which sports coverage is that? If you're referring to the super-slow-motion looks we've been seeing on high end shows like the superbowl and world series, those are in fact special cameras that actually shoot at extreme frame rates, not post production tricks. And before you ask, yes I work in broadcast sports production and have seen these cameras in use. The problem with trying to use post production tricks on live broadcasts is that if you're going to show a replay, it has to hit the air within seconds of the end of the play, and must finish airing before the start of the next play. Post production tricks that require rendering are right out in this situation.
The sports people want to sell ESPN HD Football, and the people who buy that want detail.
The people who buy that want good sports coverage. In any case, say you actually do shutter up all the cameras so motion is perfectly sharp. The only detail you actually gain is in objects that are moving, because static portions of the screen won't be motion blurred. In other words, the only extra detail you actually get is in areas of the screen that will be different in 1/60th of a second anyway! Any extra detail you'd get over a properly motion blurred scene flashes by too fast for you to perceive it! So why not just let it look natural?
With all that resolution, you're going to need either a tripod, Steadicam gyros, or stabilization processing. Stabilization processing won't help if the "shutter time" (really integration time) is more than a millisecond or two; the individual frames will be blurred. This is only an issue in still photography. In motion photography, motion blur is actually desirable because it functions as a form of temporal antialiasing, allowing frames with motion to blend into each other and create the illusion of continuous motion. Faster shutter speeds that suppress motion blur are used more as an effect rather than being the norm. High resolution with big enough collecting optics to get the shutter time down to 1ms or so, plus rate gyros to get info about camera movement, would be a useful option for news gathering. Just point in the direction of the action, take a bigger frame than you're going to use, and fix it up in post. Um, no. Newsgathering is all about having the most efficient workflow to get footage from the field to the air as possible. What you would propose would require hours in the edit suite for all of the stories that have to make the air, for no appreciable benefits in any other part of the workflow. Believe me, you're already seeing the best possible footage that news shooters can get under the constraints they work under.
Ipod Touch is much much more than an MP3 player, I don't use mine for music at ALL. For me it's more about having email, internet, youtube etc. access in my pocket without having to haul a laptop.
Once you have money you start having less kids.
So in other words, the people with the resources to raise children in the best way possible are the ones who aren't having them. I love the human race sometimes.
KARE in Minneapolis? Otherwise, it might be a pretty similar situation across all of NBC's O&Os. (Owned and Operated, meaning the network owns the affiliate)
However, the dirty little secret was that all of their cameras were 480p There is no professional broadcast video gear that operates in 480p. You were probably actually seeing standard def (that's 480i) gear upconverted to 1080i. The local NBC affiliate does something similar... They at least have their studio cameras and graphics in HD, but they haven't upgraded all of their newsgathering cameras and editing systems yet so all of their packages are upconverted SD. It's pretty ugly actually.
1. What is the standard, uncompromised compression rate for full HD video? eg. The rate of compression on a Blue Ray disc.
The uncompressed HD signals flying around in a TV truck or control room are 1.5 gbps. Blu-Ray compresses that down to 36 mbps or so using an MPEG-4 class codec.
2. What is the standard compression rate for cable HD video? eg. What I can expect from Time Warner.
Last I saw, the industry standard was to fit 3 MPEG-2 HD channels into each 38 mbps cable channel.
3. What does Apple and Netflix (if they have a service) think they can get away with? eg. What they'll stream to me when I buy/rent something from their movie service. Netflix streams in Standard Def. ABC streams 720p from their web site at 2 mbps using H.264 and it looks pretty good. At least the quality of OTA HD (which is MPEG-2). 4. What is the bit rate or internet throughput required to stream true uncompromised HD video? I ask this, because I am in doubt as to whether most cable and DSL connections are even fast enough. Again, HD-SDI (the professional uncompressed video standard) is 1.5 gbps. One video signal requires its own coaxial cable and has a maximum run length of 300 feet. The dirty little secret, however, is that once the signal leaves the production truck, it's MPEG-2 up to the satellite (36 mbps max) or over fiber (typically 100-200 mbits, but only available from select venues) to the network's master control.
Every element of a composite counts separately. At minimum, you're talking about a guy in front of a greenscreen and a background plate, which takes up twice the space of the background plate alone.
An 80 attosecond pulse of light is about 29 nanometers wide. Google "The speed of light in nanometers per attosecond) and multiply that by 80.
When I disabled texting I completely stopped hearing from certain friends. Same thing with MySpaceBook, because I don't spend all my spare time friending and commenting people I drop off their radar. Oh noes, how did we ever have friends before computers?
Considering that being blonde requires a specific combination of genes that make your hair blonde, And being black doesn't require a specific combination of genes? Anyway, my point here is that race is not any more relevant a characteristic to judge someone by than what color their hair is or any number of other superficial characteristics that someone is born with. What this survey should have done was analyze the socio economic backgrounds of gamers compared to game developers, which would produce a far more relevant comparison. Instead it took the easy way out and pulled the race card. THAT is racist.
Quick, do a study about how many blonde-haired people play games vs. develop them. The video game industry is blondeist! Seriously, why do we still use race as a primary factor in surveys when what they're looking for is economic and social factors? That's where the racism is happening, not in the hiring practices of developers.
I agree, it's not fair to get paid over and over again for the same bit of work, but I really don't see a better way to fairly determine how to compensate an artist except by how popular their work is. Honestly the last thing I'm advocating is some kind of system that extracts every last cent by looking for every possible place that a song is entering someone's ears. That's not my intention at all. I just want the big pictures to line up, how rich an artist is should roughly correspond with how much of a cultural impact they have made. I also want to make sure that nobody can get rich using an artist's work while the artist him/herself makes nothing or very little. If your livelihood is made using the artistic works of others, the people who created those works deserve at least something for creating the works that you're making money off of. This isn't unfair, at least not in my opinion.
We need a better mechanism of compensation,
I'm all ears. Any suggestions?
The solution there is pretty simple. The first print is sold for an appropriate cost under the assumption it will be duplicated to all the chain's cinemas.
That's asking the theater to assume the risk that the movie will make money. It would encourage theaters to only purchase bland, inoffensive movies that are guaranteed to appeal to the lowest common denominator, or at least edit the movies they receive until they are. Remember without copyright there would be no reason a theater could not edit or censor the movies, so on top of the layer of suits at the studio ruining movies you also have a layer of suits at the theaters! And if another theater chain doesn't want to pay the studio the full amount for a print, they can go to another theater chain who will be only happy to sell one of their copies for, say, half the price the studio is demanding.
No, they just need a way of making sure their prints can only be shown in approved cinemas who have paid. Ie: DRM. Given the relatively miniscule number and variability of customers, setting up an effective system would be child's play.
Haha, I never thought I'd see someone on Slashdot actually advocate DRM. No, DRM doesn't work. All it would do is create a market for DRM-bypassing projectors, which there would be a huge financial incentive to manufacture.
Well it would still require either the same provisions for "works made for hire" we have now, or if multiple people contribute to one thing like a piece of software, that multitude of people corporately own the copyright so if just a couple people withdraw their license it's no big deal because the majority of the people who worked on it are still okay.
What makes you think Lord of the Rings wouldn't have turned a profit without copyright ? Are you seriously suggesting the millions of people who saw it in the cinema would have just watched a dodgy handycam recording of it at home on their TV ?
The entire reason movie studios make money off of box office revenue is because they have a licensing deal with the theaters. That licensing deal requires a notion of copyright and intellectual property to be valid. Otherwise the studio would only be able to charge the theater for a physical movie print, which a theater chain could duplicate amongst all their theaters rather than having to buy more than one print from the studio.
The only way a studio could take a cut of box office revenue without copyright would be to own the entire vertical distribution chain. Every movie studio would have to build and maintain an entire theater chain, and consumers would have to go to separate theaters to see a 20th Century Fox movie as opposed to a Disney movie. Even then DVD distribution would be nearly impossible to make profitable if people could just press their own copies of the DVDs.
I abandoned Comcast for a "lower bandwidth" DSL plan because the local DSL ISP doesn't throttle. The final straw with Comcast was when I was trying to FTP something up to my web space and the connection kept resetting. They were throttling freaking FTP!
Your post is so irrational and paranoia-laden it barely deserves a response, but here goes...
All I ask is that if you profit off of my hard work, I want to be compensated in return for your use of my work. If you have a job, you are doing exactly the same thing! You are performing work for the company which helps it make money, and in return you are compensated. Yet when I want to do EXACTLY THE SAME THING with my music, I'm doing something "offensive"? That's complete BS.
I agree that copyright should be much, much weaker, but not eliminated entirely.