digital artifacts?

Having watched 'Top Gear' 30 mins ago I feel moved to ask if anyone else is irritated by the digital smear/jerky (don't know the tech term!) filming of quick vehicles - I really notice this on F1 / Rallying and to a lesser extent football. I watched the 1994 BTCC on video earlier in the evening and was struck (on TG) by the look of white lines through the windscreen, watching the background through side windows when presenters were talking in-car etc - irritating and spoils enjoyment -no?? / yess?/?

Neil (feeling better now)

 

I get irritated by the picture quality of digi telly on certain progs, especially sports stuff. Footie pitch can sometimes appear blocky and pixelated, I guess it's the compression they use. Still, it beats the crap reception I get on terrestial tv.

 

Football and rugby for me are really poor quality when watching games on my PC's USB freeview tuner (Nebula DigiTV USB), what with the digital compression. I feel using a TFT monitor probably doesn't do the picture quality any favours either, since its colour reproduction is comparitively limited compared to a CRT, it probably makes any artifacting from the signal even worse when it comes to subtle grass shades.

 

what annoys me the most is when you go to the cinema and happens. The cineworld screens are absolutely terrible. they judder an awfull lot when tracking even slightly moving objects. The sound id pretty pants too.

Anyone else noticed this?

only seen a few lcd tv's, but the last one i saw i thought the quality was terrible, smeary etc, and that was a very some one elses very recently purchased Loewe.

 

That's the problem when the broadcasters went for quantity of channels rather than quality..
Every tech boffin type at the beeb warned them not to use such a small bandwidth per channel, especially as HDTV was supposedly on the horizon. Who knows where they'll find the bandwidth for a 750+ line system..
Still, the tendency has been toward minimising quality - first cd ("perfect sound forever"), MPEG DVD, then iPod/MP3!
Compression should be a maximum of 5:1 for pics, not more like 40:1!!!!!

 

Since when were films projected digitally? Just curious, as when I saw The Perfect Storm in 2000 I could see "LCD-ness" in the overall colours, and ghosting around text on the credits which shouldn't be visible on proper analog film...

 

It's possible to reduce the visibility of digital artefacts by adjusting the TV correctly.

Sharpness - if you see halos around people and objects then the sharpness is too high.

Brightness - do blacks look black or ash grey.

Contrast - can you see the detail in white shirts or clouds.

Colour - does everyone look orange, are strong colours bleeding or do they look flourescent (sp?).


Have a look here at some shots of my TV after I set it up. Please bear in mind that these are only digital snaps. The camera can't capture the colours faithfully, there's some banding because the camera is a digital, the focus is a little off and the final image is a JPEG with it's own set of problems. Click here

The jerkyness at the cinema is to do with having only 24 frames of film per second. They show each frame twice (called 'double gating' ) to reduce the flicker but it still doesn't change the fact that a film camera takes 24 pictures a second which isn't really enough to reproduce smooth motion.

 

Trouble is Sky. If I watch a DVD from the iMac its wonderful on my flat screen, but Sky is appalling, no adjustment on the colours can help the lack of information being transmitted.

 

Cable's slightly worse than Sky - Futurama for example looks REALLY bad on both - banding all over the shop.

My Sony telly is 8 years old, has a LOT of hours on the CRT (it's ex-dem) and can still reveal shedloads of garbage on cable.

Mind you, just watched a couple of episodes of Teachers Series 3 on DVD and I still can't get over how well that TV's stood up to the tests of time....

 

So look away from the footballers' faces. Your brain has special circuitry for faces, so distortions are easy to detect. Football being a recent innovation, evolutionarily speaking, means that you don't notice "pitch" distortions so easily (well, what do you expect on a hi-fi board)

 

I find most digital television really irritating. The form that the degradation (ie blocking etc) takes is more offensive to my eyes than even lots of snow on an analogue broadcast. Most other people dont even seem to notice it. The problem is motion , as the mpeg2 encoder effectively only saves the differences between each frame. Perhaps in time they might use a better codec, but i doubt it.

 

I actually prefer the cable feed I get from Telewest to Sky. Bought a Sony Sky digibox from Ebay as an experiment but mainly for the radio stations as my DAB reception has deteriated to unacceptable error levels since moving house, but at least as an added bonus radio from Sky is better sonically. Anyway, back to the point. I'd say my prefer for Telewest over Sky is a subjective one as they are both very poor but in different ways, especially on a 42 inch display. Sky seems less sharp but also less blocky than Telewest, but I find I perfer Telewest as it's good a bit more edge definition and colour saturation looks a lot better and image depth and 3D-ness is better. Motion artifacts look much of muchness on both, although I think Sky is better in this respect in that you don't get the melting wax effect on moving faces as much as you do on Telewest, although I can't notice this once I'm sat on the sofa.

On the subject of picture adjustments I had a Pioneer PDP-436XDE plasma on loan a few months back which must have had user adjustable picture parameters that just about any videophile could conceivably want control over. In short I spent a few weeks with this set and just couldn't get the picture anywhere near as good as the latest Panasonic plasmas that I'd seen despite plenty of fiddling with settings, for example blacks were no were near as black and there was a heck of a lot of fizzing effects. I'm sure the Pioneer was faulty, so had one of the guys from the shop I loaned it from come around to view it in situ, but he said he couldn't see anything wrong iwth it. So back to the shop went the Pioneer and in its place came a Panasonic TH42PV500 which I'm now very happy with. And the strange thing is, despite the Panasonic having next to no picture adjustment control (at least compared to the plethora on the Pioneer), it looks absolutely wonderful out of the box using the factory default settings.

 

It's the tracking / jerky movement that really gets to me - I had telewest then moved to a Humax freeview box with HD. I'm thinking of sky+ but can't really justify the cost. I really feel that the pleasure is soaked from viewing motorsport with the movement problems - things seem so much better on my old VHS tapes, so it's not looking back to analogue with rose tinted specs!

 

The last time I experienced analogue terrestrial TV was back in 2001. Since then I've moved to areas where reception of such services are just so bad, I've had no choice but to get either cable or Sky unfortunately. I presume the current trend for broadcasters' to increasingly use digital video sources has degraded even the analogue equivalent feeds such as analgoue BBC1 say compared to how it use to be a few years back?

I know the Panasonic plasma I've got at the moment is definitely being held back by the sources I play through it. I'm sure Sky+ in hi def would look great through it when it gets launched next year, but I doubt very much if I'll be an early adopter due to cost justifications vs amount of time I'd actually spend watching it.

 

Aye - many programmes shoot on standard DV!!!! When this started to become the norm, it was pointed out to the various mangement types that the format didn't meet broadcast specifications, but it continued due to it's cheapness...
On the prog I worked on for many years we shot on DVC Pro 50 (5:1 compression), which just met EBU specs, but due to having a slightly different codec to the on-line conforming computer, more than 1 play-in resulted in concatenation (i.e blocking in grey areas)..
However, this isn't a problem if DigiBeta is the shooting medium, and it certainly isn't if they've got the money for super16 film (though not many have...).. But film is still the medium of choice for quality TV drama due to it's huge contrast range, especially for overseas sales.