The makeup artist for the Tonight Show with Jay Leno invented a new type of liquid, airbrushed makeup for HD. Regular old TV makeup looked too much like make-up, and film style makeup took too long for TV.
The main thing news programs have had to do is change over to genuine materials. The wood desk the anchor sat at all those years was particle board and contact paper. Now they have to use real wood, metal, glass and marble.
I don’t see how it looks any more real than regular TV. In fact, for TV shows it’s worse, because Comcrap’s cable boxes suck. I’m forever getting pixilated spots on the screen, or the action stops, or some such. I was happier without it.
ok…I’m pretty sure most of you are out of your mind.
One thing I did notice is that concerts on the HD music channel look a little strange on my 50" screen because the performer is actually larger than real life when zoomed in for a closeup.
I like HD a lot, the more realistic the better. Try watching travel shows, the scenery is beautiful.
The only thing I don’t like about HD is it doesn’t seem to handle rapid motion over large parts of the screen that well, gets blocky and/or blurry.
That’s not HD, that’s MPEG. You finally have a clear enough display to see the compression artifacts.
Is all HD content compressed though? I thought it was.
Pretty much. All broadcast HD (terrestrial, satellite or digital cable) is compressed, as is any HD you would see from a Blu-ray or HD-DVD (R.I.P) player. HD shot by most cameras (HDV, AVCHD, DVCPro HD, XDCAM HD) is compressed. And virtually any television show that is shot in HD is shot compressed; for example, the coming Survivor: Gabon in HD will be shot on Sony XDCAM HD, which is MPEG-2 compressed at 35, 18 or 25Mbit rates.
As a side note, I think (but am unsure if this is still true) some television shows are still shot on film and then converted to HD, but the conversion process itself is a compression step to MPEG-2 IIRC. Any ‘remastered’ classics that go to HD consist of digging up old film stock, cleaning it up, and converting it to to a digital (and very likely compressed) format. There’s probably folks around here that can provide more detail; I admit I’m vague on if anything is shot on film any more for television, and how old series are remastered. In any case, whatever happens in that process, ultimately the head end of the broadcast chain will require the video to be a suitable MPEG-2 variant that broadcast, satellite, and digital cable receivers can use.
There are uncompressed HD cameras (Red), but they are very expensive and not what you’d keep around the house.
So… yes. All HD content that you would see at home is compressed, unless you go buy a very expensive camera and other equipment and shoot your own footage.
I’d be interested to see more comments from British viewers (or those from other countries where PAL is the standard). A couple of years ago we had a big HD television set up as a demonstration in the office, showing test pictures from Wimbledon I think, and I remember being distinctly underwhelmed - there really didn’t seem to be that much more detail than a decent PAL picture.
On the other hand, the American NTSC standard has always looked awful to me, so I can see how US viewers would see a huge difference when they first encounter HD.
When I was teaching in Germany, one group of students were engineers who had worked on PAL systems and their joke about the American standard:
“NTSC stands for Never The Same Color as the original picture…”
I used to imagine it meant “Not The full SCreen” because it uses about a fifth less vertical resolution than PAL.
I have to say that the difference between PAL and NTSC is actually bigger then the difference between PAL and HD.
Strangely enough the effect in The Matrix Reloaded looked better on HD then on my SD TV, but that I think is most likely caused by the fact that the special effects were very fast and my screen was a bit bigger, so I couldn’t focus fast enough to notice the fake.
King Kong however looked absolutely mind-boggingly bad.
I think Weta still has some time to reach the standards set by Industrial Light and Magic.
When it’s done by people who care, NTSC can be quite stunning. The trick is finding anyone that cares.
When I was in college, I worked at the campus TV station, and when the cameras were tuned just so, and the phases of the sun and moon were cooperative, it’s great. Of course, that was a spiffy new 3-CCD studio camera displaying directly to a calibrated reference monitor that cost far more than my first car. Add a few miles of cables, switching equipment, broadcasting and display on a crummy TV that’s never been calibrated, and you get used to crummy images.
As far as home viewing goes, Sony’s line of XBR Wega CRT-based TVs were probably the best available. For standard-def programming, my 40" XBR looked better than the plasma TV.
How is that possible?
PAL’s resolution: 720 x 576 = 414,720. That’s 576 horizontal lines, and a .4 megapixel image.
NTSC: 720 x 480 = 345,600 That’s 480 horizontal Lines and a .3 megapixel image.
720p: 1,280 x 720 = 921,600 That’s 720 Horizontal Lines and nearly a 1 megapixel image.
1080p: 1,920 x 1,080 = 2,073,600 That’s 1,080 horizontal lines an a 2 megapixel image.
Pal Vs NTSC: 20% more horizontal resolution. An increase of .1 megapixels in image detail.
Pal vs 720p: 720p offers almost 30% more horizontal lines of resolution and .6 more megapixels of image data.
Pal vs 1080 = almost twice the horizontal resolution of PAL and a huge jump of 1.6 megapixels of image data.
I’m not seeing how the difference between PAL and NTSC could possibly be larger than between PAL and HD.
The color fidelity of PAL vs the lack of same for NTSC may be part of the issue, which doesn’t lend itself well to numeric comparison.
I thought this was a problem when dealing with NTSC signals broadcast through the air. And also it’s not a bout color fidelity, but rather color errors as the signal is transmitted. Most people get their TV through digital cable/satellite and in those cases, there is no difference in color fidelity.
Am I wrong?
No, you’re not wrong. But many folks also plug-in to analog cable, or hook up their digital box through a modulated coax connection to the television (shudder). So the signal quality turns back to hell again.
BTW, my comment above about color fidelity was a guess at what Scoundrel Swanswater was trying to say. I do not agree that NTSC->PAL is a greater jump than PAL->HD. Quite the opposite.
My biggest issue with the HD is the spitting. My god, the spitting! At any sports event, athletes are spitting non-stop, and with the HD, I feel like I see it all. It’s like having people spitting in my living room.
LOL!
Not true. I have NTSC, PAL and HD displays and sources and can put each on the same display. PAL is higher vertical resolution than NTSC, but the lower frame rate of 25 fps means a lower temporal resolution.
I haven’t seen a whole lot of NTSC television so my opinion might be skewered. The ones that I did see looked like it was barely a step up from the old black-and-white.
So I stand corrected, but still… PAL was clearly the superior system. 
I am glad that with HD we don’t have the difference between PAL and NTSC anymore.