Could somebody explain ***in laymen’s terms please[i/][b/] how it is that, on T.V., there doesn’t seem to be any delay between audio and video feeds received from abroad whereas it looks like the sound takes a few seconds to reach the person being interviewed by the U.S. or Canadian anchor (could be any other country for that matter).
(I realize this could be formulated more clearly if I had the correct terminology and English was my mother tongue but I guess you get the gist…)
Just a guess. There are circuits in the transmitters, satalites and receivers that take a few miliseconds to process the data before passing it on to the next station. After passing through several of these stations the signal aquires a noticable delay of a second or two.
But wouldn’t this “work” both ways, Papa?
Let me try and clarify, for all our understanding, if I misunderstood please correct me.
I understand the phenomenon in question is when a news anchor is interviewing a person via satilite in another country/state/room, and the question is asked. We watch the person live, see him sitting there waiting for the question asked to reach hin and then he responds. You are wondering why the video is real time, but it seems that the question takes a long time to get there.
This is a guess, but a good one I believe. The sound and video we recieve is real time and is in-sync because they use the best feed and transision equipment on the interviewees end. The slow down occurs in the interviewers questioning, in short notice iterviews I imagine they don’t have time or need to set up a video display on the interviewees end and therefore he has no visual of the interviewer. Most News remote trucks only carry transmission equipment, therefore the transmission is good (ie the interviewee). The trucks however don’t have a reciever and the only means of getting the voice to the intervieee is via phone. The phone line is much slower than the transmission to satilite with its resistance, switching and landlines. Even a cellular or local radio transmission may be slower than a satilite feed.
The facts expressed here belong to everybody, the opinions to me. The distinction is
yours to draw…
Omniscient; BAG
I disagree Omnis. (slightly, at least). I believe there is a transmission delay AT BOTH ENDS. In other words Peter Jennings asks a question; we wait a few seconds; the responder answers the question; THen Peter Jennings asks another questions imediately.(BUT even though we think peter jennings is asking the second question without delay, the truth is the responder actually stopped talking a few seconds ago…it just took some time for the transmission to get to us. Think of it on a larger scale, We are talking to someone on Mars. We ask a question, have to wait for the transmission to get there; they respond, (we see the response, and ask another question quickly, but we neglect to remember their response took several minutes to get to us and they are patiently waiting for the next question to arrive).
You can see the results of this sometimes if the responder in a distant country hesitates for just a second. When we see this we assume he is done so we ask a second question, and get about halfway into it when he continues on with the original answer. It winds up a confusing bit of interuptions for a while before it gets cleared up. News organizations will avoid this whole thing at times by not performing the interview live, but do it just prior to the show. THe tape is then edited to remove the awkward silences in between questions.
I suppose thats feasable too, but I’m gonna stick with my explanation until someones shows me otherwise. I’m loyal to my unfounded ideas!