I was watching my local news here on KABC7-HD and enjoying the great HD pic (at least for the studio shots) and then World News Tonight came on and it was in standard def. HD cameras, even studio cameras, and the assorted production equipment are pretty cheap now, so why can’t the network do what the locals are doing?
As an additional question, why, even on the local HD newscast, are so many of the remotes still done in SD? HD field cameras are down to around 20K! Perhaps it has something to do with the bandwidth the news vans can beam back off the dish?
Most likely it’s not just the cost of the cameras, but the entire infrastructure that needs to be changed. Camera, van, production, satellite feed…all of this needs to be updated. I’m sure it will be, but it’s probably not a top priority for news programming…
Not only is it trendy to go HD, but I’ve read a study or two that demonstrated people trust things that are in HD more. So, it will be HD as soon as possible. My guess is that they are working on that at this moment.
World News Tonight is in hi-def – I have a friend who’s on the production staff at ABC and gave me continuing updates on learning to use the new equipment for WNT, Good Morning America and Nightline. Perhaps there was a transmission problem that defaulted the signal back to SD.
As for the reports switching down to SD, a lot of the footage on newscasts is shot by someone else – a different station or a free-lance videographer. They’re probably in all different technological states. And the rule of thumb with any techmology change (black and white to color, mono to stereo, analog to digital) is that you update the transmission facilities first, the studio second and the field units last.
World News (no “Tonight” anymore) hasn’t gone high-def yet, but the studio was upgraded earlier this year and the show should be HD soon. The field units will be shooting in standard-definition for some time to come, but they’ve just upgraded to disc-based cameras, and by the end of the year they will be shooting 16x9 SD (ie, not actually high def, but in the HD aspect ratio). Up until this month they were still mostly shooting on Betacam SP tape!
The magazine shows (Nightline, 20/20) are SD as well. GMA has been high-def for several years, however.
I have less knowledge of the other networks, but I know NBC Nightly News is in high-def.