You are correct in saying that a whole new something had to be invented. What the engineering wonks have done ( and, had done successfully pre-HDTV ) is design a set of software tools that allow the Senior Video Op ( SVO ) to “paint” skin detail separate from the rest of a shot. This may sound beyond belief, but it is true. I’ve sat in quite a number of times and watched the SVO paint skin tone and detail. Similarly, I am asked by the SVO incessantly to give them a real close-up so they can do some detailing, each time we put someone new in a shot- or when the lighting cue changes.
Human skin is what it is. Make-up is what it is ( no slight to the professional make-up artists out there, to be sure ! ). One cannot re-work skin. One can alter how the electronics that are processing the (now) HDTV image perceive skin. Skin is smoothed out, etc. Tone is altered. And so on.
The first time I ever saw HDTV was in Narita Airport. I had two 4-month old infants in my arms. I saw a HDTV monitor, and a large standard resolution monitor. They were about 20 feet apart, facing eachother- playing the identical Sumo wrestling match videotape. The difference was startling.
You can see eeeeeeverything. To address the OP’s query, yes people are very careful now about how they fix up things quickly on set. Lighting is used to try to protect poorly built backdrops and sets. After all, a dimly-lit background at 725 lines is as tough to see at 1125 lines of resolution. The “dim” just looks crisper.
Art directors and props have it rough. Similarly costume folks. Aside from music videos and some very low budget projects, one very rarely finds nails and screws protruding from sets.
What one does find are inconsistencies in color or texture that used to kind of fuzz out a bit. Now all is clear. Truly clear.
There is one interesting by-product of the shift to HDTV. The depth of focus is much shallower in High Def. So, if you have a shitload of light ( that’s a technical term meaning, " a shit-load of light "
) shining on someone performing in the round, the first few rows will be lit pretty well. In standard resolution, those folks would be a bit out of focus at any medium to long focal length. Now with HDTV, those folks are MORE out of focus at the identical focal length, and are fuzzy at wider focal lengths. So, you can see more critical detail in people but unless the camera is focused specifically on them, the details are likely to be a bit more out of focus. Make sense?
I got out of big-camera Steadicam work just as High Def was really hitting. I did shoot a documentary called “Swinging With The Duke” on Duke Ellington. Watching the show on a High Def monitor was amazing. One could see not only details of the instruments that were not so clear previously- but if I was close enough, I could see things reflected in the instruments. ( Horns, etc.- smooth brass areas ). My monitor was standard def, and the truck had to use a download converter panel to feed me that 725 lines image back so I was not blind. Many HDTV cameras now have a download converter chip in them, so someone shooting HDTV can see the shot on a standard res monitor. Of course, the download converter keeps the HDTV aspect ratio of 16:9, so you are still framing a letterboxed image.
No matter how high the lines of resolution go, it always comes back to content, content, content. To use that infamous quote from the feature film “Christine”,
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