(18-11-2010 23:31 )mikeboob Wrote: [ -> ]Bailey moved and was rendered a blur.
There's still some hope for squeezing more usable picture out of the uplink, if the producers could do one or more of the following...
(note: this has turned into a bit of a rant, but it's intended to be helpful advice, based on my years of varied experience with assorted photographic, cabling, and computer imaging work*)
* Get rid of animated logos:
They look distracting at the best of times, and it's more moving image info that is just wasting capacity.
* Cut down the number and size of scrolling text areas:
For the same reasons as the logos.
The smaller the text, the less impact it has on the rest of the picture.
* Simplify the background and/or set:
Do we really need to see constantly rippling curtains, moving blinds, or a big chalkboard?
Or an impressively kitted-out bar counter, or something more visually complex than that?
Sure, if you have the luxury of higher picture bandwidth (and the budget or items for a neat set design) then by all means go for it, but the channels running at lower bitrates can not afford this.
* Less clothes!
Apart from the obvious reason, MPEG encoding is really good at doing continuous grades of tone, such as flesh. You need to be at really low bitrates to get "chessboard" or other compression artifacts on skin, but facial features will suffer first.
One time while flipping between 955 and 954, I could make out a small necklace on one channel but not on the other. Subtle facial gestures are going to be lost before anything else, but feck it, subtlety isn't important here, right?
* Less tattoos:
There's not much that can be done about this, but anyone with 4 magazine pages worth of text and picture inked onto their body is going to look worse on a low bitrate TV picture than someone with no ink. Piercings make relatively little impact on picture quality.
I'm not anti-tattoo: there are some really talented artists needling art into flesh these days, but all art has its price! If you can't up the bitrates on your uplink, don't feature as much talent with tattoos. Or, if you have a well-decorated body, move to a channel that can display it without the picture breaking up.
* Lights, camera...
Unless your channel is called "Fake Tan Babes" or "Tango'd Totty", please please please find, and then use, the White Balance settings on all cameras. This used to be a big problem, but isn't so bad now.
If your camera has auto-focus, either adjust it so that it doesn't constantly seek the best focus, or turn it off and employ a camera operator who is able to keep the subject in focus manually. It's an old-school skill, but really it's like riding a bike. And auto-focus is the stabilisers.
Lighting should have the presenter lit well enough to give a larger depth of field; that will do away with a lot of focus problems no matter what.
* Do better pre-processing:
Don't leave it to the uplink to re-encode an already-encoded feed with more compression, when you could be doing it yourself in one process. It may be necessary to consult with whoever your feed is feeding to (and whoever their feed is feeding to, and so on), and fine-tune for different sets/models, to get this right.
* Monitor outside, for the people inside:
Monitoring from a Sky digibox instead of (or ideally, aswell as) from the local camera feed will give a better idea of what the viewers are seeing.
Although going by the inability of most babe channels to even get the mic audible, I don't hold out much hope for much of this to happen...
By pure chance, earlier today I saw a presenter apologise to a caller because the battery on her phone had run down, and as she was apologising (using a wireless mic) she was checking the battery level on the mic (taking the mic out of audible range) every few seconds, and sure enough the mic died before she could finish.
This is what the technical crew are supposed to be looking after!!!
Fresh batteries, spares on chargers, and keep an eye on all power and signal levels all the time. And have spares in easy reach of the on-screen talent, incase the crew are busy chasing some other technical problem (like incoming phone lines) when the battery runs out.
Phones and mics with wires don't look as good, but one of each just out of sight, on the floor directly between the camera and the bed/sofa should be easy to maintain.
OK, rant over...
*note 2: I admit I have no experience with live satellite TV production or transmission, but the above points should all apply where needed.
I have worked on a few low-budget short films over the years, and I learnt that the most important technical skill is being able to react calmly whenever things go wrong, and restore normal service while causing the minimum of panic to the talent. Because the talent is why the rest of us are here!
