Does anyone know why 8 Bit should look soft on a direct TV signal? We are outputting 10bit now but there was an Epi that went out 8 bit. Why should 8 look so bad? Also, The channel we are broadcasting on isn't very rich in color. I'm affaird to boast my SAT or contrast. Thoughts? ANyone????
Re: 8 bit uncompressed looks soft on Direct TV by Delano Bryant on Jan 26, 2008 at 5:25:58 pm
I outputted directly to Beta SP. They ingest the BETA into their server and its broadcasted. The interesting thing is their commercials look allot better in the program then our show. I am shooting on HD online HD the output to 10bit for the SD signal they want.
Is that the color red you want to use?
Producer for HIGHER GROUND OUTDOORS.
Re: 8 bit uncompressed looks soft on Direct TV by Jeremy Garchow on Jan 26, 2008 at 5:33:38 pm
Well, you can certainly deliver a higher quality master than BetaSP. Digibeta will be a lot cleaner and will retain your 10bit depth. When mastering to BetaSP you are going to analog and all of it's quirks. 8 bit uncompressed is no longer 8 bit uncompressed. What BetaSP deck do you have?
Re: 8 bit uncompressed looks soft on Direct TV by Gary Alan on Jan 26, 2008 at 8:50:50 pm
Well, the obvious answer is to ask the network why their ads look better than your show and what format do they take from their advertisers. And, what are they "possibly" doing different to ads and your show after they get the tapes/media. Asking here and having everyone second guess is not going to help.
Gary
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Re: 8 bit uncompressed looks soft on Direct TV by arc nevada on Jan 26, 2008 at 6:40:27 pm
Beta should look fine. You can hook any Beta deck up the trasmitter and get a good clean image (not a good as Digital though). My guess is that the stations system has compressed the image into MPEG so it will not take up much space on the server. I imagine some of the other footage may look better than yours because it was delivier in a medium (digtal) that was close to the MPEG 2 format. This is just a guess. You could aks what video codec is being used at the station when the Beta tapes are digitized. I doubt they use uncompressed on a server.
Re: 8 bit uncompressed looks soft on Direct TV by Delano Bryant on Jan 26, 2008 at 6:55:13 pm
THe other issue is.... THat some of the other shows on this same network. Have a little sharper or deeper color look then we do. Our Show goes through a color corrector and should have a deeper saturated look.
Is that the color red you want to use?
Producer for HIGHER GROUND OUTDOORS.
Re: 8 bit uncompressed looks soft on Direct TV by walter biscardi on Jan 26, 2008 at 7:08:12 pm
[Delano Bryant]"THe other issue is.... THat some of the other shows on this same network. Have a little sharper or deeper color look then we do. Our Show goes through a color corrector and should have a deeper saturated look."
That all depends on how they are compressing it on their end. If you deliver 12 episodes, my guess is all 12 will look slightly different than one another. The network compresses it once, then DirectTV compresses it again for delivery to the satellite.
The image suffers twice before you see it at home. You have no control over what the image will look like once it's done with those two compression cycles. You have to just deliver the highest quality product you can. Between BetaSP and DVCAM, I would take BetaSP and push my saturation just a touch.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.
Re: 8 bit uncompressed looks soft on Direct TV by David Roth Weiss on Jan 26, 2008 at 6:54:30 pm
[arc nevada]"My guess is that the stations system has compressed the image into MPEG so it will not take up much space on the server. I imagine some of the other footage may look better than yours because it was delivier in a medium (digtal) that was close to the MPEG 2 format. This is just a guess."
No guess involved... Before video is sent to a satellite it is highly compressed, and analog video suffers much more than the digital formats. DigiBeta looks many times better after satellite transmission.
David Roth Weiss
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Los Angeles
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Re: 8 bit uncompressed looks soft on Direct TV by Sean ONeil on Jan 26, 2008 at 7:58:56 pm
[David Roth Weiss]"
You should try DVCAM. Even though it has a lower bitrate, it is sharper, and may suffer less than analog when getting hit on its way to the bird."
I'm gonna agree with David here. DVCam will probably compress a lot better.
Re: 8 bit uncompressed looks soft on Direct TV by Kris Anderson on Jan 27, 2008 at 5:28:08 am
Your concerns over delivering 10bit uncompressed on SP Beta are needless. As soon as you leave the digital domain, the bit rate is a moot point. If you really want to see what is causing the problem then send them a DV Cam master and compare the two. Forget bit rates, just go with what looks best.
Re: 8 bit uncompressed looks soft on Direct TV by walter biscardi on Jan 26, 2008 at 7:05:23 pm
[Delano Bryant]"Does anyone know why 8 Bit should look soft on a direct TV signal?"
What you deliver to a network and what you see on the final broadcast are two completely different things. I have HDTV channels here on Charter Cable that look worse than Standard Def sometimes. Why is that? Who knows, but they compress the heck out of every channel these days.
Out of about 150 standard def channels on Charter, about 30 are really sharp, the rest are varying levels of sharp to really soft.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.
Re: 8 bit uncompressed looks soft on Direct TV by Delano Bryant on Jan 26, 2008 at 8:39:41 pm
Walter I understand between channels being different. BUT between programming on the same channel? I'm seeing some shows on this network that look better then others.
Is that the color red you want to use?
Producer for HIGHER GROUND OUTDOORS.
Re: 8 bit uncompressed looks soft on Direct TV by walter biscardi on Jan 26, 2008 at 9:14:54 pm
[Delano Bryant]"
Walter I understand between channels being different. BUT between programming on the same channel? I'm seeing some shows on this network that look better then others."
Yep, happens all the time, especially on Cable networks. Discovery, ESPN, Food, HGTV, Cartoon, all of them. You'll see some amazing programming and then others that looked it went through a single pass on Compressor at 200kbps.
If you deliver your show on BetaSP or DVCAM and I deliver my show on HDCAM, guess which show is going to look better on the network broadcast?
If you shoot your show on DVCAM cameras and I shoot mine on DVCPro HD cameras and downconvert that to SD, guess which show is going to look better on the network broadcast?
If you shoot your show at 24p in SD it's going to be softer than if you shot in 29.97 in SD.
And so on and so forth.
There are so many factors that go into why one show looks better than others that there's really no telling what the issue might be and how you might go about correcting for it. I would start with Quality Control and ask them if they notice your show looking softer than other programming they are receiving. If the answer is no, then the issue is coming from the broadcast.
How does your show look if you watch it on regular cable instead of DirecTV? The same episode airing at the exact same time can look completely different on Cable due to the re-compression again by the cable company before it gets to your house.
You're going to get into a never-ending loop if you try to correct for one particular broadcast. If DirecTV looks better, now the Cable broadcast might be too saturated, and vice versa.
All you can do is make sure Quality Control says you fall within their specs and you're happy with the way it leaves your facility.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.
Re: 8 bit uncompressed looks soft on Direct TV by Jim Calahan on Jan 27, 2008 at 6:14:35 am
A lot of commercials are delivered to stations via ip or a satellite so the quality could be better than Beta SP. Direct TV and Dish pull local stations off air and then bounce it off a satellite a couple of times which causes the 5 or 6 second delay and in most cases there is a lot of A to D and D to A conversions going on. I would pick DVCam over Beta SP just from a dropout standpoint.
Re: 8 bit uncompressed looks soft on (SLAP !) by Bob Zelin on Jan 27, 2008 at 5:44:41 pm
I don't often participate on this forum, but read this thread with great interest. I feel for Delano, but having built a cable head end system, you guys just have no idea. I am sure that Delano's Beta master is just fine.
Let's take a nice Beta SX master (for example). You take the COMPOSITE VIDEO out of the Beta SX VTR (this could be Digi Beta, this could be Beta, etc.), you send it into a COMPOSITE ROUTER. The output of the router goes into an ANALOG COMPOSITE Frame Sync TBC (let's degrade it further, so we can make sure those video levels are not illegal), and THEN we send it into the COMPOSITE input of a Harmonic MPEG Encoder, so it can be sent to the on air server. "Your kidding me", you are saying right now - NO I WISH I WAS KIDDING. This is typical of what your multi million dollar cable system does with your pristine master tape. AND THEN it may get routed to a satellite (if it's not a wired cable system).
I am about to do (next month) an SDI head end, but it's now 2008, and it's been YEARS since anyone even considered this.
And STANDARD BETA VTR's will be continued to be used (along with an AJA HD10AVA to convert to SDI). So much for a pure digital path.
Welcome to real life. Stop driving yourself crazy.
Re: 8 bit uncompressed looks soft on (SLAP !) by Stuart Simpson on Jan 27, 2008 at 8:01:46 pm
This is a real eye-opener to me! I can't believe that there are still broadcasters out there who don't have Digibeta Decks! I mean a J-30 is only £6000! We haven't delivered on an SP for years...
-Simmie
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Re: 8 bit uncompressed looks soft on (SLAP !) by Sean ONeil on Jan 29, 2008 at 6:17:36 am
[Bob Zelin]"Let's take a nice Beta SX master (for example). You take the COMPOSITE VIDEO out of the Beta SX VTR (this could be Digi Beta, this could be Beta, etc.), you send it into a COMPOSITE ROUTER. The output of the router goes into an ANALOG COMPOSITE Frame Sync TBC (let's degrade it further, so we can make sure those video levels are not illegal), and THEN we send it into the COMPOSITE input of a Harmonic MPEG Encoder, so it can be sent to the on air server. "Your kidding me", you are saying right now - NO I WISH I WAS KIDDING. This is typical of what your multi million dollar cable system does with your pristine master tape. AND THEN it may get routed to a satellite (if it's not a wired cable system)."
Sadly, this doesn't shock me one bit. This is exactly why I think DVCam would be a better choice in this scenario. A digital tape format will be hurt less by this (even if only a little) than an analog one.
Re: 8 bit uncompressed looks soft on (SLAP !) by walter biscardi on Jan 29, 2008 at 11:10:01 am
[Sean ONeil]"Sadly, this doesn't shock me one bit. This is exactly why I think DVCam would be a better choice in this scenario. A digital tape format will be hurt less by this (even if only a little) than an analog one."
Except your graphics will be compressed 5:1 and take an ugly artifacts hit. The BetaSP will retain clean edges to the graphics. I would supply BetaSP over DVCAM every time given this option and we do that very thing here with one of our network shows. We could deliver DVCAM, but choose to take the BetaSP route to keep all the graphics clean.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.
Re: 8 bit uncompressed looks soft on Direct TV by Tracy Smith on Jan 27, 2008 at 8:53:29 pm
The problem is digital (FCP) to Analog (BetaSP) to Re-encode (Network) to (Digital) (Direct TV)
The conversion to Beta then back to digital is actually a huge knockdown to your original edit, then when it hits the re-encode you wind up with more problems.
( To see this process yourself,just keep hitting the "re-compress" switch on your NLE)
Sometimes it's as goofy as someone using composite outs on the beta machine. And you can't always check this.
The real solution to this problem we are all experiencing is to find out what the final "Transport" streams are going to be. Transport streams are muxed audio versions of Program Streams. (what's on a DVD) Meaning the Audio is embedded not running separate Tracks. Try to cut out the intermediate transfers as much as possible.
One way to do this: Find out what the transport streams settings are, and make it for them. On a MAC use Compressor to create the transport stream. You will see these settings in the inspector box. We have done this several times for companies, because I was so fed up with having the projects look like crap when they hit air. Burn the stream to a disc and give it to them...."drag and drop".
Sometimes you have to really push to bypass the intermediary (the "bread" as we have always baked it) But once people see the results and the loss of extra labor, they get it.
