New Years Resolution : 1080

Once again we look back and look ahead, here you go with an insider's rant.


And Yet Again we will say YOUR NEW YEARS RESOLUTION IS 1080. Why? because that is the broadcast standard and name of our domain: HD 1080i. Finally the thought that interlace delivery of 29.97 frames per second 1920 x 1080 doesnt have to be full frame progressive to be perfect, and the performances on many cable and dish more than amply proved the technology is solid and here to stay for a long time to come.

2007
...was a great year for HD in general - new channels that had been sitting "in the can" so to speak were rolled out widely, INHD re-morphed into MOJO HD ( a personal fave for us here ), MHD hit Comcast ( thats HD MTV and its very clean crisp work )... SCRIPPS negotiated a full lineup of HD for HGTV and FOOD network ( all good ) and UHD ( universal ) is doing a great job. KUDOS however only go to DISCOVERY HD and NGO ( National Geographic ) for pristine 1080 performances and superb content quality. We were hoping to RSS aggregate schedules for HD but that is not yet there on the supply side, so keep an eye out for it.

ESPN HD as always... super.

A note to the 1366x768 crowd... do not worry that you have an inferior display, its probably fine, but jump on the upgrade path offerings that will provide trade-ins coming in 2008. ( sorry i cant spill the beans on who is prepping the clever 1080p upgrade markteing, but it is coming ) I will probably no longer speak to the VHS/1366 stuff in 2008, and anything not 16:9 widescreen is basically old news.

WINTER 2008 Pricedrop season.

If you didnt get a nice big flatscreen under the tree, you probably are among the smarter of the population, since DLP and most all Rear Projection systems will see a massive price drop and the large $999 HDTV will be within reach as a very good bang for the buck,... LCD sizes increase and price competitive economy of scale kicks into full gear. We will list our picks for you.

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HD and look of large.

HD 1080 is a different world to videographers, and a happy place for Film producers... why?

In the old days of TV the image was so blurry that facial details were generally only visible in very close shots, in HD very close shooting is way too much detail usually. I sort of feel sorry for Hillary Clinton because she really cant take an HD closeup without looking rather scary, and it will happen in the coming elections as camera operators defy producer guidance and zoom in when they should not, old habits will be hard to break, and hard to take in HD. Yikes. Benefits of HD definitely goes to Mitt Romney who really looks presidential in closeup HD ( scary thought, but true )

TMFD. a new term for you.

New Technology that extracts from noise reduction filtering is already in use on News Channel HD, Smooths the skin tone color table but makes for rather plastic cheeks unless you are very good at it on the news anchors of the business, but its getting more tuned all the time. I am guilty of employing this myself in post production, since all i have to do is draw a box around the area of the image i want filtered and the rest is automated for me, no more stray hairy zit blemish wrinkle farm whatever... Temporal fNoise Filtering tools are rather cool and rescue the situation of what i will now call TMFD. ( Too Much Facial Detail )

Sorry Conan, but you should be the first to start really using this.

Another comment - does Makeup fix the problems? In Short, yes it can , but at $250/hr for quality makeup vs just clicking in Post Production... the producers will migrate to the digital solution and instruct the make-up poeple to use color standards that favor the "fix in post"

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HD-DVD

Anyhow, enough tech rant - whats in it for you? HD-DVD for one thing, its pricing and performance is just too damn good, there is not enough difference between Blu-ray and HD to merit a larger price for the Blu-ray. You will see $99 HD-DVD players in 2008 - they may not be really great in some ways but they will enable the masses who also chose to buy the $999 widescreen. That said, i still really like the Disney stuff for its high action clean look Blu-ray work, it really is state of the art, but its current economics just dont really favor middle america all that well. http://www.tacp.toshiba.com/hddvd/ Kind of caters to the Sci-Fi side, what with a toy Phaser gun universal remote, if only it could zap-away the crappy enforced trailers in the DVD.


SHAMELESS PLUG:
http://cpmotionpictures.com/ "Before The Devil Knows You're Dead" getting Nominated!


More in a bit and HAPPY NEW YEAR.