HD Relaxed
TV3 - Mediaworks New Zealand
TV3 insists that new prime time show Underbelly New Zealand (The Land of the Long Green Cloud) will be delivered in HD but says they are fairly relaxed with their HD technical requirements.
In this case, relaxed means employing an acquisition workflow that would not qualify for broadcast HD under recommendations issued by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) – an association of 110 or more broadcasting organisations from around the world.
The six one-hour episodes of Underbelly NZ attracted $3.9 million funding from New Zealand on Air’s Platinum fund for high-end programmes and are in production at the moment.
MediaWorks TV, the owner of the TV3 network, says they expect that a programme commissioned in HD has been shot in HD, edited in HD, and it must be delivered on an HDCAM tape.
Underbelly NZ is shooting on Sony F3 cameras that don’t by themselves meet EBU recommendations for HD acquisition, but originally boosted their capability with off-board recorders. These compact recorders are mounted on the side of the camera accepting an HD-SDI output from the camera and automatically recording when the camera recording begins. They typically record at 4:2:2 codec at 100Mbps, but the latest versions are actually capable of recording 4:4:4 uncompressed video. Either way, they are in widespread use as a way of boosting cameras like the Sony F3 well into the scope of any European and U.K broadcast recommendations.
However, after a while, the off-board recording approach was dropped.
“It was proving too expensive and time consuming for the production and causing delays and problems on set,” says Althea Myers, MediaWorks TV publicist.
The production changed to shooting with the native internal recording on the Sony F3 cameras, which is a 4:2:0 codec at 35Mbps on SxS cards.
“We discussed it with our engineers and distributors, and we will still deliver to all required specifications and the change will have no visible impact on look and quality,” says Myers.
Of course as a commercial broadcaster TV3 is under no obligation to meet any particular set standard and the production company can’t be criticised for making legitimate commercial choices to suit the broadcaster.
Still, if the difference in codecs has no visible or quality impact then it looks like nobody told the off-board recorder manufacturers who have built substantial business around selling gadgets at US$3K or more per unit all over the world –precisely to improve the quality of 4:2:0 codec cameras.
It is true that the quality differences of this magnitude might be too subtle for the average viewer sitting at home with their HD set top box plugged into their 20 year old CRT analogue television.
But if those people are not in the minority they soon will be; in the past 12 months alone New Zealanders bought close to 400,000 TVs up from 200,000 TVs the year before – presumably all, or nearly all, flat screen HD television receivers, many of them in bigger sizes that highlight any picture deficiencies.
On the production and transmission side, TV3 says that it will be a long time before their HD transmissions are all acquired in HD – they admit that even today they still get Beta SP as a delivery format.
But at the same time high-end programmes imported from countries where HD requirements are tighter can look pretty good, giving viewers a handy yardstick for the quality they should expect from domestic HD broadcasts.
It is entirely up to a television network to position their channel, and their individual programmes, where they will on the quality spectrum.
But as the EBU recommendations put it:
Technical quality becomes an issue for the home audience when there are evident variations in the quality of different sources available to him. It is self evident that TV channels presented in an inferior quality will be judged dis-favourably to those presented in a higher quality.
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““It was proving too expensive and time consuming for the production and causing delays and problems on set,” says Althea Myers, MediaWorks TV publicist.”
If this comment is true then they need to look at the camera / data wrangling crew. I have worked on, and we (cameraworks) have supplied numerous off board recorder kits to many different types of jobs from the smallest doco shoots to full blown drama, and while you do need to modify your workflow a LITTLE to accommodate them there is no way their use should cause “delays and problems onset” unless the crew is inexperienced with the technology, and on this level of project that would not be the case. So as I see it the only reason this system would have been dropped is because of cost, which is again is unusual, an off board recorder is a pretty small percentage of an overall drama camera budget.
“We discussed it with our engineers and distributors, and we will still deliver to all required specifications and the change will have no visible impact on look and quality,” says Myers.
Does this mean TVNZ has now officially changed their HD spec requirements? In my current understanding the show will now not be up to international HD spec, fine locally if TVNZ decides to change their rules and accept it of course but this would damage the show’s marketability internationally. Also in regard to the second part of that comment, delivering 4:2:0 instead of 4:2:2 will definitely lower the possible end picture quality but this is not evident until well into post production. As we all know you can manipulate / colour grade etc a 4:2:2 image way more than a 4:2:0 one plus you also get less motion artifacts on camera moves.
“It is true that the quality differences of this magnitude might be too subtle for the average viewer sitting at home with their HD set top box plugged into their 20 year old CRT analogue television.”
This is a valid point from a possible viewers POV but if we are working with this in mind why don’t we just shoot everything on VHS..?
Rant over, regards,
Chris Hiles
http://www.cameraworks.co.nz
http://www.thesounddepartment.com
Thanks for comments: BTW this is a TV3 show not a TVNZ show.