Well that's a failure of imagination. I'll admit technically speaking it often is *somewhat* compressed, - eg. 422 Subsampled chroma at least. But there is a massive difference between a delivery codec and a signal you're still working with. To start with H264 and their ilk are computationally expensive to do anything with. A single frame of 1080p is a pretty big dataset, and it's painful enough doing basic matrix transforms, but adding a bunch of higher level computations on top of that?... For example just cutting between two feeds of an inter frame compressed codec requires that the processor decompress the GOP and recreate the missing frames. Several of orders of magnitude more complicated than stopping one feed and starting another. And generally speaking the uncompressed feed you have in broadcast situation you're doing *something* oo. Switching, mixing, adding graphics, etc. But the biggest question is one of generation loss. Even one round trip through one of those codecs results in a massive drop in quality (as you rightly point out). You don't want to be compressing footage out of the cameras any more than you can, because you KNOW that you're going to be rescaling, retiming, wiping, fading, keying etc etc etc...

Your point is very well taken and for the most part I have to agree with you - AS far as communicating specific, for example technical, ideas are concerned. But as for communicating more subtle more nuanced things about the interviewee - especially things the interviewee doesn't specifically set out to communicate - video has it over the written word every time. You can't always tell if someone is lying over video - but you almost NEVER can when you're reading the written word.

I concur. An even better solution would be to engage a local freelancer or stringer to do it. That way they'd actually have a decent camera, decent audio gear (people so often overlook this) and might actually know something about lighting, sound, scene etc. Doesn't have to be expensive maybe a couple of hundred dollars for an hour long interview. You can still do the interview over voip, just get a million times better picture. Have a point of difference.

Speaking as an Australian I would love to pay only $60 for a AAA title. WHY is it that in this day and age with pretty much 1:1 parity with the US dollar, am I being asked for $85-110 for a new release. WTF is WITH that?

My understanding of turkish is shaky, but my ears, that consonant always sounded closer to half way between ch in branch and the G in Gem.

Of course there is a chicken and egg type problem there. How do you design effective treatments without reliable diagnosis...?

This'll really put the whole "sharks can't get cancer" thing to the test.

Who's surprised the word for "something to hide behind" is french?
/ducks

My local pub has a setup like this. I imagine it was fairly expensive to setup as it's 6-7 projectors, each with their own slave computer controlled by a server running a bit of software called watchout,( by dataton). It doesn't use cameras to calibrate, it was done manually (or so I'm told), but since the projectors have been installed for at least 5-6 years the time spent calibrating them isn't such a big deal. And the software allows for making minor adjustments (via sliders) in case you bump one of them.

Anyway this is the bar: http://www.horsebazaar.com.au/

The effect is quite cool, it's one long video wall that wraps around the pub. Shame they don't have any decent photos of it.

Mod parent up. Here in Australia we already have this legislation and it's *completely* pointless. Same deal, some ninny in parliament with no real understanding of the technology involved wrote some *bs* legislation:

http://www.freetv.com.au/Content_Common/pg-Loudness-in-Advertisements.seo

The problem is coming up with an "objective" comparison of the loudness between two bits of programming. As the parent says it's more a question of compression and dynamic range than actual volume. (by compression I mean audio compression, not data compression). If you run a peak search on even the most mild mannered jane austen bbc tv program, you'll get the same reading as you do an a sham-wow commercial. It's just that the sham-wow tvc dude is trying to cram so much information in the 30 seconds that he'll run everything at -3db. Where as in the Jane Austen thing will only reach that point once or twice in 10 minute section.

But an even bigger problem is that the people making the ads have no idea what they're actually going to be screening with. How are you going to match the apparent loudness of your ad with the tv program, if you've got no idea what that program is anyway? It's retarded.

Consequently in Australia we have a vaguely written set of "guidelines" and a requirement that any tvc submitted to a network be "OP48" compliant and say as such on the slate. The result, everyone writes OP48 compliant on their slate and that's about it....

Hrmm.. Yes I want to buy a 1TB drive because I'm about to capture 3 hours of HD footage for a project I'm working on. In fact I want to buy several. Most of the files going on to a disk like that are going to be tens of gigabytes, write once, read many. Incremental backup is so far from my mind it doesn't even register. Besides, the operating system supplies those tools anyway.(rsync rdiff - or even just "time machine"). To be honest in almost every other post production or graphic design studio that I've been in in the last 3 years has used laCie drives almost exclusively. I don't know why (maybe because they're pretty?), but if it's their target market then it seems they can get away without offering incremental backup software, just fine. And charge a premium for it. Note: this is not an endorsement of laCie products - just an observation. my 2c.

Oh.... the ironing!