RED Compression in Broadcast Signal -YUK

J

jkilgour

Member
I hate pixel-peeping, but I was watching The Social Network on HBO (NY Cablevision Digital IO) the other night, and it looked like crap.
A lot of banding and compression that I have not seen on film-sourced material before. Anyone see this?
 
Don't blame the camera it was shot on, when its been in the theatres with no problem whatsoever.

Probably has something to do with however HBO processed it.. They didn't get the R3ds to process. they got another format.
 
I'm sure they processed it from an HDCAM SR master like all other films. And it **could** be that the RED source material doesn't hold up to televised MPEG-2 or whatever HBO servers are playing out.

All I know is, I watch HBO films all the time and never saw something this bad before.
 
jkilgour said:
I'm sure they processed it from an HDCAM SR master like all other films. And it **could** be that the RED source material doesn't hold up to televised MPEG-2 or whatever HBO servers are playing out.

All I know is, I watch HBO films all the time and never saw something this bad before.
Click to expand...

Okay, but you know banding and compression are generally both problems introduced by low bit rate delivery formats, so how would that have anything to do with the origination? It just indicates that the source is a) clean (little noise and grain to avoid banding), and b) detailed (which especially for mpeg2 is further troubled by movement). If anything this highlights that some movies do more visually and require better codecs.
 
I'm not on cable now but when I was I noticed the cable company picks and chooses the level of compression per channel. Some looked like total crap while others looked good. Source material is irrelevant here.
 
Watched it on Blu-ray a while back and to my eyes it was fantastic. Downstream compression from a broadcaster is not a good way to judge codec efficiency IMHO. This is clearly shown by the difference between Vimeo's online compression vs the downloadable version in most cases. The Red cameras generally hold up well in this arena so reserve judgement me thinks :undecided
 
I've seen some stuff on HBO that originated on film and looked like crap also. I'm talking about looking very blocky and noisy sometimes. For the most part material viewed there looks great. It's not a digital camera vs film thing....i'm sure. One show that i love the look of is "Game of Thrones." Been enjoying the series and was inpressed how cinematic and clean it looked for film ....that is....until halfway through I found out it was actually shot on an Arri Alexa. A James Bond movie, for example, can come on right after that and I'll notice more artifacts in it than some shows shot digitally.

I believe it all has to do with how they broadcast it. Not the kind of camera used.
 
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