Since they seem to be here for good, why is it, when a show is broadcast letterboxed, that they still must put the bugs on the image and not in the blank areas?

I'm watching Star Wars 4, It's the scene where Luke and Princess Leia swing across the chasm. She's firing the blaster. With every shot, her eyes close as she fires. Ha!

Because many letterbox broadcasts are simulcast in high-def 16:9 on a different channel. And/or the broadcasters know that some TV's let you zoom in on a letterboxed image. In both cases the broadcasters want their bugs on the screen.

The worse problem occurs with many network sports events here in the US. The high-def camera operators frame the shots so that the 4:3 square contains all the action. When simulcast on standard def channels, they just slice off the sides so 16:9 becomes 4:3. So even the bugs and the score HUDs have to fit within the 4:3 square that's in the middle of the screen. So not only do you have the problem of the camera man not taking advantage of the wider 16:9 frame to show you a nice well-framed shot of the action for the high def audiences, you also have the station bugs and the scoreboards covering up that action.

If only the stations could deliberately add the bugs and scoreboards separately on their high-def outputs and their standard-def outputs. But for some reason, they don't. They just get lazy and cheap and compose the shot once, with all elements in place, then slice of the sides and downconvert.



Because those fake blasters were actually pretty loud cap guns, firing small loud explosive charges to make the little puffs of smoke and to give the actors something to react to. Poor Carrie was probably just not used to it, and blinked with (or in anticipation of) each loud noise.

I've got a better one for you. When they come back from blowing up the death star, Luke gets out of his fighter, Leia comes running up and shouts "Luke!" and he replies "Carrie!".

Not that it helps but they do the exact same thing in Australia most of the time. Here the FTA providers have a SD channel and a HD channel. If the HD program is exclusive to HD and not shown on the SD channel, the watermark will not be 4:3 friendly usually. That's about the only time they get it right.

For sport they do the same thing. Looks quite stupid and for anyone who hasn't really seen 16:9 before I have to explain why they do it.

A couple of channels have had watermarks so large or intrusive recently that after backlash from the public they were made smaller and/or more transparent. Surprising since they generally don't listen to what the public want. One of the channels was the ABC which is the government owned broadcaster.

And why oh why do some of the bugs have sound?
It is amazing/annoying all the things channel owners/operators are doing to cram in those extra ad spots. Thankfully Tivo helps maintain my sanity.

What I get a kick out of is the difference in scoreboards between the HD and SD broadcasts. The most glaring is probably the HDNet NHL games, where the scoreboard is this nice tiny graphic in the top left corner where everything is just so simply presented. Then, you have the Fox Sports Network that has the scoreboard across the entire top of the screen, cramming everything including an advertisement into that bar.

It is just funny to me how the screen with so much more room on it uses the smallest scoreboard possible, because they know you are watching the game and not the scoreboard. On the already limited screen, they take up a lot of the space providing mostly irrelevant information, or just blank space.

It would be clever if FSN would use the 16:9 image for both, adding an unobtrusive scoreboard for the 16:9 broadcast and filling up what would otherwise be black bars with an "obtrusive" scoreboard.

Except that most of the time when I see a bug obscuring a letterboxed TV show, it sits half-in, half-out of the black bar at the bottom.

Exactly! That's why I love watching hockey on HDNet when I can. They don't have a standard-def simulcast, so they don't have to worry about low rez TVs or 4:3 screens. They can take advantage of the high resolution and widescreen framing that high-def offers. They do such a good job.

It's usually for STB's that are set to 4:3 centre cutout.


In terms of framing shots. You can only compose one shot with one camera, so you couldn't do both unless you had 2 sets of cameras, 2 directors and 2 scanners. Then you'd still need 2 sets of character generators and 2 different uplinks. The chances are they're already uplinking 2 feeds (main & reserve) so they'd actually have to uplink 4 carriers, very expensive. Give it a few years until 4:3 sets are firmly in the minority and then the situation may change.

When we moved our shows to widescreen it took our cameramen a few weeks to get used to the extra screen estate that widescreen brings, that said they still frame for 4:3.

What amazes me about the HD from HDnet, as opposed to the networks, is just how much better it looks. They're really taking advantage of the broader dynamic range of HD, where the major networks have to produce a signal that can not only be cropped but also shoehorned into the more limited gamut of NTSC.

As Andy says, we'll at some point hit a switch when HD will be the default and SD will be less crucial. I figure the coming death of analog TV broadcasts will be one of the big steps along that particular path.