Inside Audio: Dave Moulton
A Couch Potato Rants About Video Quality
You gotta understand this. I'm an audio guy. When
I'm doing audio, I'm really pretty fussy, got lotsa critical standards,
lotsa moaning ‘n groaning about noise ‘n distortion, bandwidth,
resolution, compression artifacts, yada, yada, blah, blah, blah!
But I'm not a video guy; I'm your basic couch potato.
Seriously, I AM the Joe Six-Pack of video. Got no standards, a totally
passive uncritical and unschooled viewer. Time was, if I could tell
it was basketball as opposed to the 6 o'clock news, I was fine with
it. Well, times change. About a year ago, as a function of consulting
I was doing for Bang & Olufsen, the company gave me one of its
32-inch Avant TVs.
Now this is a seriously wicked cool TV, a TV that
does some really nice and really tricky things with an NTSC signal.
Not HD exactly, but close. Good enough quality that video guys who
have come by for one thing or another end up staring at it mesmerized,
saying things like "Wow, look at that shadow tone around his
armpit! I never see stuff like that on MY monitor," and, "Man,
when the talent gets one of these, they're gonna fire everyone in
makeup. You can really see where the wrinkles are!"
WAY COOL
For me, this was too cool. I just wallowed in the
picture quality and practiced guessing the age of the movie from
the color quality and the film grain. For the first time, I could
actually see this stuff. And I found that some channels/shows had
simply stellar video quality. The newsroom shots from CNN or any
of the major networks are usually amazing, and the Disney Channel
looks really, really good (a major triumph of form over substance?).
But it turns out that there's a downside to all this
super video picture quality. It turns out you can also now see some
really bad stuff that earlier you weren't able to see. Even worse,
it looks like we're generating additional forms of bad stuff that
were never available for viewing before.
What I've found is that I, functioning as the Joe
Six-Pack of the couch potato cohort, am beginning to develop a "flinch"
reflex to some of these badnesses. I find I'm beginning to avoid
some channels and some content where the problems show up.
More to the point, I find my TV watching is declining
because the viewing experience is becoming less pleasurable. The
trouble really began when my cable provider "upgraded"
me to "digital" cable TV. Before then, I had happily grooved
along on the 50 channels or so that I'd become familiar with before
B&O ruined me forever.
Some stations and genres such as locally produced
sports seemed pretty rough but the Avant made the picture way cooler,
no doubt about it. With the new digital cable, however, matters
have gotten worse – not better.
WE'RE JAMMIN'
I have some 250 channels and I guess what they mean
when they say it's digital is that they have converted, for transmission,
a lot of analog channels into digital signals that get converted
back to analog by a set-top box on the receiver. And I suspect there
is some serious digital video compression going on to jam all that
bandwidth into my living room.
The first (admittedly minor) annoyance occurs when
I go north of Channel 100 and change channels. Takes awhile, it
does. And the new picture doesn't all come in at once, it starts
coming on-screen in stupid little squares, taking maybe five seconds
to get everything on-screen. Annoying, ugly, inconvenient when you're
channel surfing. Not a big deal, just annoying.
But then I began to notice other things. Rapid motion
or light change – particularly with strong light contrasts
– results in a kind of bubbly decaying residue and/or disconnected
flickering of the bright light artifacts. A news shot of a person
walking rapidly while somebody fires off a flash camera at him,
for instance, immediately develops a very ugly mottled texture that
persists while the flash decays.
Meanwhile, sports such as football or basketball –
where there are high-contrast uniforms in a brightly lit venue –
present a host of nasties. The close-up, slow stuff is fine, but
with any distant field shots the coarseness of resolution becomes
obvious and nearly unbearable, especially when there's a lot of
motion.
In those cases, the players often seem to disappear
and generally what I see is brightly colored helmets and/or jerseys
kind of moving about on the field. The lack of resolution of the
signal and the artificiality of the image become painfully obvious.
In all fairness, my cable provider recently did another
fiddle to its service and things may be a little better, but it
remains ugly and annoying. And that's a serious problem. It goes
like this: We are improving the resolution and signal quality of
the production process, and we are rushing willy-nilly toward hi-res
playback in the home.
But something bad is happening in the intervening
post production and transmission systems. And the effect of those
badnesses is being magnified by (a) the real improving resolution
of consumer TVs, where improvements can be – and are –
routinely observed in ALL their glory when viewing any half-way
decent DVD; and (b) the obvious and frustrating channel-to-channel
variability of the video signal.
And when a video couch potato like me begins to be
bugged by it, the whole system is headed for trouble. I find I am
taking more and more channels off my "Fav" list and I
am watching TV less and less frequently, simply because it has become
increasingly irritating.
The unfortunate mix of hi-res consumer gear and degraded
transmission quality seems particularly poisonous. And I don't REALLY
care about picture quality – or rather, I didn't until I could
see it. Now that I can see it, I feel cheated when I can't see it.
When my TV was mediocre, it all seemed fine. Now it's much, much
less than fine.
We're in for a bumpy ride, I suspect.
Thanks for listening.
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