What’s 1080p?

Posted on May 19, 2011 by

Have you ever noticed how some TVs and other video devices often brag about their of support 1080p? I imagine that more than a few people see the 1080p logo on the TV’s box and think to themselves, “I’m not too sure about all this 1080p business, but whatever it is, I gotta have it!”

So what does 1080p mean? Anytime you see the numbers 480, 720, or 1080 in the context of video, it is referring to video resolution. And video resolution is basically a way of describing how much detail the video has. Not surprisingly, larger numbers mean more detail. The numbers themselves (480, 720, 1080) refer to the rows of pixels (often called lines of resolution) the video image has. Thus, a 1080p video has 1080 rows of pixels making up its image.

So what puts the “p” in 1080p? The “p” stands for progressive. Progressive video is video that plays one full frame at a time, just like film does. The alternative to progressive video is interlaced video. FYI: An interlaced video with a resolution of 1080 rows of pixels would be written as 1080i. For technical reasons, a lot of video is interlaced which means that it only displays half of its pixels at a time (for a deeper explanation go back to this post on 120Hz TVs, starting on the third paragraph). Progressive video looks better than interlaced video and is the hot new thing for TVs currently on the market.

1080p is a great big fat video signal. This is great for blu-ray and HD game consoles, but don’t expect to take advantage of the beauty of 1080p video when you’re watching broadcast TV.

Our television infrastructure was never designed to handle such a big fat video signal, so instead we broadcast a more slender version of HD-720p video and 1080i video.

720p, being a progressive video format, is not as large as it could be but it’s quite pleasing to the eye. Its rival, 1080i, is a larger video resolution, but only displays half of itself at a time–not ideal, but that’s the trade we must make for greater detail. Is this confusing? Yes it is!

I want to take a moment to apologize to the world for the mess that our broadcast engineers brought us. During the birth of HD video, the engineers couldn’t decide which HD video format was better, 720p or 1080i, so they ended up releasing both.

In the late 1990s, broadcast engineers got a wild hare to start creating a higher resolution video format. After looking at our current broadcast infrastructure, the engineers came up with a few options for how this higher resolution video could work. One option was to create a progressive video format that had 720 rows of pixels. The other was an interlaced video format that had 1080 rows of pixels. Two spirited camps formed, each was wildly enamored with their creation. Each camp was so stubborn and sure that theirs would be the victor that they both went ahead and sold video equipment to various networks supporting their formats.

Rivaling technologies usually have a winner and a loser. VHS beat BETA for the first home video consumer product. Blu-ray beat HD-DVD for the first HD home video product. Unfortunately, the contest between 720p and 1080i had no loser or winner, and because of this, we are left with some very complicated standards.

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Final Cut Pro vs. Avid

Posted on May 17, 2011 by

There are several options for video editing software but Final Cut Pro and Avid are the big two. Final Cut Pro was created by this little company called Apple, and Avid by DigiDesign. Both programs perform roughly the same actions; it’s just that a portion of the industry likes Final Cut Pro, and another portion is partial to Avid.

When I do work from home I edit on Final Cut Pro and at my full-time job I edit on Avid.

Difficulty:


FCP: Like every other Apple product, Final Cut Pro’s interface is elegantly designed and pretty. It’s not intimidating and it’s relatively reasonable to teach yourself how to use it.

AVID: It’s been my observation that regardless of skill, Avid editors are respected more than their FCP counterparts. I have a theory as to why: Avid is such an ugly and unapproachable piece of software that only a serious editor would ever bother with it. Even if you are an experienced editor, learning this program without formal training is almost impossible. Of course, once anybody learns something, it becomes easy. However it takes more effort to become comfortable with Avid then it does with Final Cut Pro.

Price:

FCP: $1000, or $299 to upgrade from a previous version (includes an entire suite of cool software)

AVID:$2400, $870 to upgrade from a previous version (includes only editing software)

Integration:

FCP: Final Cut Pro is best used when only one editor is working on a project at a time.

AVID: Numerous Avid’s are often networked together so that they can many editors can work on the same project at the same time.

The bottom line is that an editor is likely to prefer the software he/she was taught on and/or edits on primarily.. Avid is an ugly beast, but it’s powerful. Final Cut Pro is beautiful… and it’s also powerful. All serious editors should be proficient with both programs because the industry uses both. Each has its own way of solving certain problems, but both programs will do just about anything you ask of it.

The more you know.

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NAB 2011

Posted on April 20, 2011 by

The National Association of Broadcasters Convention (NAB) for 2011 just finished a few days ago. NAB is a big and expensive convention where all the video equipment companies go to sell their new stuff to broadcasters. This convention has everything from exciting new video cameras to cutting edge software.

Unfortunately, I’m not important enough to attend. I did however, (for the second year in a row I might add) edit a few promos, which were played on the convention floor! Here’s an original one I created for this year’s convention:

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Working on Movies

Posted on March 24, 2011 by

Growing up, I fantasized about working alongside big movie cameras, lights, and all the other hoopla one could expect from a big budget movie set. It was the job every film school student thought they would eventually land and I was no different.

It wasn’t soon after I graduated from college that I got to cash in on my fantasy. A big movie was coming to town and an actor friend of mine brought me along to the set. This was just the foot in the door that I needed, I thought. I figured that in no time I would be promoted to director or at least assistant director if that didn’t work out. And right on plan, about a week into shooting I got hired onto the crew as a production assistant–my plan to wiggle my way into the big times was working!

As a production assistant, I was entrusted with a walkie-talkie. The main purpose of this walkie-talkie was to give the truly important people access to me so they could boss me around. Though I was spending most of my time babysitting extras and guarding sidewalks from meandering pedestrians, I still had the walkie-talkie, which meant I was part of the club.

On one occasion I was even trusted to bring Mr. White (Bruce Willis’ pseudonym–sorry Bruce) a bundle of bananas. How about that!

For the next year or two, I worked as a production assistant (and as an extra when that didn’t pan out) for movies that would come around to town as much as I could. When I was on, I worked upwards of 16-hour days. When I was off – well, it could be months off. You basically get paid minimum wage, plus all the donuts and granola from the craft services cart your heart might desire.

Contrary to what you might think, the best part wasn’t the career opportunity. It wasn’t movie star sighting. And it certainly wasn’t the hours or the pay. It was the joy of standing on a movie set holding a walkie-talkie while Joe Shmoe walking down the street was totally jealous, I could tell.

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Widescreen Part II: The Fall of Black Bars

Posted on March 1, 2011 by

Mankind wanted widescreen in his home before his home theater was actually ready for it. This is the continuation of that obsession’s tale.

While viewers fell in love with the cinematic look of a photographically wider picture, video editors fell in love with the composition possibilities of the black bars themselves. Black bars allowed for all kinds of new wacky things. Editors began “thinking outside the box” (or outside the bars if you will), and started placing text inside the black bars during commercials. Some even got fancy and dabbled with trading in the black bars for white ones, or red ones or green ones, and even some fancy designs made their way onto the tops and bottoms of the video. Remember back when black bars were just the result of video not actually fitting on the screen?

It was all fun and games until real HD arrived. Now we have been graced with all of these cool widescreen TVs, and it’s time that our widescreen video properly fits on our screens! Right? Unfortunately, we were playing god. We created something that no one had ever intended. We all found ourselves left with this pseudo-widescreen video that actually only works when viewed on a 4:3 TV.

What some broadcasters don’t seem to get is that even though not everything is available as of yet in HD, most people do have HD TVs. When you watch SD on an HD TV, the HD TV shrinks the video down to fit the height of the screen, which leaves black vertical bars on either side of the screen.

This is called pillarboxing (because the black bars resemble pillars). When that pillarboxed video also happens to be letterboxed, you get the horizontal black bars from the letterboxing added to the vertical black bars from the pillarboxing.

Even though the video is the correct aspect ratio in this case, it does not fill the screen, and this leads to depression.

The good people who make the HDTVs thought ahead about this shrunken video problem and gave us a button to fix it. Sometimes it’s called, “Aspect,” or “Wide,” or “Zoom,” but it always does the same thing. Pressing that magic button usually toggles though a few aspect ratio settings on the TV.

Just when you thought this couldn’t get any more complicated and messy, it did. See some broadcasters still like to mix 4:3 content with 16:9 content. As an example of this, think of a network bug (a.k.a. the network logo that hangs out at the bottom of the screen), it’s placed correctly if this was 4:3 video. But this is not 4:3 video; the aspect ratio is 16:9, so the bug displays awkwardly between letterboxed video and the black bar below the video.

Try watching this on a widescreen TV! You are either stuck with a giant black border around the video so that nothing is cut off, or you get video with half a bug cropped off. Either way this looks really ghetto! How about you broadcasters just pick one aspect ratio and stick with it?

I would like however, to congratulate the one network that finally got it right, MTV. Recently MTV figured out what year it was and what kind of TV technology dominates right now. On MTV’s standard definition channel, they play actual widescreen shows, and then they place their bug high enough on the screen so that even when widescreen viewers ultimately adjust their TV’s aspect ratio, the bug is still fully visible. Kudos!

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Widescreen Part I: The Rise of Black Bars

Posted on March 1, 2011 by

When DVD technology arrived in the late 90′s, there was a giant boost in the popularity of widescreen video. All of a sudden the average home viewer was enjoying widescreen video for the very first time and those iconic black bars on the top and bottoms of the screen arrived. TV shows, music videos, and commercials all plopped down some black bars to show off how hip they were. The TV viewing world was excited about widescreen, and were readying themselves ready for what was still to come, widescreen TVs… Or were they?

Before we jump in, here’s a bit of background on aspect ratios for the kids:

Aspect ratio: An aspect ratio is a numerical way of comparing an object’s width to its height. A perfect square would be 1:1 (sometimes written 1X1), translating to 1 unit of measurement wide by one unit of measurement tall. For example, think of that cheesy peel and stick laminate floor tile; it is 1ft x 1 ft. Thus, the floor tile’s aspect ratio is 1:1. Another example would be a floor tile that is 2ft x 1 ft; its aspect ratio would be 2:1, meaning it is 2 units of measurement wide by one unit of measurement tall.

(There are several types of aspect ratios we encounter, here are the major ones.)

1. 4:3 Aspect Ratio: The original aspect ratio is 4:3; or traditionally called “Full Screen.” Way back in the day, believe it or not, movies were all in 4:3 (four units wide by three units tall). 4:3 is the aspect ratio of SD TV (standard definition television). Later, when TV got popular, movies had to become more awesome than TV, so they adopted a new gimmick called “widescreen”.

2. 16:9 Aspect Ratio: This aspect ratio, traditionally called “widescreen,” became decidedly sexier then 4:3 over time. After half a century of being exclusive to movies, widescreen was adopted by TV thanks to the home theater. 16:9 is now the aspect ratio for HD TV (high definition television).

Sometimes, the aspect ratio of the content you are watching, doesn’t match the aspect ratio of your TV. When this happens, some adjustments need to be made.

1. Letterbox: To fit a 16:9 image onto a 4:3 screen, the image needs to shrink down, which leaves some unused space on the screen (i.e. black bars). This kind of video is called letterbox because at some point in video history, this reminded someone of peeking though a mail slot, isn’t that profound?

2. Anamorphic: Instead of wasting a valuable portion of the video signal on black bars, anamorphic video intentionally stretches its image tall so as to stuff all the possible detail into the video signal. While letterboxed video is fine with a 4:3 TV, a 16:9 TV can benefit from a the anamorphic video. When anamorphic video is viewed on a 16:9 TV, the image is stretched back out to look its best; otherwise on a 4:3 TV, the video will be viewed as letterboxed.

These are the methods we used to jerry-rig our video so that we could enjoy the glory of 16:9 video, while we were stuck with 4:3 TVs. We wanted our widescreen! We wanted it all! We got greedy. The horror was still to come. What do you think happened once when we grew up and finally got our real 16:9 TVs? Now we have all this jerry-rigged widescreen video to deal with. To be continued… DUM DUM DUUUUUUUMMMMM!

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Universal Remotes

Posted on February 24, 2011 by

Too many times I have tried to watch TV at other people’s houses and have to be given the orientation seminar before I can even fire up the TV:

“Okay, first you use this remote to turn the TV on, and then set it to HDMI 2. After that, use this remote to turn the receiver on. Now, the receiver defaults to input 3 so make sure you change it to input 5; otherwise you’ll be hearing my favorite country radio station. After that, use this remote to turn on the Blu-ray player. Once it’s all up and running you can adjust the volume with this receiver remote, but make sure you press this button before you turn it up or down. Otherwise, it won’t work…”

Nothing makes a hot steamy home theater system less sexy then an impromptu how-to class. You’ve seen this move when old people post the homemade how-to manual at the remote control staging table. They thoughtfully adorn themselves with reading glasses while picking up the master recipe for TV watching LAME!

Some people program that Motorola remote that everyone gets with their cable box as the universal remote. Half the time with that thing, you’re adjusting the TV volume, and the other half you’re adjusting the volume on the cable box (how about someone let Motorola know that cable boxes don’t need volume control!) And there’s nothing better then hitting the “All On” button to turn off the TV and it powers everything down including your DVR causing you to miss a valuable episode of American Idol!

So what’s the solution? Truthfully TV has just gotten so damn complicated, there is no great solution. It’s tough to get one magic wand to get a multitude of different devices all made by different manufacturers to dance in harmony with each other. I’ve looked and looked and have never found the solution.

The best option, in my opinion, has to be the smart remote. A smart remote basically takes that ghetto hand-written how-to manual for firing up the Blu-ray player, and automates it into a one-button “activity.” Pressing “Watch Blu-ray” turns on all of the relevant devices, sets everything to the correct inputs and then reassigns its buttons to Blu-ray actions, all so you’ll only need one remote. It’s both pretty cool, and also it’s your only hope in dismantling the remote control staging table. I’m not promising that you’ll never touch your old remotes again, but hopefully after bringing the smart remote into your living room you’ll only need them on very rare occasions.

But beware! There are a few downsides to the smart remote.

1. They are expensive: Our first smart remote cost $80. It didn’t work all that great so we had to upgrade to a $160 one (and that was on sale).

2. They eat through batteries: Our remote has a charging cradle (How obnoxious is that? Answer: Not at all, that’s awesome!) If you get a non-rechargeable smart remote, you’ll end up replacing the batteries every other month.

3. Difficult to set up: One needs to be quite savvy to program one of these remotes properly. I fancy myself awesome at understanding these things and it took me hours and hours to get ours just right. You’ll need to teach it which commands to send, and in what order, and what the timing should be for each. And the programming software it comes with is no prize either.

4. 100% functionality is not to be expected: I feel like ours works right about 85% of the time. Sometimes if you don’t aim it just right certain devices don’t turn on, or maybe completely irrelevant devices might do something unexpected. 85% is close… better then the annoyance of having to deal with numerous remotes. (For that 15% of the time when the remote doesn’t do everything right there is a “Help” button which basically makes the remote try again, and this always works.)

5. Limited brands to choose from: In fact, if you want a smart remote you’re going to have to buy a Harmony because, well, I’ve never seen any other smart remote brand. When I was at the checkout at Best Buy purchasing our latest remote the guy behind the counter was like,
“A Harmony!”
“Yeah I know! Is this a good one?” I asked.
“Oh I don’t know, I don’t believe in universal remotes, I’m a purist…” he replied.
“…Ok…” Awkward.

Really, now? The purist argument almost never does anything for me. I do agree that the universal remote is not perfect, but it’s better then dealing with 20 different remotes.

It’s always been my dream that someday Apple will swoop in and fix all of this for us. Maybe once Steve is feeling better I’ll give him a call.

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