Formula 1 at Indy

BAZZIL · Post by **BAZZIL** » Wed Jul 05, 2006 12:04 am

theres two parts:

Video
Sound

How mighty difficult it must be to synchronise those back together again

Typhoon · Post by **Typhoon** » Wed Jul 05, 2006 12:15 am

BAZZIL wrote:theres two parts:

Video
Sound

How mighty difficult it must be to synchronise those back together again

I guess it really depends on where the fault began.

Prom, would SkyTV have any control over the Audio Sync? Or do they just pass on the package?

Kezza · Post by **Kezza** » Wed Jul 05, 2006 9:16 am

Typhoon wrote:Perhaps they should take note of our Nascar, and turn their damage off :P

So when's the rerun

Agent X20 · Post by **Agent X20** » Wed Jul 05, 2006 11:02 am

BAZZIL wrote:theres two parts:

Video
Sound

How mighty difficult it must be to synchronise those back together again

Too bloody right Bazz!

So wat if the cars are going 300Km/h and there are multiple feeds involved. The basic requirement of TV is that the sound and the audio synch up. That's it.

Agent X20 · Post by **Agent X20** » Wed Jul 05, 2006 11:08 am

While SkyTV might be cleaner and more detailed on occasions, it is also prone to hideous artifacting, dreadful colour banding and all too frequent breakup (splurges of pixels across the image).

Try a program with a sunset, water or anything with a gradual natural colour gradient. Nine times out of ten you can see horrible banding. Worse still on occasions (and the F1 has suffered from this) they turn up the compression and things start looking all chunky. The worst I've seen was an F1 race where the road looked like a bunch of epileptic squares. It was utterly hideous to watch. The cars were ok but everything else was just nasty to look at. Hell if you bought a DVD that looked like that you'd take it back.

Now this varies depending upon the chanel, material and phase of the moon but these issues are all there. Much of the time it's better than terrestrial broadcast but much of the time it's in some ways inferior. Let's not kid ourselves this is a first-rate service we're getting here.

Hell the damned decoders can't even "book" two shows in a row without it spontaneously deciding to pop you to the previews channel for the second show. Yes it's a bug says Sky and we're trying to fix it... yeah like since before Xmas and the rest.

Agent X20 · Post by **Agent X20** » Wed Jul 05, 2006 11:11 am

Typhoon wrote:[The logistics are far beyond our understanding, and yet we all have a big cry when the sound was out by a few seconds

I'm not paying $70+/month for something that comes across like a badly dubbed cheap hong kong kung fu movie, bearing in mind that F1 is the primary (well only) reason I have Sky.

Heppy · Post by **Heppy** » Wed Jul 05, 2006 11:21 am

Hong Kong Kung Fu, try saying that several times in a row when your pissed

Viking · Post by **Viking** » Wed Jul 05, 2006 12:13 pm

I think I've worked out what they did with the sync probs.
We must have got the audio live, and the video from the 'two second delay for swearing' feed.

Typhoon · Post by **Typhoon** » Wed Jul 05, 2006 12:25 pm

But is it's Sky's fault, or is it ITV's?
with 40 odd channels, I'm sure they won't pay people to sit there an watch & listern to them all, especially at 5am in the morning.
So why don't you ring up sky and complain, see if they give you a credit?

Prometheus · Post by **Prometheus** » Wed Jul 05, 2006 1:04 pm

Typhoon wrote:
BAZZIL wrote:theres two parts:

Video
Sound

How mighty difficult it must be to synchronise those back together again
I guess it really depends on where the fault began.

Prom, would SkyTV have any control over the Audio Sync? Or do they just pass on the package?

Yes they have the capability with a simple delay box. Hell even the sound desk in our main control room can handle such a simple task.

But it takes effort. And effort takes people. And people cost money. No there's no effort.

Large outside broadcast events like this have 3 methods for getting the signal from the camera back to the van.
- fibre, which is built into the contruction of the stadium, etc
- wireless, which works well for the hand held cameras
- good ol' fashioned cable, which takes video and audio signals, mostly pre-installed into locations. You can see the cbale dragging along the ground sometimes with the handhelds on rugby games. My early days of being the cable assistant at Athletic Park in the sleet convinced me of the wisdom of being a director inside a warm, cosy truck rather than being a cameraman.

Ericsson Staium in Akl and the Cake Tin in Wgtn both have pre-cabled layout close to the desired camera locations. I got involved a bit with the cake tin one when TV3 still had rights to the league. Thank god that went away !

The quality of Sky digital is moderately crap anyway, due to limited bandwidth and the amount of compression going on the squeeze those channels in

Agent X20 · Post by **Agent X20** » Wed Jul 05, 2006 1:18 pm

I've just fired an email question as to whether they will ensure there is no repeat of this situation, in the direction of Sky... for what it's worth.

famin · Post by **famin** » Wed Jul 05, 2006 9:16 pm

FFS
I know this will sound like "35 years ago..." but
I DO remember having to get video tapes from a mate in the UK sent to me weeks after the race just to see it... and I was happy.

I couldnt give a flying f#$@ about the quality or synch... at least we get it damn near real time now.

If you all had to eat gravel off road and live int cardboard box youd not bother with this whinging!

arrgh I think Ive got grumpy old man syndrome!

Agent X20 · Post by **Agent X20** » Wed Jul 05, 2006 11:22 pm

So let's put this in another context... what say the Italy vs. Germany soccer match had the audio and video out of sync by 5-10 seconds.

"GOOOALLLLL" says the commentator.... player seen approaching net. Viers go WTF?

Player now seen taking shot and scores.

So, do you think the viewing public would put up with that, because that's what we got with the F1?!

I don't think so.

Typhoon · Post by **Typhoon** » Thu Jul 06, 2006 12:44 am

Agent X20 wrote:So let's put this in another context... what say the Italy vs. Germany soccer match had the audio and video out of sync by 5-10 seconds.

"GOOOALLLLL" says the commentator.... player seen approaching net. Viers go WTF?

Player now seen taking shot and scores.

So, do you think the viewing public would put up with that, because that's what we got with the F1?!

I don't think so.

hmmm, 2 Billion watching the Football, 100 Million watching the F1?
Football, hmmm, about the size of a Football Stadium fundly enough, hell, one camera can cover the entire pitch. F1, about the size of 100 football stadiums, and more than a few cameras.

I not condoning the poor coverage, but in America, sound must travel faster because American's are so dense, that must be the explination

Prometheus · Post by **Prometheus** » Thu Jul 06, 2006 11:24 am

lol Famin.

Hey I remember the days when I had to get up 1/2 an hour before I went to bed, wrok 25 hours a day down a coal mine . . . .

I think the issue here is that :
(A) we're paying for a service that is substandard, unless it's the rugby, which then gets its own dedicated channel with extra resources...

(B) Sky really don't care as long as they get their subscriber money. Look at how many adverts there are now, plus how many Australian FoxTel ads there are on History, Nat Geo, etc. Because it's simpler for Sky to just take a feed off Aussie directly than put any effort into making it a NZ version.

Agent X20 · Post by **Agent X20** » Fri Jul 07, 2006 2:07 pm

The response from Sky:

Thank-you for your email.

Please find below a response from our Sports Department:

Thank you for your email regarding the out of sync commentary on the Formula 1.

'The reason this is happening is because we did a special deal to take the commentary
from ITV, but the pictures come in from a different source, the commentary available with
the pictures is not as good as the ITV team, so we made the decision to take two different
feeds to give the best possible coverage to our subscribers. Unfortunately, due to the feeds
coming from different suppliers (and different places in the world!) the amount of times the feed
has to 'bounce' differs between the audio and visual, so there is a slight difference. It was worse
in the last race, as it takes long for the pictures to get from the USA than it does from Europe.
We are endeavouring to fix this at our end, but it is very tricky speculate what the delay will be until the
race is coming in, when it is really too late to change things! We hope you will continue to be patient
with us, as we try to find a way to get this right - unfortunately it's not as easy as you would think!!

Hope this helps explain.

Regards,

Jill Houghton
Programming Liaison Officer

Viking · Post by **Viking** » Fri Jul 07, 2006 2:32 pm

Agent X20 wrote:The response from Sky:

Thank-you for your email.

Please find below a response from our Sports Department:

Thank you for your email regarding the out of sync commentary on the Formula 1.

'The reason this is happening is because we did a special deal to take the commentary
from ITV, but the pictures come in from a different source, the commentary available with
the pictures is not as good as the ITV team, so we made the decision to take two different
feeds to give the best possible coverage to our subscribers. Unfortunately, due to the feeds
coming from different suppliers (and different places in the world!) the amount of times the feed
has to 'bounce' differs between the audio and visual, so there is a slight difference. It was worse
in the last race, as it takes long for the pictures to get from the USA than it does from Europe.
We are endeavouring to fix this at our end, but it is very tricky speculate what the delay will be until the
race is coming in, when it is really too late to change things! We hope you will continue to be patient
with us, as we try to find a way to get this right - unfortunately it's not as easy as you would think!!

Hope this helps explain.

Regards,

Jill Houghton
Programming Liaison Officer

LOL, 2 seconds is not "slight", and that explains why the ITV commentators are commenting on replays we're not seeing.

Not often sound travels faster than light

Skuzzlebutt · Post by **Skuzzlebutt** » Fri Jul 07, 2006 2:52 pm

Hell my home theatre receiver lets me adjust the audio to sync properly with the video ... perhaps Sky would like to borrow that for race weekends?

Prometheus · Post by **Prometheus** » Fri Jul 07, 2006 5:00 pm

haha !

Well Sky have been taking the clean feed for some time - you can tell when ITV commentators have been talking about pictures on screen / pit interviews / etc but all you see is the racing. ITV would be adding their own stuff onto the coverage for just their viewers, and that's not what NZ would want to see - but then seeing Sky have a deal with ITV for commentary, you'd think someone would plan the whole exercise thru.

So we're buying a package from aninternational broadcaster. Who are going to be adding their own pictures and interviews. But we're not going to see that because we choose not to, instead we'll just listen to the commentators prattle on about something us NZ viewers can't see...

go Sky, go !

It's complete bollocks to say they're unable to sync up the audio.

Agent X20 · Post by **Agent X20** » Fri Jul 07, 2006 8:10 pm

I believe people like ITV (ie broadcasters) aren't allowed to on-sell their video feeds so Sky couldn't take both the audio and the video even if they wanted to.

You can thank Bernie.

That said at least TV1 would put their ads mostly at the same time as ITVs' ads.