HDTV Reformation

I remember seeing early HD technology at NAB in the mid 1990s. Back then, the technology manufacturers thought that everything would be produced in HD by the early 2000′s. It took a bit longer than that, but HD finally came around. In fact, after much delay, TV stations across the US killed their analog signals yesterday. The HD crusade is victorious. Analog TV has been vanquished, its bandwidth plundered and sold to the highest bidder. Now that the HD Reformation is complete, why is it that every show I work on still delivers in standard definition? In the last year or so, I’ve done work for Fox Sports Net, MTV, CBS, Speed Channel, and a hand full of DVD releases for Halo-8. Although much of the content for these shows was shot, edited, and mastered in HD, all of the deliveries were standard definition Digital Betacam. It seems crazy, but most HD content on cable HDTV channels is blown up from standard definition to fill the HD screen. I suspect this is because HDTV still only has a 33% market penetration. That percentage is growing, but not fast enough to make producers and networks mandate HD deliveries for every new show. Furthermore, the compression schemes used by the cable operators to squeeze all of those HD channels down the pipeline can degrade the picture enough that the benefits of delivering an HD master are severely diminished.

Everybody who uses HD technology for TV and film knows that there is no real HD spec. The term HD can be used in reference to any number of digital video schemes from the cheapest consumer gadgets up to state of the art digital cinema cameras. TV and movies used to be a world of specs and standards. Now we have to test a new spec for every production, and the standards are a moving target. God bless HD.

At least I’m not in Canada: