In <B75592CC.2A81%soho@eircom.net>, Richard wrote:
> I seem to remember watching American Football for the first time in the UK
> some time back and thinking how fantastic the image quality was. I then
> found out that its shot on film. Is this still the case?
>
TV series used to be shot on 35mm cine film, while sports and news was done
on 16mm, unless they had direct outside broadcast via landline. These were
then converted to TV signals via Telecine equipment when actually
broadcasting. However news then went over the ENG (Electronic News
Gathering), using high quality video camcorders. Later TV studio work went
to video, basically to save money.
One problem with this video approach is that much of the world's output
comes from the US, where they use the inferior NTSC system, at 525 lines.
Europe uses the better PAL system, at 625 lines, so the video tape signal
has to be converted, giving further loss of quality over here. This was not
a problem with 35mm film. I remember a news report about this when the TV
series "Dynasty" changed from film to video halfway through the run, and
there was a noticeable loss of picture quality.
Brian Rumary, England
