Here’s one of those things I just don’t quite understand. Here in the Bay Area, KGO-DT promotes their “Sky 7 HD”, a high definition camera on their chopper. And true to its name, Sky 7 HD is nice enough, but kind of pointless. Like most news choppers, it rarely shows any news, but rather sends back aerial footage over a place where news happened earlier in the day.
But here’s what I find confusing about it. The chopper footage is indeed 16×9 high definition, but nothing else is. The news programming is in standard definition, in the 4×3 format. So, they have all the HD switching and encoding equipment, they’re sending out an HD program stream… but only the insert shots from the chopper are actually in HD. And they actually have a different feed for the analog station, with different graphics and a cropped 4×3 picture.
C’mon, KGO. Even I have an HD camera. You can afford a pretty much useless chopper with an HD camera, but no HD in the studio?
Damn you! They were hoping no one would notice.
Oddly, there is a reason: you can do a digital-zoom in on an HD source picture *much* better than one shot in SD.
But you’re right, it’s otherwise pretty dumb, especially if their HD feed is upconverted.
*Very* nice collection at Cacophony, BTW.
Where did you get the TMYK beds? And do you have one for Real American Heroes?
(I love commercial beds…)