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Who Else Works in Television Broadcasting?

6K views 66 replies 37 participants last post by  Scottyb8866 
#1 ·
Having read through some of the recent threads here in the HDTV Programming sub-forum, it looks like in this sub-forum alone, there are a number of users who work in the television broadcasting industry. That said, if anyone else around here works in television and doesn't mind sharing, I think it would be interesting to hear a bit about your specific line of work in the broadcasting industry.


I work in a broadcast operations center, from which we provide programming and perform the master control operations for several local stations, as well as for some remote sister stations. Our network affiliations include NBC, Fox, CBS, and CW, all of which have their own unique nuances in terms of technical setup and on-air formats. My duties include equipment installation, maintenance, and troubleshooting, so my work tends to be more engineering in nature. However, as a former MC operator myself, I can still step in and fill in for an MC position if we're in a pinch
 
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#52 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by foxeng /forum/post/11456855


My bosses dream job! He keeps saying his final years before retirement, he wants a nice QUIET MCO job!

Yeah, right... nice, quiet, MCO job!?! Where?



Larry

SF
 
#53 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by Shari /forum/post/11465795


And what about aspect ratios? Clearly the non-linear stretch is not a favorite with forum members, but what would you rather see for upconverted content? Yes, we will need to live with upconverts for the foreseeable future, until there is more HD content produced for our libraries. As time passes, there will be more and more true HD content. How about upconverted SD letterbox? There's no aspect distortion on HD. Can you always tell the difference between this and content produced in HD?

4:3 SD should be presented un-distorted - so pillarboxed within an HD 16:9 frame.


16:9 full-height SD should be presented up-converted to an HD 16:9 full-frame. (But should not be called "HD" really.)


16:9 material letterboxed within a 4:3 SD frame is a more interesting one. Should this be converted to HD 16:9 full-frame (scaling the 360 active lines to 720/1080 lines?) or should it be treated as 4:3 SD and appear window-boxed / postage-stamped with pillarbox and letterbox bars all the way round? My gut feeling is that the scaling is preferable - as zooming may not be an option for some display owners.


Another question is to why material originated in 16:9 would be delivered letterboxed in 4:3 - unless the post production path introduced the letterbox and no 16:9 full-height master were available, I'd wish the letterbox transfer to be ditched in preference to a full-height master...


I would wish any form of stretch (linear or non-linear) to be avoided at all costs - circles should always be circles. I am not a huge fan of cropping active material to allow a zoom - though for 4:3 material edited into a 16:9 show a 14:9 pillarbox (as opposed to a 12:9 pillarbox) can make the 4:3 material integrate slightly better with 16:9 stuff (at the expense of some resolution and the loss of some picture top and bottom)
 
#54 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by sneals2000 /forum/post/11464887


(Totally off-topic - but is the English English vs American English spelling issue North American wide - or just US-specific? Does Canada spell colour or color, neighbour or neighbor, centre or center etc.?)

Canada retains the UK spellings. As a matter of fact, other than the American sounding accents except for some differences where the US English we use short O for words like PROCESSOR and they use long O's like the UK and words with "ou" like 'about' that sounds more like "a boat" where the US says "a bowt", someone from the UK would think they were still in the UK, except for driving on the right side of the road and using the Canadian dollar instead of the pound note. The Queen and things related to monarchy are still very much in evidence in Canada today.


Many things are "the Royal" this or that and there are roadways with monarchy names like the major roadway around Lake Ontario is called "The Queens Expressway" or the QEW.


Canada uses Metric where the US is still using Imperial.


Most Americans away from the Canadian border can't really tell the difference in accents between US and Canadian English except for the couple of examples I sighted above. I spent several weeks in Canadian 2 years ago and it is different than the US in many ways, but again the same. Someone ask me how were the Canadians and I said, "like us, just different." After a day or two there, I got used to the Metric system and now notice just how much Metric is being included in shows made here in the US and we are now getting lots of Canadian programming on the cable channels like Science Channel and Discovery channel and it is all Metric. That and the words like PROCESSOR and ABOUT are dead giveaways they are Canadian products. Most Americans don't notice it though. And if they do, they never mention it. LOTS of American television coming across the border from US stations and on the Canadian stations to Canada. The CBC was a little hard to get a grasp on but it too was interesting, in a PBS gone mad kind of way. Someone asked me to explain the CBC and the best way I could was to imagine NBC and PBS merging where you had the news resources and some commercial programming of NBC and the cultural programming of PBS with a heavy dose of the "government line" and that was the CBC. The big thing that got me was the bilingualness of Canada. English and French are BOTH the official language so anything associated with the government, buildings, road signs, etc, had to carry both English and French. There are even English only and French only radio and TV stations. (the French stations seem to be doing things completely different from the English stations with their own programming and I don't remember seeing any dubbed English to French shows on the French stations either.) That took a little while to get use to, but we are seeing more and more of that here in the US with English and Spanish but of course the US doesn't have an "official" language. English is still very much the language you see here in most of the US.


I think most former British colonies in the Western Hemisphere maintain the UK spellings and customs.The US split away over 225 years ago so have not had much to any direct British influence during that time but have amassed many customs from many countries over the last 200 and some years to become what we are, a great world melting pot, where many of the other former British Colonies only became independent in the late 19th or 20th Century and those British-isms are more embedded so they remain.
 
#55 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by Larry Kenney /forum/post/11468001


Yeah, right... nice, quiet, MCO job!?! Where?



Larry

SF

After running a department, a MCO job WOULD be quiet!!
 
#56 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by foxeng /forum/post/11468725


Canada uses Metric where the US is still using Imperial.

We're with you on that - we're still officially imperial for road distances and speeds (miles and miles per hour) and still buy beer in pints. However we have some European infuences and have to buy petrol in litres (though everyone talks in gallons - UK gallons not US gallons - and talks of fuel consumption in miles per galon not litres per kilometre) I buy food in kg but think in pounds. I buy furniture with dimensions in milimetres but think in inches - educates in metric, brought up with imperial!


The accent is interesting - "about" is a classic differentiator. In English English I would say "a-bowt" (because I have a neutral southern accent) - though upper class people might say "a-bite". Canadians are always stereotyped as saying "a-boot" - further away from English English than American English.

Quote:
The big thing that got me was the bilingualness of Canada. English and French are BOTH the official language so anything associated with the government, buildings, road signs, etc, had to carry both English and French. There are even English only and French only radio and TV stations. (the French stations seem to be doing things completely different from the English stations with their own programming and I don't remember seeing any dubbed English to French shows on the French stations either.) That took a little while to get use to, but we are seeing more and more of that here in the US with English and Spanish but of course the US doesn't have an "official" language. English is still very much the language you see here in most of the US.

The UK is similar. In Wales all official signage is bilingual - with English and Welsh. The 4th terrestrial TV station in Wales is S4C - not Channel 4 - and carries significant Welsh language programming - including soap, national news, music etc. (There is often dual subtitling - with both Welsh subtitles for the hard-of-hearing and English subtitles for translation purposes)


There are both national Welsh language and English language radio stations. Northern Ireland and Scotland also have separate language services - though Welsh is more widespread and better served.
 
#57 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by sneals2000 /forum/post/11475356


The accent is interesting - "about" is a classic differentiator. In English English I would say "a-bowt" (because I have a neutral southern accent) - though upper class people might say "a-bite". Canadians are always stereotyped as saying "a-boot" - further away from English English than American English.

To be honest, I had never noticed it until I went to Canada and then our new tower was erected shortly after I returned by a Canadian crew so I got many months of Canadian English! Now I seem to be able to spot a Canadian program fairly quickly by the accents but my wife says she can't tell the difference until I point it out.


And until I was around Canadians for awhile, I noticed that I had heard many of the same accents my whole life and didn't realize it. The "outer banks people" of eastern North Carolina who lived on the wind swept barrier islands off of North Carolnia has a variation on "about" that would make people think they were from Canada. Of course that evolved due to them being isolated for almost 200 years out on the coast and they developed a slightly different English that we call "High Tider" (pronounced "hauy tiwd-er" that is closer to the "Queen's English" than Canadian English. They are very pronounced. Many of these people are decendants of the English colonization of the new world in the 17th and 18th Centuries. Beyond that, these people had very little interaction with the mainland until the early 20th Century when bridges were built from the mainland to the islands.


The "High Tiders" were the people who helped the Wright Brothers in the attempts to fly from 1900 to 1908 when they were on the North Carolina Outer Banks. It was a "High Tider" who took the famous first flight picture in 1903. It was the first time he had ever seen a camera much less it being the only picture he ever took!


Interesting stuff!
 
#58 ·
I've been in this racket since Junior High when a brand new school opened up with a TV studio... My first day there I wound up behind a camera staring into the control room. Next week I was in there switching and a couple of weeks later I talked the Media Director into letting me direct the news show. Fast Forward thru some years at the local cable production department, the Synapse Visiting Video Artist Center and other assorted TV production jobs at Syracuse University, a couple of post production facility jobs in NYC and into CBS. I've spent 25 years here editing everything from soaps to promos of all sorts, and morning and evening news shows. I worked as the Senior Inside Edtor (defacto, but not official title) for CBS Sports for way to many years and then migrated over to News, editing several prime time magazine shows, and many long form documentaries. I'm now safely ensconced as one of the Post Production Editors on 60 MINUTES.
 
#59 ·
Dang, I wish I could be part of this thread. Wait, I can. I worked at Westinghouse in the 90's when times there were bleak. Instead of selling KDKA, they bought CBS, then changed their name as well. Goodbye WX, hello CBS. It took them a few more months to jettison my division, so I did work for CBS for a time. Does that count?

--
 
#60 ·
Occasional AVS threads aside, does anyone know of any message boards out there geared specifically toward television broadcast engineering and/or the operations/MC side of the business?
 
#61 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by Bars&Tone /forum/post/11502604


Occasional AVS threads aside, does anyone know of any message boards out there geared specifically toward television broadcast engineering and/or the operations/MC side of the business?

No, the MCO's are too busy fending off the news department; taking calls from irate viewers who want to know why the HD switch wasn't flipped, dubbing spots, taking satellite feeds,eating,and talking on their cell phones.
 
#62 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by bdfox18doe /forum/post/11502970


No, the MCO's are too busy fending off the news department; taking calls from irate viewers who want to know why the HD switch wasn't flipped, dubbing spots, taking satellite feeds,eating,and talking on their cell phones.

He is new around here!
 
#63 ·
Late to the forum as usual. I'm in postproduction. I work in Philadelphia for a great facility. I'm a telecine colorist, which means I transfer film to tape, tweaking the color in the process to the whims of the Director of Photography, Director, Art Director and/or agency creatives. And while we still transfer a lot of film, we also apply our color enhancement to skills to video originated material as well.


The job has evolved since I began almost thirty years ago. When I started, the venerable Rank Cintel MkIII telecine was just hitting its stride. We only did color balancing, or primary color correction back then. In the eighties we became able to tweak the hues and saturations of the six colors you see in color bars; this was secondary color correction. The nineties saw the use of "window" technology, allowing us to "dodge and burn" in real time to bring out one or more sections of a frame. This decade, nonlinear systems are emerging for color correction and the workflow is rapidly changing.


I've simplified things a bit, but it's a wonderful, creative job. Crazy hours, but very rewarding work.
 
#64 ·
Late, also....due to days on the road as a freelance video engineer (primarily for ESPN). Very interested in comments about productions I'm involved in as well as other productions which appear on the network I associate myself with......


Sometimes proud....Sometimes embarrassed... What else is new?
 
#65 ·
 www.radio-info.com has several forums on engineering, production, etc. Mostly radio-oriented, though.


I know there are several more....
 
#66 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by Shari /forum/post/11465795


Rest assured we pay attention to the postings on this forum. If we did post here we'd say we were interested in your feedback on our HD offerings.


Picture quality is a tough one because you can't see what the cable/sat company is doing to our original signals, but what about audio?

I, as a techy guy who loves playing with and watching HD, wish that all of the (usually minor) problems with synchronization of audio and video would disappear; it is sometimes like watching a foreign film dubbed in English. What gets me is the apparent lack of closed captions on HD broadcasts ... sound issue?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Shari /forum/post/11465795


Some of us are simulating surround sound from stereo--can you tell the difference?

I've not found enough content where there was sound quality about which to be concerned.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Shari /forum/post/11465795


And what about aspect ratios? Clearly the non-linear stretch is not a favorite with forum members, but what would you rather see for upconverted content? Yes, we will need to live with upconverts for the foreseeable future, until there is more HD content produced for our libraries. As time passes, there will be more and more true HD content. How about upconverted SD letterbox?

I'd like to see the aspect ratio be preserved as created, a circle being a circle. Most receivers I've seen allow stretching or scaling to fill a screen if desired, but don't allow correcting a transmitted "correction". If content is in 2.35:1 or whatever, I'd like to see it remain so with the full, as created, frame available.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Shari /forum/post/11465795


There's no aspect distortion on HD. Can you always tell the difference between this and content produced in HD?

Assuming "this" is non-linear scaling or cutting or pan and scan, no I cannot always tell it. Filling the screen is nice, but I'd rather make the decision myself. Now with 2.35:1 content, no 16:9 screen will be full, but I can cut edges and scale up ...
 
#67 ·
I'm a volunteer for a non-profit Roman Catholic station.


I'm not a technician.


I've been doing a bit of research on metadata, epg, ipg technology. It took me awhile to learn that these are the names of the technology that is involved when a viewer pushes the INFO button on his/her clicker or when one goes online to look at a tv guide.


Does this capability cost money for a broadcast station to use? Or is it paid for by tv guide?


How is this technology tapped into?


Can anybody help me?


Thanks!
 
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