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'Legend of the Seeker' - First run syndication in HD

86K views 571 replies 79 participants last post by  mhufnagel 
#1 ·
TV series "Seeker" looks to revive fantasy genre


Fri Oct 31, 2008 1:48am EDT


By Kimberly Nordyke


LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - "Legend of the Seeker" is hoping to conjure up some ratings magic and revive a dormant genre when it debuts in syndication this weekend.


The weekly scripted epic fantasy, about a woodsman (Craig Horner) who discovers he has magical powers and sets out to stop a sinister tyrant, will become the first major action hour to bow in syndication in recent years with its two-hour premiere. The most recent effort, "She Spies," failed to generate much interest, lasting only two seasons (2002-04).


Many had left the genre for dead, as such big-budget first-run dramas as "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys" and "Xena: Warrior Princess" were considered to be part of another era. But "Seeker" distributor Disney-ABC Domestic Television and producer ABC Studios believe the time is right for the weekly action hour to make a comeback.


"Entertainment and fantasy and escapism are very important in the world right now," Disney-ABC Domestic Television president Janice Marinelli said. "When we looked at the marketplace, there was very little first-run scripted programming available and thought there would be interest."


Those involved in the show argue that "Seeker" has several things in its favor, including the fact that it's adapted from a popular book series, Terry Goodkind's "Sword of Truth." The 22-episode series also boasts a substantial budget, with lots of action sequences and special effects; it's shot in high-def; and it features closed-ended episodes, so latecomers can easily catch up. Moreover, the fantasy genre has proved it has a huge fan base, as evidenced by the success of the "Harry Potter" books and films and the "Lord of the Rings" movies.


Asked if he considers the show risky, executive producer Rob Tapert said, "I think there are many people who would say that, but the action hour didn't die because the audience (interest) disappeared; it died because the quality of the action hour became subpar."


Tapert and his fellow executive producers -- Sam Raimi, Joshua Donen, Ned Nalle and Ken Biller -- are no strangers to the action hour. Raimi, Tapert and Nalle all boast "Xena" and "Hercules" among their credits, while Biller's resume includes UPN's "Star Trek: Voyager." But Tapert said "Seeker's" executive producers didn't want to bring the same approach to "Seeker" as had been done with "Xena" and "Hercules."


"We wanted to make it much more real," he said. "We didn't want to have the '90s postmodern attitude where the audience is in on the joke. 'Seeker' is much more serious than 'Hercules' and 'Xena.'"


Bill Carroll, vp and director of programming at station rep firm Katz Television Group, also thinks the show will reach an underserved audience.


"When you have something that is unique and targeted toward probably the most elusive demographic -- young male viewers -- then (the possibility for success) is pretty good," he said.


Neither Marinelli nor Tapert would talk specifics about the budget, though Tapert insists "it's the most money ever spent on a first-run syndicated hour." Offsetting the production costs is the fact that Disney is selling the series internationally. Carroll said one of the reasons the weekly scripted offerings dried up is because the overseas marketplace lost interest, but he argued that "Seeker" has the credentials to appeal to foreign audiences.


To be sure, many will be keeping an eye on "Seeker" to see how it fares -- and if it succeeds, it likely will spark a resurgence in the genre. It also would give station launch group Tribune Broadcasting, most of whose stations are affiliates of the CW, a shot of confidence in its ability to find its own scripted programming apart from a network affiliate should the need arise.


While Marinelli admits nothing is a sure thing anymore, especially in syndication, she is hopeful.


"In success, we hope to continue down this path with perhaps more scripted shows for the marketplace," she said. "We all have our fingers crossed."


Reuters/Hollywood Reporter

http://www.reuters.com/article/telev...49U0VA20081031
 
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#27 ·
The first two segments were SD here in Phoenix. I guess some bozo must have botched one of the national feeds since other areas of the country had the same problem.


AFA, the content, I thought it was decent not great. I've read the complete Sword of Truth series so perhaps I'm too close to it. I liked the costumes and the overall look (art direction, cinematography, etc) for the most part. Except I wish they would back off the grain a little bit in the day for night scenes.


In two hours, they really didn't do any character development at all on Kahlan and Zedd and although they did a lot of development on Richard, I still didn't really feel like I connected with the character. But again, perhaps I'm too familiar with the books and it's slanting my take.


And Kahlan's Irish accent that comes and goes was a bit disconcerting.


It's good enough I'm going to keep watching. I am a little concerned with how some things are going to be resolved since they deviated from the book in some issues.
 
#28 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by Mac The Knife /forum/post/14997384


The first two segments were SD here in Phoenix. I guess some bozo must have botched one of the national feeds since other areas of the country had the same problem.

AFAIK, there was only one HD feed of the premiere. SD is sent via Pathfire. If you didn't get the HD feed, AFAIK, you were SOL. There wasn't a refeed of any of the segments when the feed finished.


As for Tribune owned stations, none of the stations (AFAIK) capture the HD feed. Headquarters in Indianapolis captures the HD feed and then turns it around via a system like Pathfire, and sends it to the various station's HD file servers. I do not know if all of the Tribune owned stations are HD capable.
 
#29 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by rebkell /forum/post/14987888


Wish Directv would get it on their On Demand if nothing else, I really want to see this in HD, especially when I know it's HD.

Not sure that D* could work a deal for a syndicated show like this, as it would undercut the $$$ that local stations paid to air it. Most of these syndicated contracts are written with DMA exclusive clauses in them. Having it on D* in a On-Demand tier would not make it exclusive to that market.


In any event, you are right, it is so much better in HD, especially at 36.97 Mbps.
 
#30 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by coyoteaz /forum/post/14988308


[...] and it has some nice visuals, somewhat marred by KDAF's low bitrate.

That is unfortunate, since the series is fed with a average bitrate of 36.97 Mbps. It is actually fed at a constant bitrate. No VBR for some strange reason.


There should be a law that bans secondary streams if there is an HD stream, with a max of four SD only streams. ATSC sucks, especially 1080i with lots of motion. Take away bits for a SD stream and the 1080i video can start to fall apart rapidly. 1080i has a hard enough time when it is the only video stream.
 
#31 ·
First a little background. There are two audio types provided to the stations airing the series: Dolby-E, with DD5.1 and MPEG-1 layer 2, with Dolby Surround.


You'll notice that AC3-DD5.1 is missing (the format that ABC uses and one of the formats The CW uses).


So what does this mean to you the viewer, who is is equipped to handle OTA DD5.1 audio? It means that your local station's 5.1 may not really be 5.1 when it comes to this series.


If your station is doing DD5.1, but doesn't have the necessary Dolby-E piece of expensive gear, it has to use the MP2 audio stream and bump it up to DD5.1. You therefore are not getting true DD5.1, but what electronic stereo was to analog TV when stereo TV first came along in the 80s. Unless your station is a CBS affiliate and they can use the Dolby-E gear with syndicated programs, the odds are that your station doesn't have the Dolby gear. Even The CW affiliates do not need Dolby-E, as the network also provides AC3-DD2.0 and AC3-DD5.1 audio streams.


How do you know if your station can handle Dolby-E? If the DolbySurround upconverter is set up correctly, you'll have a hard time telling. If you only get mono sound out of the rear channels, then your station probably can't. I have no idea how well they take advantage of the stereo rear channels. If your station does DD5.1 during non-network primetime, call the chief engineer and ask.


Videojanitor fully understands the situation.



So, not only do stations need to be listed in this thread as doing HD, it also need to indiate if they are doing true DD5.1 with this series.
 
#32 ·
Surround upmixed to DD5.1 on KDAF, so I would expect that the rest of the Trib stations are the same way. Trib CW stations have always played fast and loose with DD5.1 audio, including upmixing 2.0-only shows like Smallville to 5.1, and not passing 5.1 when present, so not a big surprise there. Maybe it's just my perspective from the outside, but Tribune doesn't seem to care as much now that they don't have an ownership stake in the network most of their stations are affiliated with.


As to KDAF's PQ, the low bitrate is somewhat mitigated by the use of long GOPs (2+ seconds in some instances) where most older encoders use standard 1/2 second GOPs. It still looks like garbage on fast motion sequences like the intro to Seeker, but the long sequences of a motionless camera pointed at 2 people talking that seems to be a staple of most CW dramas end up not looking too bad.
 
#33 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by mrvideo /forum/post/15001559


Even The CW affiliates do not need Dolby-E, as the network also provides AC3-DD2.0 and AC3-DD5.1 audio streams.

That's only true if they can pass the AC3 right through to the encoder/mux a la Fox splicer. If you want to route it around the plant like other sources it basically takes the same Dolby decoder card to decode AC3 as it does to decode Dolby-E.

Quote:
Originally Posted by mrvideo /forum/post/15001559


How do you know if your station can handle Dolby-E? If the DolbySurround upconverter is set up correctly, you'll have a hard time telling. If you only get mono sound out of the rear channels, then your station probably can't.

The way I usually can tell is that with most dramas using true discrete 5.1 audio there will be dialog audible only in the center channel. It's almost impossible for even the best upconverters to completely remove dialog from the front right/left stereo pair, though it's usually better than 10dB down.

Quote:
Originally Posted by mrvideo /forum/post/15001559


So, not only do stations need to be listed in this thread as doing HD, it also need to indiate if they are doing true DD5.1 with this series.

The CBS(WRGB)/CW(WCWN) duopoly in Albany, NY carries Legend of the Seeker, CSI:NY and Lost in true 5.1 (So far the early seasons of CSI:Miami are only being fed in 2.0)
 
#34 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by ProTuber /forum/post/15001950


That's only true if they can pass the AC3 right through to the encoder/mux a la Fox splicer. If you want to route it around the plant like other sources it basically takes the same Dolby decoder card to decode AC3 as it does to decode Dolby-E.

Does it? Dolby-E has a lot more timing issues and requires an expensive box. AC3 is a lot easier to decode and can be done with cheaper cards. I suspect stations would rather use a cheaper card than the more expensive Dolby-E box. I can tear apart AC3 at home extremely easily, and cheaply, but cannot do anything with Dolby-E.


TV engineers will have to pipe in on this, but I figure that engineers would rather deal with the cheaper AC3 audio streams than the Dolby-E stream. If cost wasn't an issue, I'd go for Dolby-E.

Quote:
The way I usually can tell is that with most dramas using true discrete 5.1 audio there will be dialog audible only in the center channel. It's almost impossible for even the best upconverters to completely remove dialog from the front right/left stereo pair, though it's usually better than 10dB down.

Good point, forgot about that.
 
#35 ·
AC3 was never designed for decode/reencode. ABC gets away with it by feeding at 640kb/s, but for streams designed to be put straight to air like CW's 384kb/s, there would be significant degradation to decompress, route it around the station, and recompress to 384kb/s. That's assuming the station's equipment is capable of routing 6+ audio channels, which isn't true of a lot of older equipment. Dolby E is basically 2 channel audio, which works quite nicely with everything. In fact, the NBC affiliate in Phoenix actually purchased both a Dolby E encoder and a decoder so they could take in NBC's stereo pairs, encode to Dolby E, route and switch as needed on their equipment which was only capable of doing 2 channel audio, and then decode and feed into their AC3 encoder. It took some time to adjust everything to compensate for the various delays, but it got them on with DD5.1 long before they would have been able to do it otherwise.


Also, Dolby E has built-in support for metadata to pass to the AC3 encoder at the station to provide information on number of channels, mix levels, dialnorm, etc. That information is of course present in an AC3 stream, but I'm not aware of any way for commercial equipment to extract it and pass it on to a downstream encoder to keep the data the same. This has been a major issue affecting ABC stations, because they have no way to know whether programming is provided in DD5.1 or only stereo. They either end up running everything from net in DD5.1 (resulting in C, SL, SR, and LFE being silent during stereo programming) or guessing when to switch and occasionally losing the dialog.
 
#36 ·
This is so difficult.. the show sucks, the casting is wrong, the dialog is silly, the acting is bad, the editing is hacked (gogo horses 5 feet behind Khalen, then 10 minutes to have a death scene in the ditch with your sister, then horses 5 feet behind)...


and yet I will watch it. DAMN YOU IRRATIONAL MIND!
 
#37 ·
Thanks for the info. It has been a help in getting more of an understanding around this issue.

Quote:
Originally Posted by coyoteaz /forum/post/15005371


In fact, the NBC affiliate in Phoenix actually purchased both a Dolby E encoder and a decoder so they could take in NBC's stereo pairs, encode to Dolby E, route and switch as needed on their equipment which was only capable of doing 2 channel audio, and then decode and feed into their AC3 encoder. It took some time to adjust everything to compensate for the various delays, but it got them on with DD5.1 long before they would have been able to do it otherwise.

That is a very novel approach (if not expensive) to get around the three audio pairs that NBC uses. Someone was thinking and management actually backed it up with $$$.

Quote:
This has been a major issue affecting ABC stations, because they have no way to know whether programming is provided in DD5.1 or only stereo. They either end up running everything from net in DD5.1 (resulting in C, SL, SR, and LFE being silent during stereo programming) or guessing when to switch and occasionally losing the dialog.

I've never seen the ABC HD feed do anything but DD5.1, including commercial breaks. Granted, I only watch an extremely limited number of ABC programs (scripted dramas).


The CW, OTOH, bounces in and out of DD5.1 on their DD5.1 stream all the time. And very poorly at that. There have been times were they (CBS) didn't go back into DD5.1 until a few frames into the program. I've seen it go into DD5.1 for a single audio frame. They need better control of their DD2.0 DD5.1 transitions.
 
#38 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by coyoteaz /forum/post/15001658


It still looks like garbage on fast motion sequences like the intro to Seeker, but the long sequences of a motionless camera pointed at 2 people talking that seems to be a staple of most CW dramas end up not looking too bad.

Garbage is still garbage. To have motion scenes affected by artifacts ruins the HD experience.


With any luck, ABC Studios will be smart and release the series on Blu-ray 1080/24p before the next season starts.
 
#39 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by mrvideo /forum/post/15008165


I've never seen the ABC HD feed do anything but DD5.1, including commercial breaks. Granted, I only watch an extremely limited number of ABC programs (scripted dramas).

I believe the feed is always flagged 5.1, but that doesn't mean that all channels are active. Dancing with the Stars in particular sticks out in my mind as one that originated in stereo, though I don't know if the latest season is the same way since I don't actually watch it. The few times I've looked at it have always been in response to comments on here and in other forums about the audio. Also, IIRC, back when ABC Sports was still in charge (before it became ESPN on ABC), much of the sports programming was stereo. Now, of course, everything is Circle Surround upmixed to DD5.1.
Quote:
The CW, OTOH, bounces in and out of DD5.1 on their DD5.1 stream all the time. And very poorly at that. There have been times were they (CBS) didn't go back into DD5.1 until a few frames into the program. I've seen it go into DD5.1 for a single audio frame. They need better control of their DD2.0 DD5.1 transitions.

How many stations actually use the AC3 track though? Running AC3 through switching equipment other than the splicer really isn't an option, and $4100 for a Dolby E decoder is pocket change compared to most of the rest of the equipment in use.
 
#42 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by ProTuber /forum/post/15014051


BTW, I am a TV engineer.

No offense, but I didn't know that. You make four that I know about on the forum.
 
#43 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by coyoteaz /forum/post/15008449


I believe the feed is always flagged 5.1, but that doesn't mean that all channels are active.

I'd have to tear about some AC3 sections of audio into WAV files to see what it there. No to find the time to do sampling.

Quote:
... and $4100 for a Dolby E decoder is pocket change compared to most of the rest of the equipment in use.

It seems that it is more than pocket change to some stations. An engineer at a station has told me that his chief engineer says to not look for a Dolby-E decoder any time soon. So they won't be airing LotS in true DD5.1 any time soon.
 
#44 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by mrvideo /forum/post/15014240


It seems that it is more than pocket change to some stations. An engineer at a station has told me that his chief engineer says to not look for a Dolby-E decoder any time soon. So they won't be airing LotS in true DD5.1 any time soon.

Such is life in DMA 93. Your local stations somehow find the coin for HD keyers to spam their awful bugs on top of everything, but can't find the money for actual improvements to their broadcasts. I still can't figure out why small-market stations feel the need to remind you for the entire program which station you're watching, while here in a major market we get at worst a legal ID at the top of the hour and at best nothing from the local at all. This is of course ignoring Fox's splicer-inserted bug.
 
#45 ·
ok seriously...why is anybody even discussing the techical details? the show is horrible...at least the old Xena and Hercules series didn't seem to take themselves too seriously. but this garbage is soooooooo bad.....they should've aired it in black & white 4:3 letterboxed with logos and graphics filling half the screen lol it was that bad!
 
#46 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by JediMastr /forum/post/15014896


ok seriously...why is anybody even discussing the techical details? the show is horrible...at least the old Xena and Hercules series didn't seem to take themselves too seriously. but this garbage is soooooooo bad.....they should've aired it in black & white 4:3 letterboxed with logos and graphics filling half the screen lol it was that bad!

You answered your own question. There is no point in discussing the show :p
 
#47 ·
The show is certainly not good enough for me to continue watching here in 4:3 fuzzy 480i.


If better downloads are available somewhere I might watch those for awhile. Even then I'd probably lose interest soon.


- Tom
 
#48 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by JediMastr /forum/post/15014896


ok seriously...why is anybody even discussing the techical details? the show is horrible...at least the old Xena and Hercules series didn't seem to take themselves too seriously. but this garbage is soooooooo bad.....they should've aired it in black & white 4:3 letterboxed with logos and graphics filling half the screen lol it was that bad!

I disagree. It's not great, but it's the only D&D fantasy show going right now so I'm giving it a shot. I don't think the hero is all that convincing so far, but maybe he'll get better. And the wizard could end up being a hoot. Plus the 'confessor' is a babe.


Works for me. I don't have high expectations, but it's no better or worse than Crusoe IMO.
 
#49 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by trbarry /forum/post/15015105


The show is certainly not good enough for me to continue watching here in 4:3 fuzzy 480i.


If better downloads are available somewhere I might watch those for awhile. Even then I'd probably lose interest soon.


- Tom

Ditto, I'm sure I'd watch if it was available in HD here, but if I have to pursue alternate means, I'm not sure if I'll stick with it, it looks like about half can and half can't get this in HD, good idea, but I've been spoiled with HD and with two local stations carrying it and neither one showing it in HD, I'll probably lose interest a lot sooner than I would have otherwise.
 
#50 ·

Quote:
Originally Posted by coyoteaz /forum/post/15014539


Such is life in DMA 93.

I believe the station I'm talking about is in a top 20 market. I'd have to ask the engineer to make sure.
 
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