2012 F1 in HDTV  

Good news! I recorded it and will watch it later.

I think the Speed pit cameras have been HD for a while.

I can't tell if we have HD graphics or not. It's different than last year but still not all the way out to the sides. At least the Speed graphic is in the proper corner!

I'm excited for F1 this year! Go Massa!!!

Watched practice like the rest of you. The overall picture quality is improved.I noticed the on car camera shots were showing more detail.This year should be a good fight for the title.I think Schumacher has improved but it's still early and Red Bull are very fast!

I just watched this casually on my 32" 720p LCD. It looked much improved. Tonight I'll watch it more closely with my wife when we view it on our 67" 1080p DLP. That TV is much more revealing.

New posts split off, and new topic created.

Yes, these are the 16x9 graphics finally. I didn't notice much of a picture quality improvement, don't know if that's the fault of the FIA, Speed or Comcast, but at least the position chart isn't in the middle of the damn screen anymore

Woo, hoo! Now we can see a race with no passing in clear HD. It's about time they upgrade things.

Apparently, Bernie gave up trying to figure out how to get more money out of everyone for a HD feed.

I see lots of passing. Except maybe at Monaco.

But the problem with F1 remains - lots of races are determined by qualifying, and/or a first lap/first corner pass. Once someone takes the lead, there's usually not a lot of challenges afterwards. The new fuel rules made it even worse because there's no strategy other than tire selection anymore, and that's an artificial constraint.

I like F1 for the tech, but not for the actual racing.

I don't like the new fuel rule either, it took a lot of the strategy out of the races. I understand that some don't like F1. I feel the same way about Nascar. Every time I try to watch it somebody hits the wall and they run under yellow for a long time. When they finally get back to racing there's another accident. The racing part is fun but there's just too little of it. At least we all have the opportunity to watch what we like. I'll be watching the Indy cars at St. Petersburg this weekend too. Really low tech but still fun when they do road races instead of the ovals.

Back to the pq topic. Just watched Melbourne on TSN Canada and found it some better than the wide sd from last year but not up to nascar hd. Soft - In car stuff was poor. With the exotic locales and amazing cars this was disappointing. Watching on shaw cable mot 6416 to 5080 hd kuro. Hopefully it gets better. With a sunny day there were no lighting excuses.

Agreed the picture is far below other sports. I wonder why that is.

That is interesting, because all I saw was multiple cautions in Fl. I was kind of hoping Simona would win, so everyone could see what a hack Danica is. It wasn't meant to be and it looks like Mr. Judd will dominate.

PQ on the Indy cars today and Nascar was far better than F1.

The race started at 5 pm local time so the lighting was far from ideal, especially as the race went on. We'll have to wait for Malaysia or China to see normal afternoon lighting conditions.

The onboard shots are not in HD, and I wouldn't expect them to be for a while.

As for the overall PQ, I watched some of the BBC HD race production (in 1080i50), and it did look softer than I'm used to seeing from American sports. This could be the performance of FOM cameras/lenses, or maybe they just aren't using much of a sharpening filter. The on-screen graphics looked great though (not too sharp or too soft), which makes me think they aren't doing much filtering. I always feel like ABC/ESPN looks overly sharp (like this morning's IndyCar).

Also, there's also a lot of steps in the chain between FOM and your TV. Based on the info from a few months ago, FOM's satellite feeds to the broadcasters are fairly low-bitrate (42 Mbps MPEG-2, and a 22 Mbps MPEG-4 for the Americas). This could affect PQ for Speed or TSN, but the higher-budget broadcasters who produce at the track (BBC, Sky Germany, etc.) get an uncompressed HD-SDI feed straight from FOM. Then there's another compression step between the broadcaster and your satellite/cable company, and then maybe more compression before it hits your STB.

There is a difference in the color.

Here are some snapshots from Polish channel Polsat Sort HD (1080i, playbacked with Media Player Classic):







As already stated picture is a bit (even more) soft. Looks good on 42" panasonic plasma, much better that SD before 2011, but is not such quality like Eurosport (2) HD native broadcasts- I even had doubts wheter this is HD
And for comparison a frame taken from 2008 broadcast for F1-in-Cinema (Monaco GP):


Can anybody post snapshots from BBC, SkySport Germany or Speed?

Yep - though I'd not describe it as 'softer' just less 'sharpened'. Sky in the UK (and some of the US stuff that we see over here) has much higher levels of detail enhancement than the BBC (and FOM I suspect) use. This may be to ensure SD viewers get a 'sharp' picture as well...

Thought the pictures that I saw on BBC One HD (DSat) looked pretty nice and clean.


Yep - the graphics looked clean (apart from the awful F1 logo - but that's a design issue)


The BBC chain is probably a lot shorter than that.

FOM pictures (HD-SDI?) to BBC/SIS operation on-site (uncompressed so far). BBC/SIS backhaul at a bitrate and codec unknown. This is decoded in the UK back to HD-SDI and then passes uncompressed through Red Bee Media for playout, and is then passed to Siemens for final transmission encoding. This means just one backhaul encode/decode and a final transmission H264 encode/decode for DSat or DTT/OTA (not sure about cable) at 1440x1080/50i.

(The BBC outsourced their channel playout operations by selling the BBC Broadcast department to an Australian owned operation which has branded it Red Bee Media. The BBC outsourced their technology - distribution and encoding included - by selling BBC Technology to Siemens. The BBC sold their Outside Broadcast arm - BBC OB Resources - to SIS... There's not much of the BBC left outside production...)

For anyone curious, here's a one minute sample of H.264 1080i50 from Sky Sport Deutschland (but BBC audio): Video_new_new.ts

LOL!
Too true...

I have to agree.
Watched the DirecTV HD broadcast on a 73" 1080p RPTV.

Although it was "better" than last year, it didn't really WOW me.
IMO, only a minor step-up from the SPEED HD upconvert of last year (which I thought was very good for SD).

And it is pretty ridiculous the in-car cameras aren't HD yet.

BBC transport stream looked pretty good, but not mind-boggling super-duper HD. On the other hand, I am grateful that BBC did not oversharpen the image.

What format FOM uses? Is it the same for all races, or depends on the standard where the race is being held? Whatever the case, if they waited another year (or begged hardware manufacturers harder) they could shoot the whole thing in 1080p (50p or 60p, why are we still divided with frame rate?). Geez, a $300 consumer camcorder can shoot 1080p at 50fps or 60fps now. Then they would be able to downscale to 720p or 1080i. If they in fact shoot in 1080i then they have to convert to 720p and probably to filter out some detail to ensure that interline twitter does not trickle into progressive TV feed.

The logo is horrible. Better TVs stabilize in several seconds when background under the logo does not move, but with moving background I see constant twitter in the left corner. Who designed that?

"And it is pretty ridiculous the in-car cameras aren't HD yet." -- I take a CCD SD camera over CMOS HD camera any day. No jello for me.

I have a problem when playing back the above provided sample from Sky Deutschland. It is not smooth on my LG BD370. Same on computer- I have AMD Radeon which accellerate decoding, but video is how to say it- shaking horizontally. Simply seems that several frames are played forward then one(?) is played backward. I do not know why. I suspect a problem with fields order since it is interlaced video but do not know how to change this parameter in source file. Does anybody has same problem?

No issues on my machine. Maybe your player cannot correctly deinterlace it? By the way, the clip is encoded at 19 Mbit/s overall, in AVC with 6 audio streams. Whoa, way to go. BBC viewers must envy the Germans. All those languages, 192 Kbps each, that is quite generous: English, German, Romanian, Russian, Dutch and some other.

Have you remuxed it yourself? Where all these other languages came from?

It's around 9 (and so) Mbps and 1440 so, obviously, couldn't blow anything.

Thanks to free splash lite I was able to get smooth playback! (this player support ATI's AVIVO i.e. hardware acceleration).
Also using multiAVCHD I prepared AVCHD and played succesfully video on my Panasonic tv from SDHC card.