Are the FOX NFL Football telecasts 1080 or 720?

every telecast that Fox shows is in 720p, so is every channel that Fox owns. (Speed, FX, etc.)

Never more than 8.

Err, every HDTV channel uses compression. I prefer NBC Sunday Night Football to FOX, until anyone moves, then there are "blocks" everywhere.

A Fox broadcast CAN look good, if it's passed through in high band-width 720. Nothing looks as good as an O/O OTA 1080i CBS early 1 pm game in full sun-light...

FOX uses 720p to minimize pixalization. There is no cost difference between 720p and 1080i. It is just a switch flip between the two formats on equipment.

FYI, ESPN is also 720p.

as is abc

Resolution matters far less than other criteria.
Edited by HD-Master - 12/13/12 at 6:04pm

Is there any compression in OTA HD signals?

Uh, yeah there is.

I love when the eagles are on CBS. FOX is far and away the lowest quality HD for sports.

NFL network has the best PQ for games. Then CBS followed by NBC. Both of which have horrible big screen graphics. I don't care about fantasy I like reality. Next is a noticeable jump down to the 720p channels. ESPN and then ABC. Finally a another peg down is FOX.

I agree on the horrible big screen pq.

NFL Ch video production is pretty good, EXCEPT for the score box being to high on the screen. [See MNF for the proper height on Espn], audio is another question. Last night the Audio was stuttering about every 45 seconds on D. and Cox HD...A CBS O/O station usually has no Subs, and transmits OTA at the highest bit-rate. Always looks the best to me...

I don't recall any audio problems on Dish last night. However I only watched maybe an hour of the game.

Edit: wait a second I recall some sort of thing where the QB's cadence seemed doubled or something. Thought it was all in my head

Fox has always been at the bottom of PQ discussions.

Audio is good on Fox and CBS. They focus on the players, and let the crowd be ambiance. Unlike the Sunday/Monday night games which seem to think I only want to hear the drunks in the stands and the blow hards in the booth. Foolish.

PQ on FOX varies quite a lot depending on what team is doing it, the lighting level, and what stadium they are at. Their A and B games (the ones that Buck/Aikman or Moose/Goose do) usually look pretty good to me. Better than ESPN. Other times they can be noisy and soft.

I would say ESPN has really improved their picture quality immensely compared to 2010. The networks of ESPN were godawful at the start of football season that year. By the end of the 2010 football season,ESPN took strides, then I think ESPN switched their encoding from MPEG2 to MPEG4 sometime in 2011 and I would say the picture quality has been great since that transition. I would say 95% of live sports programming on those networks, the picture quality is good (seems to be an occasional clunker on ESPN U, but that is about it). With Fox as a previous poster said, you never know what you'll get. With Fox's OTA affiliates and O&O stations, they use that splicer which caps the main Fox feed to about either 12 or 13 mbps so that the stations can use the remaining bandwidth for subchannels. I think the way Fox uses their HD programming technology is not a good one as it should be left to the affiliates to determine how much bandwidth is used for their channels. At least with affiliates having that option, they can flex the bandwidth when major sporting events come on.

Unless you are seeing a HDTV camera piped into your monitor live via an Serial Digital Interface (SDI) coaxial cable, you are seeing a compressed video signal. There is no video production and transmission done without compression somewhere on the route to your home TV. It happens in almost every step of the way to the audience.

If you really want to get technical, the camera itself is doing a bit of compression before it sends the image to wherever it goes, be it a monitor, recording media or a control room. In some cases, it's also filtering or even downrezzing the image in various ways.

Why are all of the distant shots so poor? Regardless of the network, they are all terrible. I can only assume, like anything, the further away you get the less clarity you have.

It's mostly that small stuff is using fewer pixels to be rendered on screen, so it can't be as well defined.

On the other hand, when you zoom in tight enough on someone to throw that background out of focus, even the guy's pores have their own pixels to work with.

In other words, the lens is making everything bigger relative to the size of the pixels. That means each bit of detail gets more of them on the CCD.
Edited by NetworkTV - 12/15/12 at 12:32pm

The FOX endzone cams are by far the worst HD sports images I have seen.

It's possible those are portable RF units, which uses dynamic compression prior to sending the signal to the repeater and (eventually) the booth.

That's pretty much what I was assuming.

NEP trucks pretty much do all the games these days. A particular truck could be on FOX this week, while next week it could be on CBS and the next ESPN or even NFL Network, depending on game locations and broadcast times. They usually don't go very far in distance during the season because of the set up and tear down time involved for a game. It is always the same trucks used week to week and are assigned to specific areas and games within that area.

For instance, if the Packers are on FOX on Sunday at Lambau and then another Packer home game Thursday night on NFL Network, the truck never leaves. Just the format of the equipment changes along with the announcing crew and graphics.

FOX's A-crew *always* uses Game Creek's FX truck. Similarly, CBS' A-crew *always* uses Supershooter 24 and Sunday Night Football *always* uses ND3 (decked out in a Sunday Night Football paint job, no less).

I would assume Monday Night Football and Thursday Night Football have similar arrangements, though I don't know what trucks they use.

True that.

I agree, Fox's broadcast quality is horrible, even here on Fox-owned WTTG, which has no sub-channels. The scorebug and associated graphics are always muddy or pixellated. On the other hand, Fox's college football games on FX look a lot better.