Are the FOX NFL Football telecasts 1080 or 720? - Page 2

Your local Fox station could be compressing the signal. Here in Knoxville, we get the opposite. Our CBS station compresses their signal quite a bit and we get dulled colors and not the most clear picture. Our Fox station beats them.

The best comparison I can give is the fact I have NFL Sunday Ticket this year, so I get to check out all the games. A couple of the Fox crews have terrible PQ. The one with Chris Meyers and Tim Ryan are the bottom of the barrel. Most of the others are about the same. CBS used to have several crews with terrible PQ, but they have improved those. Nearly all look the same except the main crew which has outstanding PQ.

Aren't your games on local TV blacked out on ST, which sucks. The picture quality on the local telecasts is inferior to
what is on ST.

Unlike the other networks, FOX doesn't let the network signal go through the plant. It runs from the receiver straight to the transmitter via the splicer. All stations get the same quality of signal. If the signal is good on one station, it is good on all. If the signal is bad, it is bad on all.

Monday Night Football uses SuperShooter 25 outfit and pretty much has since the show debuted on ESPN in 2006 (although the truck itself has been upgraded a number of times throughout the years). Same goes with ND3 Sunday Night Football's outfit which they've used since 2006. ESPN primarily uses NEP (who basically own everyone these days) and Game Creek for their big shows. Saturday Night College Football and the National Championship are usually done out of a Gamecreek truck.

The biggest differences I've spotted is not so much one of resolution, which as many others have stated is often a very overrated variable (contrast often is the primary determinate of how sharp something appears as well as focal length and the ability to discern edges between objects), but rather the cameras themselves. I've noticed the shows that are shot with Sony cameras (SNF, ABC Saturday Night Football, etc) tend to be a little crispier than the GVG cameras (MNF). I think the GVGs are a little bit softer out of the box (European design) than the really edgy/uber-saturated Sonys (which are known to be almost excessively snappy). During the NBA Finals ABC/ESPN often has used a truck with Thomson cameras at one venue and Sonys at the other and the difference, even with the same crew is often pretty striking. One venue usually looks a bit snappier than the other.

Same goes for ESPN's Sportscenter shows. The LA show uses Sonys and looks noticeably sharper than the Bristol show (in fairness LA is a 1080p native facility and the Bristol show appears to have the detail dialed down a bit).

I have noticed that ESPN's Monday Night Football looks pretty good this year though. The only real standout in terms of just horrendous PQ (to me) is some of the ESPNU remotes which are just notoriously noisy (seriously the internet feeds look better). Not sure what that's all about.

PQ is bad on WNYW-DT NYC . Every sports broadcast has swimming grass effect digital compression artifacts and motion artifacts on the players.

On FiOS ESPN PQ on MNF is 100% better then NFL on FOX.

Those are usually contracted out to independent companies and sometimes larger affiliates who have the resources to pull off game coverage. How well they do varies.

The big way you can tell the difference, aside from quality, is how often you see shots of fans as cutaways after a play happens. ESPN almost always goes to the players or the coach for reaction shots and seldom goes to the fans except during time outs or as bumper shots in and out of breaks, with only a few exceptions (such as showing someone's Mom or someone of significance). When you see a lot of random fan shots during game play, it's likely not an ESPN production.

I agree I agree. The espn version if its a giants/jets game is better than the my9 version. On fios whenever espn or another channel goes to commercial the audio drops out sometimes so that I have to turn the av receiver off then on.

I agree. I've noticed in the past that games with Sony cameras usually look better than the LDK 6Ks, though I haven't really seen if the 8ks are better. I think some of the saturated look of the Sonys is the masking settings. Also the look set by the video operator can be a big factor too. Detail settings still seem to be set by subjective observation rather than objective measurement, and there still seems to be a significant number of those who love to add outlines, sometimes referred to as "Contour Kings".

One difference in 720p between the Sonys and the LDKs is that the latter uses sensor pixel grouping to essentially emulate a native 720p imager. Sonys create a 1080p image and then scales it to 720p. At least vertically that should allow better vertical detail depth of modulation. Both scale horizontally. Is filtering is considered to be compression? Interlace mode with its typical sensor pixel row grouping also creates a filtering effect but I don't know if that's referred to as compression. Even the pixel element is averaging the detail in that area, though the optical low pass filter should reduce that to a minimum. There is also the RGB separation to emulate human color perception which could be considered spectral compression. Even the successive still images could be considered temporal sampling and a form of compression.

That's not true. The same truck did the Thursday night game every week for NFL Network. Geography isn't a primary consideration. The 2 years I did Fox NFL, our truck was usually F&F GTX 11. In 2008, our first week was in San Fran, Week 2 was Charlotte. Same truck. The only times we ended up with a different truck was if GTX 11 was doing other shows during the week and physically couldn't get to where we would be for a Saturday setup. I can't think of a time last few years a truck would stay in place for different broadcasters on an NFL game. We even had a situation where we did the 2009 Orange Bowl, but had to tear out the entire operation even though we were back 5 days later for set of the BCS Championship Game in the same stadium. The Dolphins made the playoffs, but that CBS crew had a specific truck they'd used all season, so in that one came.

Yea because most of those shows are built in specific trucks. It would be pretty crazy to have say Sunday Night Football have to jump to another truck midseason after the entire show has been built for ND3. You could probably get away with that on RSN shows or small sports remotes where the builds are pretty quick, maybe a day or so, but I mean those big shows like SNF or Saturday Night Football or MNF begin building well in advance of the season. Even the sort of run-of-the-mill college football shows typically travel the same truck all season (basketball is a mixed bag). College Gameday has its own truck all season. Even some studio shows, 'live' in certain control rooms. At ESPN Sportscenter and the big NFL shows have their own room that those shows always originate from to avoid having to have the show (especially a really heavy show like Sportscenter) built in a number of different control rooms (tying up server space or shotbox space and having to have TD effects built on multiple switchers, etc). Some of these shows these days have ridiculous builds (even some RSN shows). I remember someone telling me Sportscenter used all 99 registers on the Kalypso and anytime a new wipe was added one had to be taken out.