Bad or obvious use of softening filters in HD programming

i notice it a lot in that show the new adventures of old christine...

This does seem to be a trend recently with many HD programs and especially with aging female actors. So much so that there are times when I think my HDTV is going bad and losing focus.

Time to get some young talent for these shows if the seasoned woman can't deal with HD.

I'd much rather have a seasoned real looking lady then some vaseline covered mess... it looks foggy and gives me a headache, so i'll change the channel, or watch some bikini show from off hdnet or something instead

I think they are definitely softening Catherine in CSI:Vegas and Callie (sp?) in CSI:Miami. They seem to leave Grissom and Horatio well enough alone though.

They've been doing this for decades on SD TV (Color & B & W) and the movies. Female actors have always wanted a softer look on the screen, big or small. It's not new at all! Just more noticable with HD.
Where are those fotographers? What's the filter called again?
HD is just that much sharper that all flaws are shown in their natural glory. I notice it on old B & W movies as it's more evident. Go back and check out your fav movie with full face shots between a man and a woman? See?
Are the women in everyone's life perfect? I think not. If you think so please take off the rose colored glasses!
HD is like looking at real life, warts and all.
Wait 'til we get smellovision!

The last new episode of CSI Miami where Cali is questioning a suspect. The face of the guy she is questioning is very detailed, but when the camera goes to her face you can see the how the camera changes in detail. This happened about 3 times in that scene and it's very clear.

Smallville uses Schneider Half Softs on every shot to keep the softness consistant while making the closeups look good.



If you see specks in the out of focus lights, you know they're using a soft filter.

Maybe it's just me, but since Studio 60 has made it's return, it looks a LOT softer than before the holiday break....

I was thining the same thing watching the show from 2 weeks ago.

Even tho not HD, Janice Dickenson's show on I think E has a massive filter going on on her face. I noticed it the first ouple of minutes I saw and my wife mentioned it shortly after.

Except you can't use a program shot on film as a determinate for HD clarity. IT'S NOT VIDEO! Not only that 99% of the time (even on 24p shows) there is going to be some optical maniuplation going on, even if its a simple as using high grain film stock, or pushing the exposure. It's like comparing the tonal quality of a damper pedal of a Steinway piano to one on a Roland synthesizer. Yes the end result is the sound of a piano, but the technologies and approach are so divergent that the argument holds no weight. A GOOD example of a HD show that does obvious filtering is Good Morning America and The View. But optical manipulation has been around for nearly 100 years and IS NOT going anywhere, no matter how many HD sets sell. Crisp crystal clear razor sharp video is NOT AN AESTHETIC that is desired by most people involved in the motion picture photography community. It's like trying to rationalize an oil painting in terms of megapixels.

True. All you have to do is look at any original series Star Trek episode. Many of the actresses look like they were shot through guaze, panty hose AND vaseline.

Phew! Izzat why I thought they were so babe-a-licious when I was a kid?

Funny you should say that because it is very common for DPs to photograph through sheer objects such as pantyhose (almost every Spielberg movie uses this technique), and in more artistic cases grease and vasoline. Never heard of gauze being used (except maybe on some experimental student film or something).

The Ted Danson show that comes on just before Boston Legal (at least it did in the Fall) was incredibly soft...looked like it was shot through a jar of Vaseline. The immediate transition to Boston Legal reveals incredibly crisp HD PQ. Same channel...both HD...moments part. Danson must have mandated the mush PQ. Looked so bad as to be out of focus. Boston Legal is spectacular.

I can see why folks who are new to this stuff could become confused. If the Danson show was the first I saw with my HDTV I'd be sorely dissapointed.

The first time I became aware of it was M*A*S*H shot in 1970.
They used a fog filter to give it a old look.

......And I am not sure I want to see Barbara Walters in all of her glory, but historically
the Barbara Walters interviews have been soft focus, and it literally gives me a head ache.

Actually, that's her voice and annoying personality that gives you the headache...

Well there is no need to complain about it... because it isn't going to change.

The funny thing is, if they are always going to filter and reduce the effective resolution then they might as well send a lower resolution picture at higher quality without the other artifacts.

On any given show you can't have it both ways at the same time. Most of the time the extra resolution of 720p or 1080i transmission (but not displays) these days is just being wasted.

OTOH, I do beleive that as everybody starts getting displays that can show the difference more shows will be produced to actually use that resolution, at least for premium services and hidef discs.

In an open market complaining does work.

- Tom

Except shows are produced at or higher than transmisison resolution. For all the filtering GMA is still 720p. And the episodics are shot on film...even the graniest 35mm film is still going to have a native "resolution" (if you can call it that) that kicks the crap out of HD video. Your display is just reproducing more of the inherrent grain. The argument proposed in this thread essentially makes sharpness the only determinate of good picture quality. That's a losing battle. It's kind of like judging how good a book is based on the font size used for the text.

I seem to remember reading some information about softening filters built directly in the HD video cameras now in use in the studios. I believe it can discern skin tonal qualities and apply the softening algorithms only in those areas. Maybe ABCTV99 or John Mason can provide more technical details.

This is "Skin Detail" processing - and has been standard on high-end SD cameras, and now HD cameras, for a number of years. (Certainly the last two generations of SD cameras in BBC News studios have had it)

Video cameras have built in electronic "aperture correctors" - otherwise known as detail - which are designed to improve the perceived sharpness of a camera. If you ever see an older broadcast SD camera with the detail totally switched out, you'd be surprised how soft it can look. However excessive detail can be very harsh (over here it is known as the "French look" - because our neighbours the other side of the Channel often wound huge amounts in on their cameras in the 70s and 80s)

Skin detail circuitry reduces the level of detail / aperture correction applied on picture areas of certain hues (i.e. pink faces) - often allowing two settings to cope on two shots or quick re-frames for anchors of different flesh tone.

This isn't so much selective softening though, it is selective lack of sharpening. Not quite the same thing. (I don't THINK negative detail is a feature of cameras - though I may be wrong)

Recall mentioning years back here that Philips won an Emmy award for their TV-camera skin-tone processing circuits; scanning this Philips camera pdf file for "Emmy" shows how cleverly they outline the process. (Thomson/Grassvalley now makes/markets the cameras.) -- John

Actually it's more like judging a book based on whether it was printed on a 70dpi dot-matrix printer instead of on a 1200dpi laser printer. And yes, I would complain about a book if the text looked like a bunch of marbles thrown onto the page.

Filters don't exactly "reduce" the resolution or only make it look softer. They just use the resolution in different ways. This is how they rationalize it anyway. Every soft filter has a distinctive look that some directors and D.P.'s prefer over other filters. They would all look more similiar at lower resolutions.

In Barry Salt's "Film Style and Technology" book, he said this in the "General Trends in Cinematography" section on the Seventies showing that "throwing away" improvements in resolution is nothing new:


I saw that scene on CSI. It seemed weird because Jorja Fox doesn't have a perfect complexion, it's completely obvious 99% of the time on the show, and we're all cool with it. And why didn't they fog the guy she was talking to if they just wanted that scene to have a surreal apperance?

Yep - people forget that HD can capture out-of-focus / blurred picture information in high resolution - making the quality of the out-of-focus / blurred picture information higher - and appear nicer to watch.

Soft or blurred doesn't mean low resolution.

It may not "mean" low resolution but I think it effectively makes an image that could be transmitted at lower resolution without further loss of detail. I suppose it depends upon how the picture is made soft. Most filtering removes high frequency information one way or another. But if there is NO high frequency information in an image then that image could in theory be resized to a smaller image that still contained all the information of the larger one allowing some bit savings on transmission.

I guess the best examples are upconverted SD shows. They now come in a nice big box but the box still contains only the same contents as before, with more packing.

- Tom

It is on HD cameras, and is a vital part of getting the film look out of an HD camera, as much as switching it into 25p mode. The MTF of HD cameras is higher than that of film and this causes film judder to be far more apparent off a digital source than off film -- by winding in some negative aperture correction you can get a better match to the film look. See BBC R&D White paper 34 for details.

Interestingly, Sony have removed the option from the F900R, which means it can't do as nice a film look as the F900 or F750...

Steven