[icemannyr]

Live on PBS from the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol.

Wednesday, July 4th, from 8:00 to 9:30 p.m. ET in High Definition

Full program information http://www.pbs.org/capitolfourth/concert.html


The Weather Channel mentioned that rehearsal had to be cancelled due to thunder storms in the DC area.

Don't know if was being video taped as a backup in case it rains on the 4th.

 

[bobby94928]

The Memorial Day concert on the Washington Mall was stopped for the same reason. PBS went to an earlier broadcast from last year.

 

[icemannyr]

The Weather Channel just showed video from the PBS media feed showing people getting up and leaving.

I guess this means there is no full dress rehearsal as a backup to air on Wednesday.


On Memorial Day for the west coast they were switched to the dress rehearsal from the day before at the point when the live show was stopped.

 

[icemannyr]

WNET-DT NYC (2 SD Sub channels) FiOS.

PQ is not as good this year with increased digital compression, motion artifacts and macro blocking.

Audio is stereo.


There's a definite down grade in PQ. The shots of the crowd are full of motion artifacts macroblocking.

 

[Matt L]

A "Definite downgrade in PQ"??? Be honest it was abysmal! It was so bad I will be on the phone tomorrow to a couple of PBS outlets complaining, not that it will do any good.I have 2, well 3, PBS outlets available to me and I tried both of them and the show looked equally bad on each. Since it was so bad to two of the major outlets I had little hope for the third and opted not to turn my antenna. On both WTVS from Detroit and WFUM Flint the show looked little better that SD.

 

[RenoDavid]

Watching this now on the west coast. Yeah, not very good at all. The crowd shots are especially bad.

 

[dougotte]

I too noticed the PQ was very poor (but not surprising for our affiliates) and the sound was stereo only. Also, during the actual fireworks, the sound mix had only the orchestra, and none of the actual fireworks' sound.


The FiOS guide said this was the program from 2009 with Jimmy Smits.

We were momentarily confused.


Doug

 

[jpillar]

I just wish they would have more patriotic music!

 

[Jim Shaffer]

I finally got around to watching the recording I made from the Ku-band distribution feed (7.5Mbps MPEG4), and the only time I saw banding and artifacting was during some but not all close-up shots of the fireworks. It seemed to happen only when there was nothing but fireworks, no background. All the other scenes were gorgeous PQ. (But yeah, the bad parts were BAD.)


Since I only saw a problem in some shots, I wonder if the MPEG4 encoder was having a problem with dark scenes (they only just switched to MPEG4 within the past month!), or whether the problem was with one specific camera.