Mike Hicks

ArBaedkwo nnIT ehS apecT-mi eoCtnniuu m

Hmm. I suppose it's always been this way, but I've been noticing the word swathe showing up recently. I think that must be the British/colonial spelling, or maybe someone has just neglected to consult their dictonary. In the U.S., it's more common to use swath, and keep swathe as a totally unrelated verb usually reserved for Christmastime (i.e. “swathe him in swaddling clothes”—er, make that “cloths”)

Oh god, I'm becoming an English teacher. That's not right. I used to hate it when strict language rules were imposed on me.

Other little things have been bothering me lately. I wish I knew what the hell Spike TV (née TNN) is doing to mangle their video. Ever since they started airing Star Trek: TNG, I've been annoyed with the weird things they do. It used to be that they'd squeeze the image to fit their little black bar underneath. For the past several months (at least), many Star Trek episodes have very jittery video that makes it hard for me to watch. I noticed it again now that they've started airing Deep Space Nine.

I think they must have some sort of time-compression device set up to squeeze portions of the show, but it leaves troublesome video artifacts. It seems to me that the fields of video (field: 1/2 of a full video frame) have been swapped, though I'm not exactly sure what has happened. I'm going to try to take some frame grabs once DS9 starts showing again today and see if I can figure it out.

If this is what's happening, it might be diagrammed like this:

      normal       inverted
   11111111111   22222222222   odd
   22222222222   11111111111   even
   33333333333   44444444444   odd
   44444444444   33333333333   even
   55555555555   66666666666   odd
   66666666666   55555555555   even
   77777777777   88888888888   odd
   88888888888   77777777777   even

I think the technical term for this is field inversion, though there are a couple of different ways it can get screwed up (I think).

This is why we need progressively-scanned/non-interlaced video. Actually, it's interesting to note that Star Trek was largely recorded on 24 frame-per-second film, so most of the video frames can be un-interlaced (in a sense). The film went through a telecine or 2-3 pulldown process to be converted into 59.94 field-per-second/29.97 frame-per-second video. Given the right software/hardware, it's possible to convert the video back into the film format. Unfortunately, most of the post-production for Star Trek: TNG and DS9 was done on regular video-editing decks that weren't set up to worry about keeping the full frames intact. Many video effects and transitions between different camera shots can't be un-interlaced without exotic tricks.

But, I'm just whining at this point.

Posted by mike at April 6, 2004 10:50 AM | News , TV | TrackBack