Brazil Formula 1 on BBC1 HD
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The upscaling on the F1 today was very good. I noticed a big difference in picture quality on today's race, particularly the live reporting by David Coultard. Eddie Jorden and Jake Humphrey,
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Shame the race was a little dull.
It's strange that ITV, ch4 and Five's upscaled content can often look fairly close to HD but I've not yet seen any upscaled content on BBC1 HD that has looked as good.
Agree with all of that.
When it goes HD I'm sure Bernie will find a way of funding it out of somebody else's pocket.
Wasn't there talk of it being HD in 2011?
Bernie Ecclestone confirmed it in a BBC interview with Eddie Jordan in September that the 2011 season coverage will be in HD.
I think for once the TV networks and fans managed to back Bernie into a corner and force his hand, and considering Delta 3 made $278m in 2009 from TV coverage fees alone the additional cost of producing HD coverage is absolutely negligible.
Well, given the BBC's performance on HD (they are only broadcasting at 1420x1080 instead of full HD 1920x1080 and are using a lower bit rate than other broadcasters) we will not really be getting the full benefit of Bernie's outlay.
Perhaps we could hope for F1 to reappear on Eurosport whose HD picture on Sky is superb! And they could have a non-Legard commentator, too! But we'd have to put up with ads. Is life never perfect? (I can answer my own question there, thanks!).
So it's the BBC's scrimping on picture quality that leads to the upscaled F1 pictures not being not that much better than SD. As others have said, upscaling on the other main channels can look as good as the BBCs' HD-sourced transmissions.
My beautiful Panasonic HD TV needs a full HD picture to be happy and to justify its cost:. C'mon BBC. You used to be the technological leaders.
Hamilton went wide and Alonso went past.
Er, I thought that the upscaled F1 looked much better than the normal BBC1 offering.
TBH - given that it starts out as SD, I couldn't really imagine it looking much better than it did :eek:
Where was the radio 5 live commentary option this time; I had a F1 multiscreen option on the red button (via channel 101) but only had the driver tracker, on-board and main channel. Wanted to listen to crofty instead of useless leggard!
There is a noticable improvement, but it is mostly the lack of compression artifacts on the HD channel that is behind that as far as I can see.
I got it via the red button just as the warm up lap started, and reverted back before the race started.
To be honest though, I was watching via BBC's Freesat, I don't know if you get a different 'red button' on Sky.
Bring back James Allen. He was far better than Leghorn ever will be.
Oh agreed - completely.
TBH - if they upped the bandwidth enough there is no reason why SD via MPEG2 couldn't look almost as good. All we are getting with upscaled SD on an HD channel is "SD like it always should have been".
Anyone remember how good BSB looked using SD via DMAC ? Twenty years ago !
It was the poor quality of Sky analogue that put me off for another 10 years!
DMAC was still only an analogue system although something of a stepping stone towards DVB. It certainly looked better on our old CRTs than the analogue PAL Sky churned out at the time, though not sure it would look that great on our big screens today .
And you can still see houses with those squarials on the side .