Television

[Peter Waites]

Is it just me or does anyone else wonder how TV camera crew always seem to get such excellent shots. Clearly on location and studio shoots they will have a lot of control but how about such things as outside broadcasts and news clips?. White balance, saturation, exposure and depth of field always seem to be bang on and if there's a good sky it's usually in there. They must be using the same digital equpiment in principle as us and of course they trained and then do it for a living but boy they are good!
What lessons can we learn from them?

[miketoll]

They are very good but also use top equipment and I do not think moving pictures on a television screen is so demanding image quality wise. Videos on a home player looked fine but a still image off one is awful.

[Inyourface]

As Mike said, the image qaulity Is not that important.

[yelvertoft]

Plus, the crews will take care setting up the equipment when they get to location, correcting things before they start the broadcast. Once on location, the lighting is unlikely to change rapidly and for news type broadcasts, the director is unlikely to want to play around with fancy effects on the fly.

[nirofo]

You can get away with murder on a moving image, the perception of vision registers the image as sharp enough even though it isn't really. I remember watching a video clip of a Kingfisher diving for minnows, it was a marvellous piece of film, or so I thought until I was shown the frames on an individual basis. There wasn't one sharp frame in all the sequence.

nirofo.

[walwyn]

There wasn't one sharp frame in all the sequence.

Just to illustrate the point a hand held macro video with added wind.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/overton_cat/3586204217

Click on the bottom left corner to see it full screen.

I've not checked but given that one has no more than 2 mm of focus I doubt there is a single frame in focus here either.