Footage From Overseas

In viewing the news footage coming from overseas, particularly from the Middle East, it looks to me like much of it was shot in Movie Frame Mode or progressive scan. It doesn't have the crisp, soap opera look most video has. This stuff has a gritty, newsreel look. Am I the only one who has noticed this?

At first I thought it had something to do with generation loss during satellite bouncing, but that doesn't make sense considering it's all done digitally. Then I thought it must be the crews over there are using PAL cameras, but that argument seems flawed, too.

More often than not, when you see a live remote it looks like today's video. So there is pure video coming out of the region.

Any guesses?

[Jeff Donald]

Hi,

My best guess is that it is PAL footage and converted to NTSC rather quickly. The resulting grainy, fuzzy footage is then broadcast. News events are very timely and they just don't spend alot of time getting the conversion perfect (content over quality of video). The uplink news crews use also greatly affects the quality.

Jeff

[Margus Kivilaan]

yeah it's partially true in other direction too. I think it's frame rate conversion which makes biggest difference. The other point is, that here is a big amount of analogue converters in use around Europe. In that way signal is converted to digital>analogue>digital... several times.
Btw some NTSC-originated news materials have greenish look in PAL, looks like they are also converted with analogue devices.

Margus