Few queries about channel broadcasting medium

[viper08]

Friends

I have few queries about TV channel broadcasting.

1. I found the PQ of channels is comparable / better than the sources we use for some of the direct home videos considering that there will be some loss during the transmission through indirect connections.

What source they use for the playing/ storing the video signals? (DVDs/ DAT/ any Hi fi storage devices)

2. What brands / models they use for their equipments? (e.g DVD player for instance)

3. Do they play the original master tracks or do they use some filters to remove the logo watermarks from the contents of copyrighted company?

4. In commercial breaks we see lots of advertisments just one after another (bumper to bumper).
How there is absolutely no time lag (blank gap) between 2 ads? I mean there should be some time interval (although negligible) in swithcing from one media
to another. This particulalry gets intresting when there will not be any pre-planned break interval in ad-hoc show like cricket.

It will great to clear few above doubts from you media gurus.

 

[viper08]

Any expert Views?

 

[jls001]

Friends

I have few queries about TV channel broadcasting.

1. I found the PQ of channels is comparable / better than the sources we use for some of the direct home videos considering that there will be some loss during the transmission through indirect connections.



What source they use for the playing/ storing the video signals? (DVDs/ DAT/ any Hi fi storage devices)

DVD is not used by professionals for long term storage or playout. It is more of a consumer storage medium.

2. What brands / models they use for their equipments? (e.g DVD player for instance)

3. Do they play the original master tracks or do they use some filters to remove the logo watermarks from the contents of copyrighted company?

4. In commercial breaks we see lots of advertisments just one after another (bumper to bumper).
How there is absolutely no time lag (blank gap) between 2 ads? I mean there should be some time interval (although negligible) in swithcing from one media
to another. This particulalry gets intresting when there will not be any pre-planned break interval in ad-hoc show like cricket.

It will great to clear few above doubts from you media gurus.

1. Typical workflow and types of equipments used in TV channel will be:
a) source - either canned footages from studios/locations or outdoor shots like news footages.
b) post production - the raw footage goes through a post production process - addition of special effects (if needed), chopping off unwanted portions, marking into time codes to fit into the channel's FPC (Fixed Point Chart - which is nothing but the channel's weekly playlist),
c) Quality Control and S&P (synopsis and procedure - which is essentially self censorship of audio and video content),
d) storage into an archival system (typically a NAS or SAN), etc.

But there are other contents like channel's own promos and commercials - these are also fitted into the daily timeline using a BMS (Broadcast Management System), which in a way is a playlist manager which will see what to play at what time, and will go and fetch the footages from a local/networked storage, then send it to the final uplink to satellite. Before the actual uplink to satellite, the signal will be compressed to 2-6 Mbps stream (typically), in either MPEG2 or MPEG4 formats using professional hardware encoders. The current digital satellite broadcasting standard is either DVB-S or DVB-S2, the latter being spectrally much more efficient.

2. Too numerous to list, but certainly not DVD players. In fact the servers running the BMS have now taken over the role of players.

3. Channels get non-watermarked content, unless they are re-playing some other channel's new content (with permission, of course).

4. Long, long ago, there used to be a "wipe" frame between commercials. But that was a long time ago. Nowadays no channel wants to lose even a second of saleable time - yes, channels have a limit of how much commercial time they can play per hour.

Hope this clears some of your doubts.
Joshua