Ethan Reigns
Scooby
Agreed. I was never fond of digital mastering for shows like Buffy because the brightness levels are converted to integers which give a step function to low light levels. If you look at some scenes that were digitally mastered or remastered, a dark scene like a basement shows differing levels like a contour map with discrete jumps between levels rather than shading. If the show is always in the light (like Friends or something like that), you don't notice it. It is particularly obtrusive in Buffy and Angel which have a lot of dark scenes.
HD went to the 16:9 ratio because that is always used in movies - it gives a good aspect ratio for things like cavalry charges, but it has been a colossal pain for sitcoms and other TV shows where you have a few talking heads in a scene and the 4:3 aspect ratio is better suited. If you have ever been to the studios where the Tonight Show is filmed (I went in 1982, before the age of HD), the backdrop, which is a picture of the San Fernando Valley from about 2000 feet up on Mulholland Drive, is maybe an inch larger than needed to get the shot you see on TV. For 16:9, they needed a new picture and a lot of expensive extra background got added in a lot of shows where 4:3 would have been perfectly OK.
The other issue with HD is that it sends an image then another and interpolations between them so you can update the picture then calculate positions between updates. This allows a detailed picture to be sent without extra bandwidth in the transmitted signal. Most of the time, this works properly but there are circumstances like waving fields of wheat or waves crashing against a rocky shore where the effects require too much computation and you get digital artifacts because the digital processor cannot keep up. It is not a problem for most shows but it always has to be checked and may restrict what gets shot.
