Early testing of HD video coding

[old_tv_nut]

Use of existing TV drama film material:

The test committee thought at first they would like to use examples from existing programming, since that would represent common production practice, scenes with various degrees of motion, title crawls, etc. CBS donated a 35mm film clip form "Murder, She Wrote." We ended up not using it for several reasons:

1) The film grain was terrible in high definition. The production companies were using grainy high-speed film because it made lighting much easier. CBS saw this and instituted a new policy that all future shows be filmed on fine-grain stock

2) Angela Lansbury looked fine in standard definition, but you could see she needed much more makeup to hide wrinkles in HD.

3) The scene included someone facing Angela Lansbury and holding a gun by his side - but the gun was cropped out of the picture when televised in 16x9 aspect ratio. Not knowing about the gun made the dialog very cryptic, and it was judged that test viewers would be distracted by trying to figure out what was happening.