Jeopardy In HDTV: How Does It Look?

Commentary
Jeopardy In HDTV: How Does It Look?
By Vidiot
HD Observer

Editor's Note: Game shows Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune began broadcasting in HDTV yesterday. Although few local stations are airing the shows in high-def yet, our HD Observer, 'Vidiot,' was able to capture a high-def feed of Jeopardy.

Washington, D.C. (September 12, 2006) -- A little over a month ago, Sony ventured into new territory when it recorded one of its two game shows in HD: Jeopardy. (The other being Wheel of Fortune.)

In my market, neither of the two game shows are available in HD. But I managed to get my hands on Jeopardy. The magic of satellites allowed me to be able to view on Monday the show that will air on Wednesday (No, I'm not going to say who won :-).

I did get to watch it at a bitrate of a little over 28 Mbps, which will provide plenty of room for (local) stations to re-encode for the ATSC bitrate. Sony uses the 1080i HD format, so stations that are 720p will have to "transcode". Once the Pathfire system is ready to roll for HD programming, the HD satellite feed will go away and the Pathfire sat feed will take over, making it a lot easier on the stations.

Now that the technical specs are out of the way, the real question is how does (Jeopardy in HDTV) look?

A screen shot of Jeopardy in High-Definition TV.

Technically the image is indeed crisp. Definitely will look good on your 1080 display. Me, I have a 1280x720 display and it looked great.

However, if you detected a "but" in there somewhere, you would be correct. The problem is having to shoot for protected 4:3. That really messes up the framing of shots of the (Jeopardy) answer board, as they have to frame it with a border, which can be seen in the long shots of the set.

The other, very distracting framing is the three-shot of the contestants. By having to frame it for 4:3, you end up with not only space on the top and bottom, but you also end up with space on the sides.

It looks like a letterbox ad in a 4:3 frame viewed on 16:9, i.e. -- you have a little image in the center of the screen, with black all around. In this case, you don't get the distracting black, but you do get the smaller
image in the center with set all around. An unfortunate waste of display real estate.

What is the cure? Shoot it framed for 16:9.

But what about the 4:3 audience, you may ask? Create a letterbox SD master. While there will be those audience members that will complain, those same audience members probably complain about primetime dramas that are letterboxed. Going to SD letterbox just might indicate to the viewing public that the show just
might be in HD on their station.

Will Jeopardy/Wheel cause the public to rush out and get HDTV sets? Hell, no. It's just a game show after all.

'Vidiot' is a HD Observer for TVPredictions.com.
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