Scott Riegelhoupt wrote:
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Might this have anything to do with poor conversion from PAL to NTSC
somewhere along the way? Perhaps there is some defective equipment in the
mix.
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While not high-def, most EPL games on Fox Soccer Channel are very
decent-quality for regular-def television here in the U.S. Where exactly
does the signal from the cameras get converted to the broadcast format (PAL
vs NTSC)? Do US broadcasts on FSC of EPL (or UEFA/Champion's League) games
usually get the feeds before any broadcast-specific format-conversion
occurs, or do they simply license the British/European PAL-formatted feeds
and convert? One frequent quality culprit in the age of digital broadcasts
is the the combination of the amount of compression used and the amount of
bandwidth used to transmit the signal. When either of these factors are
stressed too hard, visual artifacts (especially in moving parts of the
images) start to become much more frequent and noticeable.
By contrast, nearly all South American soccer broadcast over Fox Soccer
Channel has comparatively very poor quality, comparable to the quality of a
VCR game tape made on an extended play setting (note: I'm NOT saying that
such taping is the technological reason for the poor broadcast quality from
S.A. - this is simply a quality analogy, nothing more).
