• Broadcasting

  Broadcast title safe vs. old CRT sets

  Posted by Mark Mastropietro on December 20, 2009 at 2:42 pm

  Hi group,

  While my :30 spot aired via a local broadcast channel the other day my client viewed it on an old CRT set (unfortunately I do not know how old). On this tv set the last digit of a phone number was cut off. I’ve read issues in this forum with broadcasters compressing commercials resulting in poor color, contrast, etc, because they don’t give a crap. Do they upscale the image or something similar that would knock text out of the title safe zone? I am 100% sure the text is within the title safe zone.

  OR, can anyone provide info on picture distortion on old CRTs? I know after a while brightness and color suffer but what about increased overscanning over long periods of time? I have no reports of the spot on a new tv at this time.

  Is this issue something that occurs after I hand my spot over to the broadcaster, or does my client need a new tv?

  Thanks!

  Mark Suszko replied 16 years, 7 months ago 3 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Bob Zelin

  December 20, 2009 at 5:58 pm

  1) do you have the ability to see title safety while you are editing the video ? Do you have a monitor, or safety generator (like a Horita box) that has safe title markers ?

  2) how come the station didn’t reject the spot ?

  3) all TV’s can be overscanned, and all kinds of crap happens to old TV’s ? Why not go to WalMart, and buy your valuable client a nice $350 26″ Plasma or LCD for Christmas, and throw out his old TV. This is like when clients didn’t have a DVD player (not that long ago) – I used to tell people to buy their clients a damn cheap DVD player. They are your clients – they pay you money – but them a nice present, so your “problems” go away, and they will keep hiring you. What are you going to do – call a TV repairman for this old TV ?

  Bob Zelin
• 

  Mark Suszko

  December 21, 2009 at 2:52 pm

  It sounds to me like the guy wasn’t composing to safe title, and this is getting more common these days as people move to flat screens. usually, you hear the reverse problem; that junk and garbage on the far edges of the picture, which in olden days would be way outside of the scanned and visible aera of a CRT set, are now very visible on flat screens and especially encoded videos on the web.(Unless you add a crop or mask)

  It’s probably my uptight Catholic School upbringing that keeps me OCD about safe titling boxes, but a standard is a standard.
  Sure, some individual old CRT TV sets may have a *little* more over-scan on them, but it would be pretty rare for one to be as bad as described here, and it sounds like it may still say “DuMont” on the set’s front nameplate.:-)

  At some point, I guess we’ll all have to officially re-calibrate safe title areas, but I’m sticking to mine a while longer.

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