To be specific, my cable system just added the HD feed of the Food Network. Walter handles the HD editing, color grading for Good Eats, among the most popular shows there. Walter also handles both HD and SD animations for Good Eats, among the most distinctive parts of the show.
Wally and I have the Red Sox postseason to thank. Okay, and to a much, much, much lesser extent, the Yankees, Cubs and Phillies.
The Red Sox were pioneers of local sports programming - among the very first to own their own cable network (New England Sports Network, NESN), the VERY first to build schedules of major pre-game and post-game coverage (usually an hour, often 90 minutes), as well as extensive original programming, ESPN-style studio newscasts, talk shows, documentaries, etc.
This was a model followed by YES, the Yankees network, among many others, and is fantastically profitable.
When the current ownership bought the team in 2002 for $700 million, they were widely derided as insane. The business of baseball was in a shambles, with the entire league combined posting a $14 million loss that year. But the ownership team believed that -- even apart from a fanatical fan base coming to the park -- they could turn a profit on the NESN part of the package alone, and that it could more than offset potential losses by the ball club itself.
The club became far more profitable of course, and the $700 million investment is becoming, remarkably enough, one of the great bargains in sports history.
One of ownership's big investments was in HD. Every Red Sox game (and hockey too, which NESN also carries) is carried in stunning HD -- the best picture and VERY best sound of any sports broadcast I've ever seen. This includes the Super Bowl, whose sound and picture ass the Red Sox kick 162 times per year.
Here's where the baseball playoffs come in. This year, MLB wisely distributed the playoffs to TNT and TBS, preserving the World Series for Fox (alas, baseball coverage heinous beyond description.) We have a tiny regional cable network...whose other markets just happen to include New York, Philadelphia and Chicago, all of whom had teams in the basebally playoffs....
...and NONE of whom got TBS in HD. The outcry was so overwhelming -- and they'll be the first to say that the screaming was loudest from Boston, which had the longest heritage of all-HD coverage. They responded with TBS in HD on the very first day of the playoffs, October 3.
The news was so big, and the revenue impact so great, that it was reported on the cable company's INVESTOR INFORMATION page.
Comcast and Verizon had the same problem, btw, and also responded by bringing TBS HD online just in time for the playoffs, and not one day earlier.
Ours was the only system, however, to add FOOD NETWORK HD at the same time. (You knew I was going to back to this, right? Or maybe you'd given up hope.)
Nora and I used to watch the Food Channel all the time. We enjoy food, enjoy cooking, and our favorite show from day one has been Good Eats, hosted by Alton Brown. Many of the recipes we've picked up have become staples. The sweet potato pecan waffles are now a holiday tradition for us.
But the show is about far more than recipes. The Monty Python-inspired graphics are a hoot, and reflect the show's REAL draw, which is a smart, funny approach to food science, with history and anthropology thrown in. A recurring cast of characters, puppets, great music, and unusual approaches to shooting are all part of the mix.
And some cooking. Even when we weren't cooking at all -- and not doing much these days either -- we find Good Eats one of the most entertaining shows on TV, and highly recommend it to anyone who likes smart, funny TV.
You can get an idea what I'm talking about by heading to the Good Eats page at Food.com.
You'll find clips there (heads up: Windows Media) that show off Good Eats style. The very first sample video: the history of cans. Short version: it started with Emporer Napoleon in 1794. Like I said, not an ordinary cooking show.
I've known that Walter has been doing the HD post on Good Eats for a while, but it wasn't until Monday that I got to see the show in HD for the very first time. In a word, stunning, even by HD standards.
The episode was on deep-frying turkey. Perfect example of why Good Eats is such a great show: I don't eat turkey, and even if I did, I'd never deep fry it. Yes, it's the best-tasting and fastest way to cook...but building my own winch to lower the turkey into 400 degree oil is more than I'm up for.
One of my favorite parts of the show is when Alton demonstrated what might go wrong with deep frying a turkey. He was in front of an Atlanta-area fire station, and as he lowered the turkey into the oil, it literally exploded into flames. Not caught on fire. No, burst into a tower of flames that poured out of the pot into a genuine inferno 15-20 feet across.
Cool!
And it looked truly amazing in HD. The shot ended as firefighters stepped forward to extinguish the flames, and the screen filled with the white blast. Dissolve from white into the next scene. Perfect.
There were other great things in the show. You could see every single hair on Big Foot, every spike in Alton's own hair, every ripple on the giant plastic ice cream cone, and razor-sharp display in the hardware store. Again, not your typical cooking show.
Walter and I have known each other for the better part of ten years now, and I've known for a long time that he's a talented dude. But this was my first time to see his latest work with Final Cut Pro and Color, in its full HD glory. I gotta tell you, I was really, truly impressed.
So even if your town doesn't have the rabid fever for the Red Sox that can force the addition of Food Network HD, pester your local cable company anyway. It's worth it just to see Walter's work on Good Eats alone.
