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.
Digg it
Well thank you very much!
Wow, thanks Tim! You know I haven't even seen the show broadcast yet as Charter Communications is yet to add Food HD to the lineup, but I'm hoping to switch to DirecTV very shortly as it's either already there or about to be.
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.
How about THE most popular show, as in the #1 show on the network? Woo hoo! Notice AB was moved into the prime 8pm slot on Food Network. Woo hoo!
The Animations are what got me involved with the show in the first place (along with the Creative COW!) I was originally called in to talk about some simple animations which have grown in their complexity through the years. When they were making the switch to HD, the D.P. asked me to help since he knew I had an AJA / FCP HD editing system.
The Red Sox were pioneers of local sports programming - among the very first to own their own cable network (New England Sports Network, NESN),
Truth be told, they were really just following the model set by Ted Turner with TBS and the Atlanta Braves, both owned by him at the time. Actually everyone has simply followed along what Ted created by getting TBS onto a satellite as the first "Superstation" back in the day and making the Braves a national entity. THAT's a really neat story to be told one day......
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.
We don't have NESN on cable here, but on DirecTV I have to say, NESN looks fantastic and the TBS broadcast of the Braves in HD locally is some of the best HD I've seen. Funny how the local stuff looks better than some national stuff.
One of my favorite parts of the show is when Alton demonstrated what might go wrong with deep frying a turkey.
Alas I wasn't on set that day, I was too busy working on other stuff unfortunately but I would have LOVED being there for that.
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.
Glad you were impressed and glad you were able to see the show. We work really hard, especially on the color correction to really push the colors for HD. Hopefully more folks will enjoy the show as Food HD seems to be one channel that is popping up pretty quickly on cable and satellite providers!
Walter Biscardi, Jr. www.biscardicreative.com
Ted Turner, TiVo and all the gang
The Red Sox were pioneers of local sports programming - among the very first to own their own cable network (New England Sports Network, NESN),
Truth be told, they were really just following the model set by Ted Turner with TBS and the Atlanta Braves, both owned by him at the time.
I didn't say the first to own the broadcast outlet and the team. That honor goes to the Chicago Cubs. Or the Tribune that is, who owned the newspaper, the TV station AND the team. Probably some other stuff too.
There were other notable examples, such as the Madison Square Garden network, but nobody's extended their reach further than the Cubbies.
Where the Red Sox innovated was building the entire network around local sports. A full hour to hour and a half of pregame for a single game? Two hours on Fridays? Same thing postgame. 162 times per year.
Then throw in the multiple rebroadcasts of classic games, original documentaries, writer's roundtables and so on. Think of it as the full range of programming on ESPN, except 70% of the programming is everything Red Sox. By "everything" I mean that I was flipping through the channels while I was eating lunch, and stumbled across the live broadcast of the ALCS news conferences -- a whole bunch of players, the manager, etc.
That leaves 20% for the Boston Bruins, and 10% for everything else -- all as part of a real sports network, with everything you expect from a real sports network. Except for ping pong, which is how ESPN first built its audience. (Really.) And no Gilligan's Island, which was a huge part of TBS's appeal at the time. (Really.)
Anyway, the full-time, high quality local sports network is the part that the Red Sox pioneered. :-)
I have to give Ted his props, though. He singlehandedly invented cable programming as we know it. Long before CNN, he developed the Satellite News Channel -- "Give us 18 minutes and we'll give you the world." Clearly the basis of the headline news model. That's just one example.
Then there's the chutzpah of pushing his signal onto cable systems just to give them something to carry. I can't how overstate how big a deal this was when selling cable subscriptions 25+ years ago. Which I was. And it sucked. There really was darn near nothing there.
I admire pretty much everything about Ted, and miss him.
Which of course has little to do with either the Red Sox or Food Network.
...on DirecTV I have to say, NESN looks fantastic and the TBS broadcast of the Braves in HD locally is some of the best HD I've seen. Funny how the local stuff looks better than some national stuff.
The funny thing is that it's not local anymore. Getting TBS over the satellite is the same distance that every other signal carries. Same for NESN over cable. It goes through the same head end and wire that Fox...which has the second best sound, imo....or anyone else goes through.
Our first HD experience was with DirecTV. The reason was simple: they had the first HD DVR. That's a bottom line for us. We saw that HD looked great, but not a prayer of getting us to make the leap without a DVR, which we (obviously) aren't willing to watch TV without.
At the time it was a joint deal with TiVo -- DirecTiVo, pretty slick. We paid extra for a bigger hard drive, which was awesome. We could store a couple of days of HD, 200 hours of SD, record 2 HD feeds while watching a third, the whole deal.
We wouldn't have switched except that our regional guys do the phone, TV, internet thing, and are really, really good at all of it.
But with all the HD stuff coming on line with DirecTV this year, nobody else is going to be close to them. I'm sure you'll let us know how it goes. :-)