Lou Dobbs in HD + Some Diffusion Action
In the office where I work, there are always at least two HD televisions playing CNN. As of late, I’ve been watching a lot of news leading up to the Inauguration. HD programming looks really crisp, sometimes to a fault. It brings out all the little details in sets and, of course, people. I was watching the Inauguration and there was this one female reporter who wore so much makeup that it looked like she was wearing a mask made out of clay. It was rather shocking. Of course, if you were watching on a standard definition television (SD), everything probably looked normal as it has since the 1940s.
This brings me to the subject at hand: Lou Dobbs and his diffusion filter. If you watch CNN for most of the day, when 6PM hits, you’ll be instantly transported to the set of “Days of Our Lives.” There is this soft diffuse glow that envelopes your screen. No, it’s not Lou Dobbs’ silky voice, it’s a diffusion filter. As a result, it softens edges, with a tendency to cut down the signs of aging in the talent. My argument is not that Lou Dobbs should be chastised for using a diffusion filter for purposes of vanity, but more so that it actually makes HD look better for live television. I say live television because produced shows have hours of color timing and (probably) slight diffusion added here and there to improve the overall visual quality. Sometimes, when I’m watching live HD channels with people talking at close range (e.g. news, sports talk ((yeah right)), talk shows, etc.), it’s like the picture is a little too much. It is almost like the edges of the images are so hot that they stress my vision.
I read an article (now pretty old by Internet standards) of an interview with the CEO of the FX Group about how to build HD sets for TV news stations. One recommendation was that talent should use a more “natural look” as far as makeup is concerned, unlike the past tradition of caking it on. And for cameras, use a gold diffusion filter to soften the hard edges that are native to HD. There were also recommendations on the intensity of light, using ND filters for over lit scenes, as well as the width of the stage to accommodate wide screen TVs.
When discussing the issue of softening HD video with diffusion filters, I am reminded of the first CDs that were produced in the early 1980s. If I remember correctly from my multimedia music composition class, the digital wave form is actually a stepped approximation of an actual sound wave. This is why higher sampling rates are so important for digital sound. The more samples, the finer the stepping (the resolution), creating a smoother, more natural sound. (Read more on Digital Audio on Wikipedia.) The point I’m getting at is that playing a RAW digital audio track sounds too harsh. By way of using filters (this is done through the devices you use to play music whether you know it or not), they smooth out the square attributes of digital waveforms.
Coming back to HD video, once the novelty wears off and producers get used to using it, I hope the common practice of employing mild diffusion filters will become common practice to improve the visual appearance of live, close range television shows. Like early digital audio, there needs to be some kind of filter, whether it is physical glass or some kind of real-time smoothing software, to even out these overlly crisp HD images. Aesthetically, smoothing out the picture gives HD more depth and visual interest. Just look at Lou Dobbs. He’s 63 and still easy on the eyes.