Some questions about US Television? :) (1 Viewer)

[Everlasting Gobstopper]

The trend I find much more annoying is the way they have advertisements for other shows sliding across the bottom while your show is airing.

It's not limited to US broadcasts. On my imported Spooks (MI-5) episodes, I get adverts for "Up Next: 3 Non-Blondes" flashing across the screen. Of course, the show itself is a full hour long with no commercials and a much less rigid enforcement on language standards, so I choose to ignore the banner and focus on the good.

 

[Yee-Ming]

The trend I find much more annoying is the way they have advertisements for other shows sliding across the bottom while your show is airing. What's even more annoying is when they have sound effects.

Even worse: when some guy does a voice-over during end-credits announcing what the next show is and a little something about its plot. No big deal on most dramas, but many sit-coms now have a final gag in the end-credits, and Voice-Over Guy completely drowns it out.

 

[John_Berger]

And is it me or are many stations actually removing frames? Watch Star Trek: TNG on Spike, particularly during an Enterprise fly-by. You'll notice that once every second, the Enterprise seems to jump. Unless there's problem with the impuse or warp engines, that's not supposed to happen. Looks like that's yet another way to shorten the time to fit in more commercials without using gaping editing holes, like M*A*S*H.

At that rate every minute removes about 2.5 seconds of footage, assuming 24 fps. In a show that was originally about 45 minutes, that's enough to fit in about two minutes of additional commercials without glaring edits.

TNN isn't the only one that I've seen this with, but they're the most consistent.

 

[John Watson]

Removing frames? Wicked.

Its an Ad, Ad, Ad, Ad, Ad World, and the great sellebration makes me puke.

 

[Adam Lenhardt]

You're not imagining it, John. There is a device called the Time Machine that employs this technique. It works by noting the difference between two conscecutive frames, and if the difference isn't great enough, one of the frames is removed. I know about it because the NFL fined some affliates for making use of the device during live games, because the games were no longer live as a result of the processing used.

Personally, as long as this is only used for repeats and syndication, I greatly prefer it to cutting sequences out.

 

[Everlasting Gobstopper]

I remember seeing this used in a telecast of "Shaft" where, for the entire theme music sequence of Shaft walking the streets of New York, he seemed to be power-walking and the music was much too fast. It was rather disconcerting.