OTHER TECH

Not all the Winter Olympics events were broadcast in high-def, but the major ones were. These included the opening and closing ceremonies from Rice-Eccles Stadium, figure skating and short-track speed skating from the Salt Lake Ice Center, speed skating from the Utah Olympic Oval, ski jumping from Utah Olympic Park, and hockey from the E Center. And the events were shown in their entirety, with fewer commercial breaks than the traditional analog broadcasts.

"We don't do all the up-close and personals - not that there's anything wrong with that," said Philip Garvin, cofounder and general manager of HDNet, in a sly reference to the reputation that NBC Sports had earned at the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, Australia, for elevating packaging over game play. "We don't edit it much."

NBC had 2,600 employees in Salt Lake City while HDNet had 18, and yet HDNet produced all of the peacock network's high-def Olympics programming. So it was all the more amazing that the fledgling network could also churn out extras like fan-on-the-street reaction in Park City and a sit-down interview with Mike Eruzione, a member of the U.S. hockey team that beat the Soviet Union in 1980.

In a trailer next to the one used by their boss, Darrell Ewalt, a handful of young HDNet employees logged in and recorded on videotape the HDTV world feed arriving via optical fiber from the five venues. HDNet had no control over camera angles, since it was using a shared feed provided by International Sports Broadcasting, but it inserted its own graphics, teasers, and announcers - or, in the case of hockey games, the same voiceovers used by NBC in its conventional broadcasts. HDNet only made cuts so that a day's worth of events would fit within an 8-hour block of programming, which was then repeated twice.

Probably the biggest downside to the high-def Olympics broadcasts was the enforced delay. Though NBC's analog coverage was either broadcast live or shown later the same day, the HDTV coverage of the same events wasn't shown until the next day. This was the result of a vote by NBC's affiliates. Since most of them aren't set up to broadcast digitally, they feared losing viewers to an HDNet simulcast. The delay did offer some benefits, though. NBC or HDNet could pause the tape for a commercial without missing anything, for instance, or provide full coverage of two events that had occurred at the same time by showing them one after the other.

Getting the Picture . . . and Sound

So when the U.S. men's hockey team tied Russia 2-2 on Saturday night, February 16, how did HDNet get the high-definition (1080i-format) images of the event to American HDTVs on Sunday? First, the network recorded the live high-def feed from the E Center in its production trailer. Then the game was uplinked at 7 p.m. MST the next day via a dish atop the other trailer to a transponder on a GE satellite normally used to relay The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. The signal was then downlinked to each of NBC's digital affiliates and to HDNet's Denver control room. The TV stations (including KSL-TV in Salt Lake) broadcast the game locally, while HDNet relayed it to the DirecTV broadcast center in Los Angeles, which uplinked it to a DirecTV satellite that in turn beamed the event to viewers' dishes.

When I stopped by a voice-over booth, one of the studio hosts, John Dockery, pointed out that high-def shows off everybody's flaws. "You should be about 25 when you do high-def," said Dockery, who played for the Jets in Super Bowl III in 1968. "We all want extra makeup."

Later I visited Ron Balentine, HDNet's audio engineer, in his surround sound-equipped booth behind Ewalt while he was monitoring the U.S. vs. Finland men's hockey game, and he showed me how the subwoofer gets a workout whenever a player slams into the boards. He then explained how he handled the mixes for the various events. For the hockey game, the two announcers were mainly relegated to the center speaker while crowd noises were channeled to the discrete surrounds. For figure skating, the music, which is an integral part of the event, was sent to the front left and right speakers as well as the sub. From a sonic perspective, Balentine's favorite sport was speed skating. "You can hear the noise of the starter," he said, "the sound of the skates on ice, and the hush as fans hold their breath. It really sounds like you're there."

Eight channels of audio went out when the game was uplinked: for the surround mix there were five full-frequency channels and one low-frequency (the ".1") plus two full-frequency channels for the stereo mix. HDNet used the Winter Olympics to debut its delivery of 5.1-channel sound, but about half of NBC's DTV affiliates broadcast the Games in stereo only.

How the image should be framed and how close-ups should be used are hotly debated issues among HDTV broadcasters. For instance, Garvin feels that the camera should stay fixed on the widest angle most of the time. He pointed out that a high-def picture is so detailed, you can see the figure skaters' expressions even in a wide-angle shot. On the other hand, he cautioned, you don't want to use wide shots so much that viewers start fixating on a fan's mug in the foreground. "In hockey, you'd want the camera to zoom in a little on the action," he said.