Okay, maybe I should take some of the blame for what I'm going to complain about, because it was my own fault that I watched a "chick" flick on a cable network the other night. And it had some quiet, sensitive, meaningful dialog that I had to hear if I was going to follow along.
Anyway, it seemed like every five minutes or so a set of graphics touting an upcoming show would slide in from and out to, the lower right side of the frame. It was visually a tad annoying, but nothing I couldn't live with.
SLEEPING ON THE JOB
However, accompanying the movement of those graphics was a low frequency sound that masked the dialog that I was listening to. There's a relationship building in the movie, a magic moment happening, and all of a sudden that damn graphic sound covers up the dialog.
Now I don't watch enough of these types of movies for this to become a major problem in my life, but there are likely some viewers who watch a lot of them, and unless they have the dialog memorized or are really good lip readers, it must drive them berserk.
It kind of reminds me of a Jack Lemon/Walter Matthau scene in one of the "Grumpy Old Men" movies. Matthau has a channel changer programmed to Lemon's TV and can point it at the TV through a window. Every night as Lemon is anxiously listening to the lottery numbers, the channel unexplainably changes and he doesn't get the last one.
The noisy graphic is exactly like that except for one thing--no one was intentionally trying to mask the dialog. It just happened automatically. I'll bet that an automation system was instructed to run that graphic sequence every so many minutes, regardless of what was going on. And like a good automation system, it did exactly what it was told.
I don't watch that particular cable channel all that regularly, so I don't know if this particular sound and graphic combination is new or has been part of the regular schedule for some time. But if anyone working at that cable channel actually has been watching the channel, not monitoring, but watching, then it's hard to believe that the sound that goes with that graphic is still there.
The Hippocratic Oath says something about doing no harm. Maybe television isn't, as they say, brain surgery, but to paraphrase the oath, maybe we shouldn't do anything that takes away from the viewing experience.
That's an order most channels break every day, however. Commercial television puts on commercials, and that takes away from the viewing experience. Public TV has those pledge drives.
And C-SPAN takes away from the viewing experience by letting politicians speak. And the government gets involved in lessening the viewing experience by dropping those EAS alerts right in the middle of somebody saying something interesting.
But this sound and graphic combination seems like an ill thought-out addition to the telecast. And it just plain wrecks the viewing experience when you can't hear quiet dialog.
A station where I worked some great number of years ago set aside one week a year when the management team watched the station. It wasn't a case of watching it in their offices, while doing their work-a-day jobs. Five of them each spent a very long day at home, watching the station, taking notes about the on-air look, and sound.
I don't think there were any sound and graphic combinations back then, but they caught a lot of little details. They found inconsistencies in the way pretaped news updates referred to the evening news, commercials that touted last weekend's clearance sale; those kinds of things.
One thing in particular I remember that got caught was a station ID that was apparently being supered over an important crawl coming from the network. The solution was to come up with a second ID super that was a little higher in the frame, so it could be supered without wrecking the crawl.
JUST BECAUSE THEY CAN
The reason I think the big shots at stations and networks ought to do some actual viewing of their programs is that with all the bells and whistles on new equipment, I'm convinced that we're doing some of these graphic and sound things because we can, not because we should.
Looking through the NAB press handouts this year, the word "workflow" is probably still the undisputed champion for the third or fourth year running, but "branding" is sneaking up toward the top of the list. And the branding devices are automated so they can lay graphics (and probably sound) on all the channels of a multicast without requiring an operator. The only people who will see (and hear) the effects are the viewers themselves.
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