Agreed - and Spencer Kelly looks much more comfortable in his presenter role. The dynamic look and sound of the programme gels together well too.
Only gripe I have is that the BBC logo on the opening titles needs to be moved up, as it is always obscured by the ticker, except during Breakfast on a Sunday when the programme is shown and the ticker is not used.
Just watched this weeks programme. It really is turning out to be the best tech programme around today. Its so useful and the team actually know what there talking about.
While most of the programme is less patronising, it all seems to have been moved into the tech help section. Maybe they're just trying to pad it out to a certain duration and don't have enough emails, but there was a rather lengthy description of different types of cables which was rather OTT.
The programme is certainly a lot more stylish than Click Online was. I do like the graphics - which get placed wherever in the screen happens to have a bland enough background.
I like the refreshed music, however I'm not too sure about the icecube titles though.
And is it me, or have they put that stupid film effect on the video?
It's not you, they have. What idiot dreamt up the idea of doing that to perfectly good 50 fields per second video. Everything is infested with it now.
I know we have had this discussion before but what exactly is this film effect? Is it a different frame rate a second or is it something completely different?
Every other field is dropped, the gaps left by this are filled by repeating the previous field, so you end up with Field 1 and Field 2 being the same, just like film. However you also destroy the resolution gained from interlacing, and in effect the vertical resolution of the image drops from 576 to 288 visible lines.
You can see this from the jagged edges diagonals etc have.
That's not explaining the film look in general - just one, poor, method of implementing it.
The film look is, partially, caused by reducing the number of different "pictures" each second from the 50 used by normal video, to the 25 used by normal film. It is difficult to do well for a number of reasons.
If the method Markymark suggests is used (and it shouldn't be these days) - then you not only lose vertical resolution and get jagged edges - but you also get slightly exaggerated motion judder (more than you might get with film) as half the motion information is chucked away (when you throw away one of the two fields), whereas with film it may be present in a motion blurred form.
Good quality 50i to 25p conversion IS possible - though you have to pay to do it. Using a Snell and Willcox ARC100 - which uses multiple fields and multiple lines to generate a decent 576/25p result was popular - but if you want the best results you need to use something like an Alchemist standards converter. This effectively motion tracks the 50i image and recreates brand new 25p frames based on this. It was used for Dr Who - prior to the SFX being added (surely one reason for using film effect on some shows is that it halves the number of frames you need to composite manually...)
If only click online came back, but with clicks titles ...