RTM HD probably wont be available until mid or late 2012...

HD world is just so damn expensive... to get a HD Beta Camera alone can buy me at least 2 proton cars..

Hehe..i hardly watch astro channel..but my mother often watch it. She doesnt care it is HD or what. I think astro should upscale all of the ch. and transmit it in 16:9 format. That would be better i think.

Somebody else said it before. The equipment outlay is a one-time cost (sans maintenance and tape costs). The real cost of HD is in fixing the makeup, wardrobe and sets. That's because the production has to be of movie-set quality. You made me look at the HDW790. Yeah, it costs US$60,000.

But if you're a production house or starting one, I think investing in about 4-6 RED One cameras are better at US$18,000 per body. You do have to rent the lenses but at least your footage can be up to 4K and higher than 4K Digital Cinema standards; of course you can shoot in HD too with RED One. Lots of films were shot with RED One cameras, including The Informant, The Book Of Eli, Knowing and District 9. So practically, you're shooting your project at a very high quality. AND you could buy a mount that, combined with two RED Ones, will enable you to shoot in 3D.

Anybody who's thinking of buying a Betacam HD is thinking about quality issues. Handycams are great for non-professionals or when you want a HD footage but not having the insurance to put a BetaHD cam in the danger zone. There's a slew of settings you can play with on the more expensive cameras than you could with a consumer grade camera. You get what you pay for.

By the way, I heard that the Astro site visit was canceled because of lack of attendance. I would suggest that the organizers ask Astro for a rescheduling prior to the World Cup HD broadcast can be scheduled. That way people can see how they handle live and taped feeds.
fuad

wonder which one is worse... pillarbox in 16:9 tv or letterbox in 4:3 tv ?

yeah .. you are probably right.. people are not complaning because human eyes are side by side so naturally wide rectangular picture is more comfortable than close to square picture... that's why they came out with the 16:9 ratio in the first place...
mathematically also, a 29" 4:3 tv produce a  bigger letterbox size (27" letterbox diagonal) than size of hypothetical 29" 16:9 tv pillar box (24" pillar box diagonal)...

http://www.cnet.com/1990-7874_1-6307377-1.html
but it has to be mentioned that market equivalent to 29" 4:3 tv is not 29" 16:9 tv but 42" 16:9 tv.... meaning most people in HDTV world use 42" tv as most people in CRT world use 29"....

if ASTRO to push pillar box to 42" HDTV user, they can still came out with a rather comfortable 34" pillarbox.. but if they push letterbox  to 29" CRT tv users, they wont be happy with the rather small 24" letterbox....

my first Byond experience is actually on a CRT tv and i cant see anything in the HD channel...luckily my HDTV arrived the next day..
these transition take time i guess... we are not there yet, but 4:3 ratio is getting irrelevant by the minute..

Good enough?

Next month Asstro got increase price or not? If got how much more must pay?

Example: see Sun DTH, they offer free dmt and dish and kaboom!! 2 million customers in 2 yrs!

I hope Astro launches the first HD channel in Malay...

Actually it is true.

Sometimes people prefer FREE things then only you get good response.

At the end, the profit is from the subscriptions of all customers for long term.

If they give free decoder, dish etc, all these are small matters and can earn back from long term subscriptions.

That's business.

I heard a romour that AF last concert they do it on HD... 

It's good that astro will take the burden of our b.yond decoder

It's all logistics isn't it. If they have crews at all games and can get the video back in time for edit then sure...but I don't know if they have the crews?

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Added on March 26, 2010, 11:55 pm
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Discovery HD, is that true? Where did you hear about that?

to the person who posted about seeing discovery HD ad on Tv..
can u please share how the ad was..
seems that ur the only one who has seen it..
I watched discover all night long and didnt see the ad..maybe i missed it
hope u can retell how the ad was n what it said
TallJustin cant confirm it since he's on astro tech team..

Hope astro dont april fool joke us all on april 1st..huhuhu

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Added on March 27, 2010, 3:38 amJust saw a Malaysian Hockey Match on Astro Arena
It was in letterbox mode
Kinda funny watching hockey as if watching movie

astro already has a Astro Variety on Miotv I think, by the way Discovery HD seems to be a April Fool Joke cos I too did not see any adverts.

Astro can't transmit in native 16:9 SD formats because the old decoders can't handle the signal.

The best they can do is shoot in 16:9 and then add the letterbox to make it 4:3

If you own a B.yond box you could then use the zoom feature to make it fit a 16:9 screen.

Oops....  I forgot, because people have such a desire to fill every inch of their tv screen no matter what, the zoom feature is no longer available!

This stinks...

Go back into cancel Astro mode. If you don't give use what we want, what for we keep our subscription?

If they want to play this kind of game, I'll just stop paying my bills again.

They might as well stop advertising Byond. The service is so feeble, even India, Indonesia and even Vietnam and Cambodia has bested them in terms of content. I was going to keep the service because at least one of the four channels in my wishlist has been granted. Turns out that it was a mistake. Turns out that I made the mistake of believing that they will change...

Uh huh. Why does TM IPTV has the BBC packs then?

They don't even have to launch it, signal already available in Asia, they just need to receive it and retransmit it. Problem is, they don't want to for reasons beyond our comprehension. Apparently how many hundred people beg also they're not budging (as happened with BBCE. Petition form also they try to ignore, but bring in Granada to try to pacify the viewers. Doesn't work for me, Granada dun have Red Dwarf and Weakest Link)
Someone else in the forum say it's because Astro has disagreement with BBC's terms and conditions...

Some local productions are already shooting in HD.  But these are the ones from producers that actually care what their content looks like.  Not your typical Malay dramas or telemovies.

Most of the dramas filmed for Citra are now at least shot in HD.

Sepuluh (Citra), Ghost 2 (8TV), Ampang Medical (ntv7) were all shot in HD using cameras like Sony EX3 or Panasonic P2.

But they're all edited in Apple Pro-Res codec (an intermediate codec - "not full HD") and then down converted to SD for final delivery.

No one edits in full HD because it's bloody massive.  You need sustain read rates of about 200MB / sec.  To get that you need full on expensive RAID systems.

Nothing made for television in Malaysia is mixed in 5.1 surround.

Nothing is delivered to any station in any HD format.

The delivery of HD content would have to be on HDCam tape and there are only a couple of HDCam recorders in Malaysia at the moment, and no one can currently encode surround audio into the necessary Dolby-E format to be placed on the HDCam tape.  Only Singapore has Dolby E-encoders / decoders.  I'm not even sure if Astro has the encoders / decoders yet.

When Astro says they need to buy HD cameras etc... they're not talking about buying the cheap H.264 codec cameras, like Ex3, P2 or RED, they're talking about buying broadcast level CineAlta HDCam cameras such as those used to film the new Star Wars.

It's older technology, but the codecs are truly lossless,  and these cameras are easily US$100,000 and more, so it will take some time for Astro to shoot completely in HD and will be a huge investment to shoot something with multi-cameras like AF in HD.  It will also have a huge budget impact on everything from make-up / set-design / audio / video recording / audio / video editing and post-production.  Essentially it will make everything more expensive.  If Astro / Television stations don't pay more for the shows (quite likely)  the shows will end up in HD but they will look and sound worse than they do now.

I see a lot of people here asking for Chinese dramas in HD.  Currently I don't want to see that stuff in HD because I can already see so many problems in SD resolution / Cheap sets / cheap lighting / bad audio recording.  HD resolution will just take me out of the show completely and I won't be able to enjoy it all.

erm, i think film people have start their way to produce HD drama or film coz now they have their place to sell it...and i think maybe someone have planned it now...but, if the picture quality is good but the storyline bad, wut for hd????want to see malay drama, girl crying in HD ar?haha...then raining...