Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Curb Your Enthusiasm: Good Content / Terrible Image Quality

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Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 09-17-2002, 09:39 PM:

What is with the video quality of "Curb Your Enthusiasm"? I posed the same question in the rec.arts.movies.tech Usenet forum, but haven't got any response. I love the show, and laughed my ass off at the new episode Sunday night. But while the show itself is good, the videography quality just downright sucks.

What in the world are they doing? I mean, I can tell this show is being videotaped and not filmed. The color character alone reveals videotape as the source. But it seems like the post-production team is putting the video through some post processing filters to try to imitate something resembling the film look. It doesn't work. Instead, it just harms the videotape image quality to where it looks as though it was shot using the cheapest low-grade VHS-C camcorder one could find. The blurry images and poor shadow detail make me think I need RK laser surgery on my eyes to see it correctly.

Curb Your Enthusiasm is a good enough show to justify keeping it around on HBO's schedule for at least another couple years. But if HBO green lights more seasons, I hope they also green light giving the CYE production money to rent film gear or just make them just use their 3CCD video cameras properly and let the videotape look like videotape. The show looks terrible with that in-between nonsense.

Posted by Paul Linfesty (Member # 214) on 09-17-2002, 11:07 PM:

Th eshow is deliberately shot to look like cinema verite documentary style. I think its quite an effective look for the show.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 09-18-2002, 12:54 AM:

Cinema verite? If that is the stylistic choice of CYE, so be it. I don't care for it though. Most documentaries are shot on videotape and simply keep their video look (and some do a great job at it too). Most any investigative report from a small market news cast will have video footage looking better than the video quality of CYE. I don't mind a stylistic choice when the picture still looks sharp and clear. In the case of CYE, the applied filters make it look terrible. If I were making a show for TV and had to use videography, I'd let it look like video. Some video, like certain HD formats, looks really good. It's not film (and shouldn't be used for film purposes), but video does work for TV.

Given how HBO is doing more shows with HDTV in mind, it would be nice if Curb Your Enthusiasm used a real HD format (such as either shooting on film and doing an HD master or using some kind of HD video format that does service to the 1080 format).

Posted by John Pytlak (Member # 331) on 09-18-2002, 06:11 AM:

From Editorsnet:

stage.editorsnet.com/article/ mainv/0,7220,22747,00.html

"Riding the success of HBO's one-hour mockumentary about Larry David returning to stand-up comedy comes the HBO/Production Partners half-hour weekly series "Curb Your Enthusiasm." The show, shot in a semi-documentary style and mostly improvised, follows David through his daily life in Los Angeles.

Unlike the special, where David acknowledged the camera, the camera and crew are never acknowledged on the series. "Curb" is shot on two DigiBeta cameras and has a 20:1 shooting ratio, giving the editors a whopping 10 hours of footage per episode, on average. The show started production in March and is just now finishing its initial order of 10 episodes. On average, it takes about a month to cut one episode."

Frankly, I've even been disappointed with the image quality of most of the shows shot with the 24P HD cameras (e.g. Max Bickford, 100 Centre Street, this year's MTV Music Awards)

------------------
John P. Pytlak, Senior Technical Specialist
Worldwide Technical Services, Entertainment Imaging
Research Labs, Building 69, Room 7525A
Rochester, New York, 14650-1922 USA
Tel: +1 585 477 5325 Cell: +1 585 781 4036 Fax: +1 585 722 7243
e-mail: john.pytlak@kodak.com
Web site: http://www.kodak.com/go/motion

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 09-18-2002, 05:39 PM:

I'm somewhat surprised "Curb Your Enthusiasm" is originated using Digital Betacam, particularly when I have seen Beta look much better. Even the old analog BetacamSP format looks a lot better than this stuff. "CYE" isn't presented in HD at all (at least when I saw it on my parents' home rig in Colorado; just side-boxed NTSC shown on the HBO-HD channel). Anyway, I still think if they are going to shoot on video, just do video in all its regular 30fps glory. They need to use a film camera (and buy some Kodak film stock) if they want the real film look.