Lip sync

[Hoss]

Does it not bother anyone else that the lip sync in both the local and national News is atrocious? This is for all three networks and Fox from other than the on set anchors. Sound usually lag the lips as little as 3 frames but many time much more, even seconds occasionally. Seeing the lips move first is like watching Lucy in Mexico. Even if we give a pass on everything out of house, surely you should be able to keep your own stories in sync, and especially LIVE from three feet away! The national doesn't seem to care so maybe that's a justification for the local folks to ignore it. Seems it eventually goes to creditability, what else isn't important enough to care whether it's correct or not. But as for me it just drives me to distraction and my attention span isn't that good anyways!

[genlock]

are you on cable or satellite?
Or are you picking up local stations off air?

The digital signal will lose a/v lock if there is a momentary disturbance in the main signal.
it sounds like you are getting a marginal signal or one with a lot of multipath.
I do not have the problems mentioned. Suddenlink cable here.

[lastone]

I have seen this lately too and I'm OTA.

Gerwig (formerly of WOWK) told me some time ago that the switchers he installed would cause this, in particular on the network feeds, if no one poked in a delay.

He blamed it on no one paying attention. (or cared)

It's usually not noticeable until it gets to around 500 ms. i would think in digital that amount of time would be considered huge.

[Hoss]

I too have SuddenLink and the problems with that are more extensive and possibly correctable if I would add a different SuddenLink box but of course that would make my $135 cable bill much more as I lose my bundle discount. No this lip sync error must originate at the station as it is not consistent; it comes and goes with the source and lastone also sees it OTA.
Lastone’s friend, Gerwig, is correct; large corporate owners have sucked the caring out of the local markets. The people at the local level are just tools to be applied, certainly not assets to be leveraged. As these large corporate buy outs became more common so did oversight by the people at the corporate top, they have to keep that cash flow up and expenses down. The emphasis is on stock and stock prices. What the result is, in my opinion, is the folks at the local level have become nothing more than custodians and do not have any real input in quality or operational decisions. After a while the best and most conscientious employees tend to be beat into submission or maybe a tunnel vision that is too busy to see anything but the same goals as upper level corporate. And of course we all need to have a job and I don’t mean that as a cop out just a reality that most working people must live with.
None the less I guess this is just another old guy, yea actually had a first class FCC license, that believed we would have all the positive jumps in technology with the quality and bench marks that were set as standards at one time.

[Big Media]

This is not necessarily a product of the television station's equipment. There are multiple factors at play here. The signal leaves the broadcast antenna and gets demodulated at the cable headend, is then muxed with other tv stations and then modulated or transmitted over the hard wire to your house where it is demodulated again, encoded, and sent over an HDMI cable to your TV set where it is decoded into light and sound. I may be leaving out a few steps but you get the idea.

While this works very well most of the time, it's not going to work all the time and it's not going to work exactly the same in every case due to differences in the chipsets that are built into the various demodulators, cable boxes, and TV sets on the market.

Since video takes longer to process then audio, a delay is often built into the audio portion so when it leaves the antenna, it's all in sync. What happens after it leaves the tower is out of our collective hands.

[oldtvman2]

the big trouble with lip sync came about with the more modern video switchers. when I worked with WOWK and we put in a new awitcher we had lip sync problems. I complained to Warren Kunkle about it every day. telling him that people that could hear and read lips had a big problem. I worked at Owens on the hot end, the noise was so loud that you could not hear anyone over one foot away, so most of us learned to lip read, not good but enough to understand what the other person ment. finally Waren ordered an audio delay unit and we sat it up for great lip sync. when the video goes through the switchers the video is delayed some when going through each stage ( putting in supers and lower third, crawls all add to this delay) the audio is not delayed and thus the lip sync is off. audio was always the BAS**** child of TV. TV was all about the picture and audio was just there. it was all about the picture. I guess when I left no one cared about lip sync. but just to see how many elements they can get on the screen at one time. when looking at net off of sat on other stations the lip syne is mostly oj but when it goes through our local stations where no body cares and it sucks. it looks funny when you hear someone knocking on a door and their hand is back away from the door when you hear the knock.

[the jive talkin one]

Rabbit ears user 100 percent here...and no problems with sync at all. Also, no extra charge for HD...or anything else!

[Lester]

Rabbit ears user 100 percent here...and no problems with sync at all. Also, no extra charge for HD...or anything else!

And, at least down here, the OTA channels looks a lot sharper than the cable box version of same.

[RADIOHEAD 1]

Plus OTA HD is 1080 I not 720 p as from the cable box...on a large TV there is a noticeable difference.

[Scott Reppert]

This past weekend and Tuesday evening I had the tv on for the longest period in a while and, yes, I noticed it. OTA with strong signals and I noticed it a couple of places, but the NBC newscast was particularly off. Also on a game show (I have no idea what it was on. CW maybe?). The All-Star Game sync was perfect and the only place I noticed it since was on the local (5.2) weather channel, which is almost expected...

[Dave Loudin]

Plus OTA HD is 1080 I not 720 p as from the cable box...on a large TV there is a noticeable difference.

Nope. Some OTA is 720p.