WTF with my computer clock?

Very possible Dave. But on that score, one thing I've found is that when you decide to go channel hopping on the satellite programmes, it seems to be the law that the first channel you surf to, will be in a commercial break, then the next, then the next, then the next, then the .....

And you're right about them going straight into content, with the opening credits following later. It drives me up the wall as well, when opening credits are running at the rate of one every 20 seconds or so, and it doesn't get to "directed by" (always the last one) until 10 minutes - or more sometimes - into the show. Worst that I've come across in recent years for annoying openings, was "The Shield". That one had an opening sequence of what happened in some storyline two seasons ago, as if you can remember, and then the opening credit sequence started, running over the top of the new storyline. That I could live with, except that each character name was on a black screen, so some scene important to the current episode is running, and for two minutes, you keep getting a black screen with a white name on it, obliterating what's going on, whilst the sound continues to run, just to taunt you.

Does anyone know where in the world the school of half-arsed camerawork and editing techniques is ? Must be a big place, as it seems that networks won't take on anyone any more, who hasn't graduated from it ... :-)

Arfa

Depends - the actual ad break times are pretty accurate between some of the companies - the idea being to prevent channel hopping when the ads come on. You'll just see ads on the others. Hence the way they crash into the break on progs not made with this schedule in mind. And most of ITV comes from just one playout centre, so should be synchronised across the country. Start times for progs have never been accurately published. They've always been approximate - apart from on some data points in the evening.

Most PVRs allow you to set a buffer period at start and finish of the prog. But if only the EPG sent out a flag for the *actual* start and finish.

Dunno the actual process, but I have a radio controlled clock next to the computer - and that always agrees as close as I can tell to the time signal off analogue radio - but never *exactly* with the computer one. Of course this could be some delay within the computer. I have two computers here - an elderly RISC OS one and a newish PC, and it applies to both.

It was once thought that any camera work or editing which grabbed your attention would distract from the story. But nowadays story seems often less important than the action. I'm of a generation brought up on radio drama - and still enjoy it. Luckily in the UK there's still a fair bit. Both film and TV have to work hard to improve on your own imagination. ;-)

There's a lot of camera and editing techniques employed now, which I think are the result of arty-farty thinking, and often at least incongruous in a particular production, if not downright inappropriate. One that seems to have come in recently, is where a show like for instance "The Hotel Inspector", has a presenter who needs to present some parts direct to camera. They used to look at the camera, and the good ones could get the right 'expression' into their eyes to 'engage' the viewer. You actually felt like they were talking to you alone. Now, they seem to talk to some unknown person standing 10 feet behind the camerman's right shoulder. This gives their eyes a strange 'disconnected' look, and it feels sort of rude of them to appear to be talking to someone else rather than me.

I also hate the waggling camera shots, the rapid zooms and de-zooms that leave the focus lagging a couple of seconds behind, and the way that cookery programmes are shot now, with the camera zooming in on a single tomato seed in the mixing bowl, before a high speed de-zoom to some arbitrary ingredient pile or implement, followed by another high speed and defocussed zoom to the spot on the end of the presenter's nose, followed by a rapid drop back into the mixing bowl. WTF are they trying to show ? How is that sort of crap appropriate to that type of programme ?

And now that "The Bill" has got a 9 o'clock slot, they've changed the shooting medium to something that looks altogether 'wrong', changed the way it's lit, presumably to try to give it some kind of dark edginess, added the most inappropriate incidental music, and changed the characters into moody hard-men. That show had a good format before, and wasn't suffering falling ratings, so why try to fix what ain't broke ?

And it never starts on time ... :-)

Arfa

Have you noticed that they've just discovered tilt shifting so that almost every cop show you watch these days has long shots that look like lego models and usually quite out of context - they do it cos they can.

Ron

W2K has an SNTP client built in. Run cmd.exe then type 'net time /?' for help.

I used to build OEM computers and have seen many different degrees of inaccuracy both positive and negative.

I hadn't particularly noticed that one, but I shall be looking for it now ...

Arfa

It's called HD. ;-)

Oh, but it was. Rumour has it ITV wanted to pull it totally - but Talkback Thames threatened to withdraw the other shows they make for ITV if they did. Hence it changing to only one ep per week - and if the ratings don't improve it will go by Xmas.

I'm not familiar with the term and don't know what you mean - can you expand?

On 8/14/2009 6:52 AM Meat Plow spake thus:

Thanks; as Johnny Carson used to say, "I did not know that".

So how does NTP work in this case? I'm guessing it must contact some entity over "the network" (meaning something external to my computer) in order to determine the actual time, no? How does this work? Who does it contact? (Short answer will be fine.) I do notice that one of the NTP commands is

so I assume my computah keeps a list of servers "out there".

(So I guess if my computer is contacting a time server out there periodically, but my clock was still off by 5 minutes, then the RTCC must be *really* inaccurate.)

By the way, you can type "net time ?" to see the "help" info.

Most crystals used in computers are within ten or 20 parts per million of the frequency stamped on the case (you can get a lot more accurate ones, but computers don't need it). AFAIR, those little cylindrical "clock" crystals that run at 32,768 Hz are at least ten times poorer, and far more temperature sensitive to boot. I think the *best* you could expect from one of those without special treatment would be about a minute a month.

Isaac

My Pana 51" has a different color matrix for SD and HD.

On 8/14/2009 11:46 PM isw spake thus:

Hope I'm not belaboring the point here. I just ran "net time" again and got the error message "Could not locate a time-server". So I assume that even if that process is running on my computer, as someone else here asserted, it's not doing anything to my RTC, as there are no time-servers to query (that it knows about). Therefore, the time my computer displays is the actual RTC value. Therefore, it seems to be at least as accurate as you've stated (about a minute a month), which actually seems pretty damn good to me. If it gets off by 12 minutes a year, resetting the thing once annually would yield a clock that should be close enough for most folks' purposes.

Explain some more ?

Arfa

Don't remember that one - do remember a Columbo movie where a VCR is used to timeshift a programme (football game?) which together with drugging is used to give the murderer a witness to prove that he was at home at the time of the murder. Quite a new idea at the time - the movie was made before launch of Betamax and VHS so was probably either a Umatic or Philips stacked reels machine.

I've had machines with faulty (or even missing) CMOS battery causing the Clock to stop in Standby but still not any loss of setup data.

It's not just between broadcasters, the BBC does it between their channels as well. Their 'Points Of View' viewer complaints show have done a few reports on viewers complaining about different times on BBC1 and BBC2, at least one of which had one of their presenters switching between the 2 channels at programme change to demonstrate the problem.

The problem (which they actually proved was real - surprised they were allowed to show that on BBC1) is that BBC1 often runs 2 minutes early and BBC2 is 2 minutes late. Switch one way and you have to wait 4 mins for programme start, switch the other and you miss the start.

But then the BBC don't seem to care about viewers anymore - the recent Wimbledon problems where the schedules for the 2 channels were suddenly switched at the last second for 2 evenings (causing people recording the last episode of Robin Hood to miss it, needing it to be rebroadcast a few weeks later - they switched schedules too late for PVR's to catch the move).

Quite how they thought that helped anyone is a mystery - anyone recording Wimbledon would have missed it and had BBC1's normal schedule recorded and anyone recording the normal BBC1 schedule who would have got home to find a tape / DVD of wimbledon (or in the case of PVR's nothing at all - the change made recordings just cancel).