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Pete,
Having spent enough of my life in remote trucks that it could be measured in years, I have a few thoughts from the remote end. I will leave the station processing to others other than to say "GIGO". Garbage In, Garbage Out".
The camera settings at the remote end are some of the most subjective settings in all of television other than stage lighting and are totally at the whim of the operator and his/her eye and judgement of what is happening on the waveform monitor and color monitor on the truck. Add to this, the difference between Sony and Ikegami, the two major players in cameras. That is the difference between Ford and GM.
I can put two different video operators at the video console on the same show and end up with two different shows. One dark, one overexposed. One contrasty, one flat. Color saturation is adjustable but tends to be set to a spec point and ends up being visually variable depending on iris and black level settings.
When I sit at a video console, I tend to be generous with the iris to the point of blooming some whites in order to get otherwise darker parts of the scene up to a useable level. And I tend to run the blacks up a bit to push up the gamma area in the middle of the waveform where the bulk of the picture information is for the viewer (most of the greys). On a remote, you do not have the luxury of time to set all of the camera gammas individually. You just make wholesale adjustments as best you can.
But I usually work in sports and showing a white uniform against a dark seating area guides me. I would never do this on a good stage opera with good even lighting. Every situation is different.
Other ops, especially the ones trained in the tube days when the first thing to hit 100% stopped there, are still doing it that way today. And something in the picture had to be black at 7.5 units and they will find something to put there notwithstanding there is nothing black in the picture.
And black does not mean black with no detail. A black jacket should show detail because even black cloth reflects light in varying levels showing the pockets, lapels and stitching. The dark parts are the finest adjustments with little range for error.
After that, the signal from the remote is tested with color bars during transmission tests all the way back to the station or network with what my experience is generally very good oversight. Sat uplinks, Verizon last mile video loops, VYVX long-haul fiber transmission, sat receivers, etc. Whatever the combination is for the show. A lot of operators along the line whose only job is to set levels on color bars passing their facility.
At the station at the very end, not much happens to the signal in my experience. It comes in and in these days of digital, it is pretty much fixed. It will pass through a switcher and a few pieces and then on to the xmtr. The most that would happen is in the analog down-conversion on a hi-def show or digital signal and that is not enough to give the difference you see in your pix. Your pix show clear color differences and iris settings.
My bet looking at the pix is the possible Sony/Ikegami color differences along with two sets of eyes seeing the same thing with two different ideas on iris settings in two different remote trucks.
It's scary how the signal finally gets home,
Dave A
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