td@alice.UUCP (Tom Duff) (11/07/84)
The 1984 general election is over, with no major surprises in the voting. Since the political result was a foregone conclusion, our unbiased elite panel of experts and industry watchers was free to spend the evening picking the winners of the quadrennial TV Network Election Coverage Computer Graphics and Video Effects competition. This year's undisputed winner is NBC. They placed first in all categories except demographic maps (won by CBS) and Good Taste (a 3-way tie for last.) This result is to be expected, since the American public doesn't want TV with Good Taste, they want TV that Tastes Good. NBC had the best Fake Shiny Metal candidate picture frames, the best glints and gleams, the best paint-program processed backgrounds and the most subdued ADO/Mirage/Squeezoom effects. They were the only network all of whose graphics were reasonably anti-aliased, the only ones who tried to do anything about chroma crawl, and the only one to do any significant on-line 3D animation. CBS and ABC were not even in the race. All three networks had computer-generated title sequences and bumpers, none of which appeared to have been done in-house. ABC's looked like they were done by MAGI or perhaps Digital Effects. NBC's probably came from Cranston- Csuri or Digital Productions. CBS's might have been done by Digital Productions, but I only saw it once. (I could easily be wrong on all of these. Four years ago all the production houses had distinctive styles. As they steal each others' tricks, they're all developing the same mediocre look.) In all three cases, the titles were from the Cheezy Logo Move school of vertiginous computer animation. CBS's was slightly less noxious than the others, since the 2 elements moved relative to one another in a non-trivial way. On CBS and ABC the on-line graphics were pretty much trivial. ABC just showed still art with superimposed titles and Mirage and Squeezoom page-turns. CBS fancied up their stills with a snappy 3D demographic map and some modified Rubik's cube page-turns. CBS and ABC both had serious aliasing problems that made their coverage extremely hard to watch. Will these people never learn? NBC, on the other hand, had several kinds of animated perspective bar charts, and some nice animated 3D diagrams of Senate/House seats broken down by party and on liberal/conservative lines. This stuff was all anti-aliased, on-line, good-looking, real-time animation, something we haven't seen before on election night. All three networks had color-codes for the two parties. ABC and CBS had Republicans Red and Democrats Blue, while NBC had Democrats Red and Republicans Blue. This proved to be extremely confusing until we gave up on ABC and CBS because of the headache-inducing quality of their graphics. Maybe an ANSI comittee should be formed to standardize the color code. CBS's graphics was done mostly using a system they put together in conjunction with Ampex, and which they've used on previous elections. ABC used the Dubner character generator/frame buffer/animation system, developed mostly in-house. NBC's animation was all done using a system running on a VAX driving secret rendering hardware. The system development was done in-house by a group headed up by Christie Barton. Surprisingly, PBS chose not to compete this year. They ran a Nova episode, a documentary on Parimutuel horserace gambling and an installment of `The Constitution.' C-SPAN won the award for Most Tasteful election visual aids for their hand printed poster-board title cards.