Baja in HD?

[WormGod]

Anyone with Directv a subscriber to the HDNet package?

http://www.directv.com/DTVAPP/imagine/HDTV_package.jsp

Monday, May 29th, they are doing a special on the Baja in full, hi-def wonder, and the ads for it look brilliant. I have been planning for weeks now to just plant my arse on the couch and watch this. It's been a dream of mine since I was very young to run the Baja at least once, and until then, seeing it in hi-def just gets me one step closer, heh. Just seeing commercials for it in such grand resolution, I get all goosebumpy. I feel like I am 10 years old again and just got my first SnakeEyes G.I. Joe.

[Ruflyf]

That would be a blast Wormgod. tell ya what donate your vx to the cause and I'll sacrifice myself to be the co-pilot

[Joe_Black]

I just spent 4 days driving a Baja Challenge car back in January from Ensenada to San Felipe and back again. In a word, it was AWESOME!

You can do the trip through Wide Open Baja and as they put it "will give you enough rope to hang yourself with" driving the car. You're basically running the Baja course with a guide rather than blind, but at full speed. If you do it, absolutely get the optional insurance. You pay for anything you break.

[Ruflyf]

Wow, thats a nice site. Looks like they have a nice set-up. What did it end up costing for the run you made?

[Joe_Black]

They've got a great program and take good care of you out in the field. As for the cost, they've got current pricing on the site if you dig around. Figure about $3K for the 4-day and near $5K for the week trip.

A friend won a package from them at the SEMA show and invited me along to split driving/co-driving since I had co-drove for him in the 1995 La Carrera Pan Americana in mainland Mexico. Generally though you want to split it with someone you know since it's a driver/co-driver format.

[WyrreJ]

Anyone with Directv a subscriber to the HDNet package?

http://www.directv.com/DTVAPP/imagine/HDTV_package.jsp

Monday, May 29th, they are doing a special on the Baja in full, hi-def wonder, and the ads for it look brilliant. I have been planning for weeks now to just plant my arse on the couch and watch this.

Last I checked, neither Directv nor Dish did "full hi-def" - they do "HD-lite" where either they reduce the resolution (I think Directv takes 1920x1080 and downsamples it to 1280x1080) or they keep the resolution and just starve the bitrate so you get tons of macroblocking in any high-motion scene.

Also, for some reason, a lot of the down-sampled 1280x1080 ends up with a lot of macroblocking and softness.

All part of their annoying focus on more and more channels with less and less picture quality.

[Andrey]

Not only Direct TV has HDNET.... Dishnetwork as well. They already aired a programm on some desert truck run.. not sure if it was Baja. It was in HD but to be honest with you it was not that spectacular. All you can see is TONS of dust, gravel, sand flying around. Besides, they do not put HD camera on the racing car. A support team travels ahead of the particular truck and filmcrew follows them. On one leg of the trip Toyota truck turn over and they did not show that only radio conversations and support team... thats it. I hope that this filming was done differently.

On issue of resolution, and bit rate. I doubght that DSS companies are playing with resolution.. Bitrate - yes ! Besides, they've changed modulation (Dish) from 8VSB to 4PSK to fit more HD channels per transponder on Sattelite (my old eqipment which let me record HD since 2000, got obsoleted by that). The resolution on fixed pixel display is changed internally by scaler of your monitor - in my case plasma. None of plasmas have native resolution of 1920X1080 so far. The first one is coming from Panasonic this summer.

Hope to enjoy racing in HD

[WyrreJ]

Trust me - some of them are reducing the resolution, I have many recordings that are 1280x1080i.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hd_lite

[Andrey]

what are you recording with ?

[WyrreJ]

Giganews and comcast. Although last I checked 169time and another company would modify satellite tuner boxes to add firewire output. Pricing was in the range of the old 8VSB modulator for Dish in its heydey.

[Andrey]

i had modulator and 5000 dish also panasonics tu-dst50, 51, couple of PV-HD1000... good old days

[WormGod]

You know what though, compared to a classic old RCA analog crapper.... this is a godsend. I dont care much about the specifics, I just know it looks a LOT better than non HD.

[Andrey]

I've seen preview and it looks awesome - areal shots from helicopter etc. I guess I've seen a very different show on Discovery HD 2 months ago which was not that impressive.

So show is tonight at 8 PM Easstern. Anybody can record to D-VHS ?

[WormGod]

Caught the second viewing at 11pm last night. Interesting to say the least. Kinda disappointing that they centered the show around ONLY the high budget drivers and teams and did NOTHING about the average little guy who scrapped his money together to create a ride and run the race.

Tended to be a bit on the boring side with a lot of their sidetracking bits on individual drivers and their tactics. Team Assassins completely unimpressed me. A bunch of partying drunks who couldnt race without being hungover. No wonder their best finish was 15th (I believe that was what they finished), heh.

There were some great looking rides though.

[Andrey]

Team Assassins completely unimpressed me. A bunch of partying drunks who couldnt race without being hungover. No wonder their best finish was 15th (I believe that was what they finished), heh.

There were some great looking rides though.

AMEN