Scott Greczkowski

It Was RAW!
January 22, 2008

Last night the folks are World Wrestling Entertainment presented their first High Definition broadcast with their flagship program RAW. 

And RAW it was!

I watched the show via DirecTV on my 50 Inch ISF Calibrated Sony SXRD HDTV and I also had my surround sound cranked up with all 7.1 speakers ready to go, grabbed some snacks then it was show time!

The show opened with a standard definition tribute video to the great Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. from there the HD kicked in and was a feast for the eyes.

The graphics used were top notch and almost looked like they were popping out of my TV set, however the audio was strange, while my Denon surround sound receiver said it was getting a Dolby Digital signal only the front channels were being used.  The center speaker barely had any audio coming out of it, and the bass sound coming from the WWE was up a little too high for my tastes.  I was disappointed with the sound for the entire show, as I was expecting to feel like I was sitting there in the crowd.   The WWE needs to work on their audio greatly in order to deliver fans a true HD experience.

The video at times was eye popping, it almost seemed from a visual standpoint that you were there, however I don’t know if it was the way the WWE shot the video or if it was a problem with the compression from DirecTV but any fast action on the screen turned my picture from a great looking glass into a sea of tiny pixel boxes, these pixel boxes more commonly called “micro blocking” was a major distraction and took away from my overall enjoyment of the show.  Besides seeing macro blocking happening during fast action it was also seen anytime they used fireworks, or when they wrestlers were making their ring entrance.

After the first match there was a segment with Vince McMahon in his office talking to Randy Orton, the video here looked great, but the audio was horrible,  it seemed like the audio guy needed to turn up their mics to full which introduced a major hiss sound which almost overpowered the talking for the entire segment.  The hiss was so bad that it was almost uncomfortable to listen to this segment.

Another annoyance to me was a locker room interview featuring Todd Grisham and WWE Wrestler “Triple H” this one had good audio but the problem this time was the video, while not noticeable on the SD feed on the HD feed viewers saw a handheld camera which was run by a cameraman I will nickname “Shaky”, his shaking was so bad that I had to turn away, even my wife said the shaking was giving her a headache.  The WWE needs to invest in a good HD camera lense with image stability built in or tell Shaky to knock off a few cups of coffee and give him a tripod.

During the show they aired some highlights packages of things that happened over the past few weeks, what I found interesting was that some of these highlights were in HD which shows that they were indeed taping in HD over the past few weeks.  For other highlights packages they were shown all in standard definition framed in a 4 x 3 screen with the sides of the screen showing off the Raw Logo and WWEHD logo.

Overall it wasn’t a bad show, just had a few issues which hopefully the WWE will tweak over the next few weeks.  For their first actual live broadcast I score the show a 7.5 out of a 10.  It can only get better from here.

It will be interesting to see if tonight’s ECW show will be in HD on SCIFI HD, the WWE advertised this show a few times during last nights broadcast but did not mention if it would be shown in HD.

The only folks who saw last night debut HD edition of WWE RAW was folks in select cable systems and on DirecTV.  Dish Network does not carry USAHD or SCIFI HD currently.

Posted by Scott Greczkowski on January 22, 2008 | Comments (5)