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"Additional cast"! The nerve!
Knots Is Streaming in the US at Last!
- Thread starter ChrisSumner
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"Additional cast"! The nerve!
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Question. The show is on Plex. I know I've asked before on here, but is Plex a subscription service?
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Nope, it’s free. That however also means you cannot get it without commercial breaks.
The episodes on Plex are very badly encoded. For one, the aspect ratio is wrong. The image is being squeezed sideways. It should be 720x480 with .9091 or 640x480 with a square pixel aspect ratio. We are getting 654x480, which might be a derivative of PAL 720x576.
The next problem is that they have been encoded progressively without any deinterlacing. So we are seeing the interlacing lines on all the motion. The serrated lines around the moving images is what I am referring. This is an absolute no no in professional video editing. In Knots Landing's case, it was all shot on film so an IVTC (inverse telecine) approach would likely be best to recover the 24p cadence. From what I can tell, interlacing follows the 3:2 pattern (three progressive frames, 2 interlaced frames). However, if that isn't possible then deinterlacing with a frame blend would be the next best thing, though this would result in jerkier motion, especially on the intro that has the scrolling pictures.
Here is to hoping that if Amazon gets the rest of the series to actually buy the episodes, they will be properly encoded with correct aspect ratio and deinterlaced or IVTC for correct progressive playback.
The next problem is that they have been encoded progressively without any deinterlacing. So we are seeing the interlacing lines on all the motion. The serrated lines around the moving images is what I am referring. This is an absolute no no in professional video editing. In Knots Landing's case, it was all shot on film so an IVTC (inverse telecine) approach would likely be best to recover the 24p cadence. From what I can tell, interlacing follows the 3:2 pattern (three progressive frames, 2 interlaced frames). However, if that isn't possible then deinterlacing with a frame blend would be the next best thing, though this would result in jerkier motion, especially on the intro that has the scrolling pictures.
Here is to hoping that if Amazon gets the rest of the series to actually buy the episodes, they will be properly encoded with correct aspect ratio and deinterlaced or IVTC for correct progressive playback.
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From what I can tell the episodes used on Plex on-demand are all the international (PAL) versions rather the mix of different sources which was used by WBD on the Primetime Soaps channel (where a 14x9 aspect ratio was used). So these would all have been digitized from source material on DigiBeta tapes. I don't believe there is anything wrong with the original digitized material but it rather is a problem at Plex for playing out everything that's originally 4x3 aspect ratio in 654x480.
It's not massively squeezed so I'm not too bothered.
The interlacing is more annoying but I've minimised it with some settings on my TV.
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Plex is available in much the same way as Pluto, Tubi. etc. are--if you have a "smart TV" that offers these options. It's free but wants you to "sign up" (get your email and/or personal data). I opted not to and it didn't seem to care.
I had never heard of them before this, so I had to look under "new additions" or something like that in the menus, where I found it and added it to the main page.
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Yes, the nerve! I guess the writer witnessed a zero in excess, resulting in his belief that the main actor Alec Baldwin appeared in 400 episodes (instead of 40), with the “additional cast” only appearing in 344 episodes. Lol.
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The image is awful , very decieving
I just took a look at season 13 and that is definitely not the international version, which used a different font for the episode title/writer/director credits. It appears to be the original CBS broadcast version.
The interlacing is really shocking, can't understand why they couldn't have fixed this as it is not a difficult thing to do (as Knots4309 alludes to) -- that plus the wrong aspect ratio shows there is zero quality control at work here. Not surprising when it's likely the people working at Plex likely have zero knowledge about 4:3 broadcast television standards.
The horizontal lines that keep flickering are really distracting, especially on a bigger tv-screen. The upscaled 1080p streams on the FAST channel don't have this problem and the quality there is much better so I will stick to my download of those streams.
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I never thought I'd see the day! This is amazing news 
I checked a few of them out and they are beautiful. I never thought I'd see the day where I could see episodes from S03-14 without the SOAPNet LOGO! Even Season 4's "Loss of Innocence" has the score - I've never seen that episode with the score as it was meant to be broadcast!
Quick question about the ads - at the moment they seem to be randomly injected - often interrupting the middle of a scene. Does anyone know if they eventually get around to cleaning this up, and moving the ad-breaks so they come on in-between scenes or when there is the intended breaks for them?
I checked a few of them out and they are beautiful. I never thought I'd see the day where I could see episodes from S03-14 without the SOAPNet LOGO! Even Season 4's "Loss of Innocence" has the score - I've never seen that episode with the score as it was meant to be broadcast!Quick question about the ads - at the moment they seem to be randomly injected - often interrupting the middle of a scene. Does anyone know if they eventually get around to cleaning this up, and moving the ad-breaks so they come on in-between scenes or when there is the intended breaks for them?
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Oh really? I have never heard about a different front being used for S13. For S14 I know that there was a version without any elements (no actors names etc. on the credits, no episode titles, no guest stars etc.).
That only became a thing in the early 90s for international masters of shows to make it easier for the distributors in non-English speaking countries. Before that, it was hard work to create opening sequences with the local title and even changing the episode title to the local one was messy (where possible the video would be frozen just before the original episode title would be displayed, but more often than not the original title would be covered with black boxes and the local title then laid on top of that with massive drop shadows so the box was hidden as much as possible).
Regarding the interlacing, that seems to be a general Plex problem. There are a lot of people who are using the Plex Media Server as a DVR for over the air reception and there are complaints all over the internet that anything recorded and encoded by the media server does not deinterlace at all, which in the US is a big problem.
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There was a different font used for season 12 as well for the international versions than the original CBS broadcasts which used some variant of Times Roman from what I can see.
Comparison screenshots below - international version at top, US version at bottom.
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I wonder if CBS Drama was accidentally given the “blank” versions that I thought only existed for season 14. Those titles don’t look very “professional” and that would be in line with how CBS Drama was run. It was basically what’s called a “channel in a box”.
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Knots Landing is ranked #2 on Plex for viewership, behind The Drew Carey Show.
As crazy as I thought the FAST channel was, it clearly did the job of creating buzz around the show. I'm glad they added it on demand and I hope that it's success inspires them to continue with more primetime soaps.
As crazy as I thought the FAST channel was, it clearly did the job of creating buzz around the show. I'm glad they added it on demand and I hope that it's success inspires them to continue with more primetime soaps.
@alexpaige is completely correct.
When CBS Drama was invented, it was intended to be for the international market, which is why they were provided with early-generation (unedited) PAL distribution prints from Warner Bros. rather than NTSC prints. That is the reason for the difference in the font in the opening credits as described.
Around 1985 or 1986 when Lorimar started to use the Ediflex for editing on video rather than editing on film, they added textless elements of the main titles, opening scenes of act 1, closing scenes of acts 4 and the end credit visuals at the end of the distribution print, so it was easier to localize their shows. These were originally created on the first-generation NTSC master from the answer print and then converted to PAL via Telecine transfer.
When Freevee first provided "Falcon Crest" for streaming, there was one episode in which the textless elements have been accidentally kept after the end of the episode. We addressed this issue with screen captures in our "Show - Media -Streaming" section: https://www.falconcrest.org/english/master.php?path=media/streaming/8
The current problems with the "Knots" quality on Plex TV @knots4309 described are unfortunate; there seems to be no quality control at Plex at all. But they are not caused by an inverse Telecine transfer since (unconverted) NTSC masters are in use. All the other technical problems @knots4309 described are completely correct though.
When CBS Drama was invented, it was intended to be for the international market, which is why they were provided with early-generation (unedited) PAL distribution prints from Warner Bros. rather than NTSC prints. That is the reason for the difference in the font in the opening credits as described.
Around 1985 or 1986 when Lorimar started to use the Ediflex for editing on video rather than editing on film, they added textless elements of the main titles, opening scenes of act 1, closing scenes of acts 4 and the end credit visuals at the end of the distribution print, so it was easier to localize their shows. These were originally created on the first-generation NTSC master from the answer print and then converted to PAL via Telecine transfer.
When Freevee first provided "Falcon Crest" for streaming, there was one episode in which the textless elements have been accidentally kept after the end of the episode. We addressed this issue with screen captures in our "Show - Media -Streaming" section: https://www.falconcrest.org/english/master.php?path=media/streaming/8
The current problems with the "Knots" quality on Plex TV @knots4309 described are unfortunate; there seems to be no quality control at Plex at all. But they are not caused by an inverse Telecine transfer since (unconverted) NTSC masters are in use. All the other technical problems @knots4309 described are completely correct though.
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Yes I found some French versions last night and the “unprofessional” looking titles are indeed on there as well (for the last few seasons the French kept the original episode titles and put the French titles underneath rather than covering up the original titles and they look exactly like the CBS Drama versions).
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Knots is now #1 on Plex!
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I've read articles about the FAST channel structure.. and it's a growing venture with increased interest and views. And not only did Knots Landing get renewed interest from this concept... so did Growing Pains (an 80s sitcom) that hadn't been streaming in the US for a long long time.
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Sadly so far Knots is getting very inferior treatment. The quality is not great (although I will never complain as long as it’s available after all these years!!) whereas Growing Pains has been very nicely cleaned up and there are no interlacing issues.
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